Carlos Wilton, February 17, 2010; Ash Wednesday, Year C; Amos 4:6-13

“...you were like a brand snatched from the fire, yet you did not return to me, says the Lord.”
– Amos 4:11b

    When I was a kid, my father owned and operated a men’s clothing store in Toms River.  “Wilton and Woolley,” it was called.  Some people thought the “Woolley” referred to the fabric, but in fact it was the name of a silent partner, W. Howard Woolley, who had a department store in Long Branch.
    My father’s merchandise was high-end: expensive suits, mostly.  The customers would stand there, before the three-paneled mirror, while my dad would mark the sleeves and cuffs with a chunk of tailor’s chalk.  It looked like one of those thin little soaps they give you in the hotels.  Then, the suit would go off to the tailor’s – a Russian immigrant who lived on the other side of town.  Sometimes, my brother Jim and I would ride along in the car, as my mother would drive the week’s alteration orders over to the tailor’s, and pick up the previous week’s batch.
    At the center of the store, dominating the scene was an ornate cash register, probably the oldest thing in the store – a big, old antique my dad had picked up somewhere.  It wasn’t electric, with a digital display, like the machines you see today.  This one was mechanical.  Press a key, and a corresponding metal tag with a number on it would pop up behind the glass window.  Press the total key, and you’d get that distinctive “ka-ching!”
    Another memory I have of my father’s store is the hats.  This was the early 1960s.  The fedora hat had only just began to fade away as a fashion accessory.  All along one wall of the store, the suits were arrayed on their wooden hangers, in two great rows, upper and lower.  Above them was the shelf on which the hats were displayed, there beside the sturdy, oval boxes they came in.   Men’s hats – as anyone of my age or older will remember – were absolutely obligatory for a great many years.  Think of all those black-and-white photos of city streets from the 30s, 40s and 50s.  Hardly a man is walking down the sidewalk without his fedora.  Each guy wore his a little differently: some straight-on, others at a slight angle with one part of the bill pulled down, always with a soft crease in the top.
    But then, abruptly, in the early 60s – when I was a kid – the fedora dropped out of fashion, never to return.  My dad got out of haberdashery not long after that, moving into various sales jobs, always working for big companies – making more money, but never again his own boss.  It turned out to be a wise business move.  The small, Main Street specialty shop – offering personal attention to regular customers the owner knew by name – was becoming an economic dinosaur, pushed out by chain stores in the new shopping malls: the end of an era.
    The other vivid memory I have of that store is of a certain, unforgettable day: the day of the fire.   One summer evening, just after supper, the phone rang at home, and my dad rushed out the door and drove off in a hurry.  My mother explained to us that the store was on fire.  She bundled us into her car so we could follow along and see what was happening.
    I will remember to my dying day the look of sheer agony on my dad’s face as he stood with us across the street, watching a plume of black smoke come rolling out of the broken front window of the store.  His expression was a potent blend of worry and grief.  I suppose he was calculating in his head, good businessman that he was, how much of an investment was tied up in those orderly rows of high-end suits and fedora hats – and not only that, how much of it was our family’s future.
    It turned out all right, in the end.  The fire had begun in bad electrical wiring in the beauty salon next door, that shared a common wall.  Wilton and Woolley sustained mostly smoke damage. My dad had insurance, enough to cover most of the loss.  Afterwards, he moved the store to another location, in a newer, safer building.
    Before he vacated the old place, though, he held a fire sale.  Walking into the store that day, I was struck by how different it all looked – and more than that, how different it smelled.  An oily black sheen covered the walls.   A choking, burned odor seemed to permeate everything.  Gone were the suits and the hats – a total loss.  Once the smell of smoke gets into that kind of fabric, it’s only good for the dumpster.  The only merchandise suitable for sale were a few accessories: cufflinks and tieclips, items like that.  They could be cleaned, but even they were selling for pennies on the dollar.  My dad was just cutting his losses, that’s all.
    ***
    As I sat back and reflected, this week, on the symbolism of ashes and Lent, it was the image of that long-ago fire sale that came to mind.  Ashes.  Dust.  Grime. That pervasive, burned-over odor that no cleaning agent could remove.
    The anthropologists say fire was one of the human race’s first great achievements. The ancient Greeks told the myth of Prometheus, a titan who first stole fire from the gods and gave it to our ancestors.  In the myth, the gods are angry, much as God, in the Bible, is angry with Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit.  When you think of some of the ways we human beings have used fire, you begin to understand why. Sure, we’ve used it over the millennia to heat our homes, cook our food and make our cars move down the road, but we’ve also used it to put to torch the thatched roofs of our enemies’ homes, to drop napalm on the heads of unsuspecting children, and reduce whole cities to wastelands with atomic fire.  Our hearts are much the same as they’ve always been, filled with the same bitter distrust of God’s promises and hostility toward our neighbors.  It’s only our technology that’s allowed us to deploy fire more efficiently.
    Any of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, can identify areas of our lives that are burnt over, reduced to barren fields of ash by the fires of sin.  When we allow our foreheads to be smeared with a cross of ash, we’re admitting, to ourselves and to the world, that we are complicit in more wrongdoing then we care to admit, even to ourselves.
    It’s not that we need go through a whole catalog of sins, to grovel in our misdeeds.  Our Reformed theological tradition has always emphasized sin (in the singular) over thick catalogs of offenses.  Sin is a condition.  It’s not so much about things we do as about who we are.  One of our Reformation-era confessions of faith puts it very bluntly indeed.  The Heidelberg Catechism acknowledges that “by nature I am prone to hate God and my neighbor.”  Not just by accident.  Not a mere, occasional slip-up.  By nature!  If you and I are human beings, true children of Adam, our hearts are coated with choking, gray ash – guaranteed.
    We take a little of that ash and smear it on our foreheads as an ancient sign of penitence.  Our ancestors kept fires burning in their homes, which meant there was always a supply of cold ashes readily at hand.  To rub ashes on one’s face was a potent symbol of grief, of mourning, of heartsickness.  Our little smudges of ash are a reminder of that tradition, a way of mourning that part of our human condition that keeps us from trusting God completely.
    ***
    I also came across, this week, the reading I shared with you from the prophet Amos.  There’s nothing like a Hebrew prophet for laying it on the line about the human condition!  The prophet, as prophets are wont to do, is calling Israel back to repentance.  This poem is a sort of litany of all the ways the Lord has tried to warn the people, but each time they have failed to respond.
    First, the Lord sent famine.  The first line of the passage sounds rather odd to our ears: “I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities.”  That may sound like a dental hygienist’s dream, but it’s really about hunger.  If you have nothing to eat, your teeth are clean.  “Yet you did not return to me, says the Lord.”
    Then, the Lord sent a punishing drought – causing the rain to fall capriciously, first on one town and then the other, but never enough to truly water the earth.  “Yet you did not return to me, says the Lord.”
    Next came crop blight.  Whole gardens and vineyards grew diseased, the locusts devoured the olive groves and fig orchards.  “Yet you did not return to me, says the Lord.”
    Then came illness – deadly plague.  Even the soldiers of the mighty army fell before this pestilence, as surely as if they had been slain by the sword.  “Yet you did not return to me, says the Lord.”
    When such disasters befell the land, some were miraculously saved.  “You were like a brand snatched from the fire, yet you did not return to me, says the Lord.”
    While these are terrible disasters to tell about, the emphasis here is not so much on judgment as on grace.  The Lord’s intention is to use even such terrible events as instruments of blessing.  The intention is to call a wandering people back to faithfulness.  How bewildering is sin, that it allows the likes of you and me to resist even such a clarion call to repentance!
    Just last night at the Session meeting, someone what pointing out how it was around her in those days after September 11, 2001.  Our church was full on Sunday morning.  All the churches in town were full.  In times of calamity, we return to the Lord.  But, do we stay?  Not many of us, it would seem.  Just 3 or 4 weeks after 9/11 and worship attendance had sunk back to its normal levels.
    “Like a brand snatched from the fire.”  That’s us.  There’s conflagration all around, a world lost, that desperately needs to know the love and redemption of Jesus Christ.  Here we take a smudge of ashes, a reminder of that conflagration, and remind ourselves thereby that we have been singled out to receive the gift of salvation, a gift completely beyond our deserving.  We’re like those remnants of merchandise from my father’s store, left over after the fire.  Some of us may not look that promising at the moment, but by the saving grace of Jesus Christ, we do polish up real good.
    The ashes of this night speak to the profound sadness that comes of living in a world of sin.  Yet, because of the good news of salvation in Christ, they serve also as an emblem of victory, a divine promise that the fires of life – and death – will not consume us, that we will come out safely on the other side.
    ***
    I’d like to share with you, now, a very unusual prayer.  It’s called “Marked by Ashes,” and was written by Walter Brueggemann, one of the greatest Old Testament scholars of our day...

