“Kiss My Ash”
Our son-in-law called a few Sunday ago to tell us what had transpired during worship at their church in Chicago.
The pastor had just finished what Travis described as “a lovely sermon about living a life of love, mercy, and compassion.” The musicians were playing a peaceful interlude as the service segued to a time of prayer signaled by a slide featuring the silhouette of a person with hands folded and head bowed captioned by the words Quiet prayers. Prayers for healing. Prayers for the world. Then things got interesting.
Someone’s voice was broadcast over the sound system in a not quite understandable tone that was not prayerlike. It was more like amplified anger. Travis opened his eyes to peek at what was happening. The pastor was sitting in the chancel in meditative repose after having just preached the “lovely sermon about living a life of love, mercy, and compassion.” A woman in a seat directly behind him was leaning forward. Reaching over his shoulder, she held the worship bulletin in front of his face with one outstretched hand while she jabbed at the bulletin with the extended index finger of the other hand, remonstrating in an unintelligible growl over the pastor’s hot mic. She was, in Travis’ words, “very upset.” He couldn’t make out what she was saying, but she was letting her pointer finger do the talking. Right there at the base of the cross under a screen whispering the words Quiet prayers. Prayers for healing. Prayers for the world, accompanied by the worship team’s peaceful instrumental, she came from who-knows-where and gave the pastor you-know-what.
At that point, the lay member of the congregation assigned to lead the time of prayer came forward. Seeing what was transpiring, my son-in-law said the poor guy “looked frazzled.” Once having ascended the chancel steps, the man walked over to the source of the bulletin-jabbing invective, leaned toward her, and spoke four words that were picked up and broadcast clearly on the hot mic: “Be at peace, sister.”
That was it. Said Travis, “The service carried on after that.”
Which reminded me of some animated invective I witnessed years ago when I was guest preacher at a community Ash Wednesday Service in Mesa, Arizona. A reception followed. As I was pondering the juxtaposition of confession, penitence, and ashen foreheads with cookies and punch – Sweets for the (sooty) sweet – I spotted a young woman who had risen through the ranks of junior high and high school church camp during the years I served as a counselor. She was 20ish at that point. Her father, still dressed in his choir robe, was standing across from her. They were having an animated conversation replete with waving arms and emphatic gestures. I sauntered their way to say hello, arriving just in time to hear daughter say to Daddy, “…and you can tell him he can kiss my ***!”
The accentuated epithet had no sooner cleared my former camper’s tongue than she and her father saw me standing there. Daughter said not a word, though her face said Oops! Dad stood mute, too, as he pursed his lips, shook his head, and looked over his glasses at his daughter with a Shame on you! look in his eyes. Guest Preacher said nothing either, though it crossed my mind that it being Ash Wednesday and her standing there with the telltale smudge of the cross on her forehead she could have growled “Kiss my ash,” but that says more about the way my mind works than the way hers did.
We’re a piece of work, we human beings. You can dress us up and take us out – even to church, especially to church – but no sooner have we heard “a lovely sermon about living a life of love, mercy, and compassion” than we’re giving the preacher hell for a typo. No sooner have we been marked smack dab in the middle of the forehead as a pious penitent and swallowed the bread and cup of forgiveness than we’re talking trash.
We’re nearly waist-deep in Lent now, season of spring cleaning and soul scrubbing. Luther said we’re simul justus et peccator which is a fancy Latin way of saying we human beings are simultaneously justified and sinful at the same time – saints and sinners all at once. But the good news, as my longtime friend the Rev. Dr. Bob Hill puts it, is “There is always more mercy in God than there is sin in us.”
So it was that as my cussing camper and I turned toward the cookies and punch, I winked at her, smiled, and said, “Have a happy Lent.” Blushing and smiling at the same time – simul justus et peccator – she said, “You, too.”
She died a few years ago in her early thirties, leaving three young children, her three sisters, and her father.
Lord have mercy.
The Lord will.
Genesis 2:4-7 is the Bible’s story of God making the first human beings. It’s a poem rather than a scientific explanation, so you need to use a holy imagination, but when you read it through the eyes of faith you see God on hands and knees scooping up dirt/dust/ashes – some earth (the name Adam literally means “earthling”). God then breathes into it the breath of life. God kisses our dirt/dust/ashes to life, if you will.
No one has captured the glory and warmth of this story better than African-American writer and poet James Weldon Johnson in his 1927 poem titled God’s Trombones. It ends:
Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in his own image;
Then into it he blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.
Says poet Johnson echoing the poet of Genesis, God created humankind by kissing our sinner/saint mix of ashes to life. And one glad day God will kiss them to new life – eternal life.
Amen. Amen.
Be at peace, sister.
Both of you.