Ruler of the Night, Guarantor of the day . . .
This day — a gift from you.
This day — like none other you have ever given, or we have ever received.
This Wednesday dazzles us with gift and newness and possibility.
This Wednesday burdens us with the tasks of the day, for we are already halfway home
     halfway back to committees and memos,
     halfway back to calls and appointments,
     halfway on to next Sunday,
     halfway back, half frazzled, half expectant,
     half turned toward you, half rather not.

This Wednesday is a long way from Ash Wednesday,
   but all our Wednesdays are marked by ashes —
     we begin this day with that taste of ash in our mouth:
       of failed hope and broken promises,
       of forgotten children and frightened women,
     we ourselves are ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
     we can taste our mortality as we roll the ash around on our tongues.

We are able to ponder our ashness with
   some confidence, only because our every Wednesday of ashes
   anticipates your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death.

On this Wednesday, we submit our ashen way to you —
   you Easter parade of newness.
   Before the sun sets, take our Wednesday and Easter us,
     Easter us to joy and energy and courage and freedom;
     Easter us that we may be fearless for your truth.
   Come here and Easter our Wednesday with
     mercy and justice and peace and generosity.

We pray as we wait for the Risen One who comes soon.

[Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People (Nashville: Abingdon, 2008), pp. 27-28.]

Copyright © 2010 by Carlos E. Wilton.  All rights reserved.