As ashes are placed on your foreheads, you hear one of two things that you hear. The first is “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

It comes from the book of Genesis; it is part of what God says to Adam and Eve before they are cast out of the garden. Here it is in full context:   

Cursed be the dirt of the ground because of you! In toil you shall eat its yield all the days of your life. By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat until you get returned to the dirt of the ground from which you were taken, for you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.  

These are words of warning. Apart from Him, life will be a constant struggle amidst the drudgery of work. struggle and misery of having to work… never rising above the dirt of the ground. No matter how much you work on earth, no matter how big you build your pyramid, how much you sacrifice, how well off you make it be, at the end, you will never be more than dirt. How is that for your midweek motivation?  

God isn’t being mean, he isn’t saying this out of anger either, God says this with sadness, deep sorrow because his creation chose something different than what they were intended for. So, as we receive the ashes today, one of the options we have is to join in God’s sorrow for the ways we are not living to the fullness of what we were created for. It is a time to reflect and admit if I am spending more time working for meaningless things, than eternal things… weather I am being human first, then spiritual.   

The second option we have when the ashes are placed on our forehead is “repent and believe in the Gospel.” This comes from the New Testament, Mark 1:15, and these are the words with which Jesus begins his ministry after coming out of the desert. To repent is a call to conversion, an invitation to be more than dirt, to fully engage in life now, to not be stuck in the past nor to be anxious about the future. This requires hearing God’s sorrow over our sins, and God’s hope for humanity to live as he intended us to be. We acknowledge the past, we look forward to the future, but only to be fully alive in the present.

There is an important statement we heard proclaimed by Paul today, 2 Corinthians 5:21: God made Jesus who knew no sin to be sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

 Jesus came into our condition of sin, became dirt, and he too worked, toiled, to gives us the power to transform it from within. Sin is transformed into righteousness in our own lives. The Greek word for righteousness can also mean justice, Jesus has given us the power to transform evil into good in our world.

The question for lent is: are we really becoming the righteousness of God in Jesus? Are we really living in the power of transformation that Jesus gives us? Paul prays for the Corinthians that they will not receive the grace of God in vain. We’ve all received the sacrament of baptism meaning every single one of us has the same opportunity to grow in grace.

That makes lent more than a time to simply think about our bad habbits and what I need to give up in order to overcome it: I eat too much chocolate, so I am going to give up chocolate for lent. There is space for that, but it’s not merely about that, and most people make lent a time to simply give things up.

But not you! You go beyond dirt, you are spiritual first. You begin lent by asking yourself how is the condition of sin affecting me? Is there anything in my current way of life not life giving? Is my life being consumed by dirt, the drudgery of work, and is it separating me from the love of God and people in my life?

 If so, then maybe we should give up work for lent. A lot of people would probably like that idea. But no, it’s not very practical, we Christians might not be of this world, but we are still in it.  But, we can find ways to spend more quality time with the people we love, we can resist allowing work to absorb us completely, and the challenge is finding new ways to do so during lent, and continuing it beyond these forty days, applying the growth to our lives, otherwise we are not really growing, we are simply becoming short-term actors – hypocrites as Jesus said in the gospel this past weekend. So if you give up chocolate for lent and then eat an entire giant chocolate bunny on Easter Sunday, your lent was in vain… 

Through the history of the church the discipline of lent has been prayer, fasting and almsgiving. These are not meant to be the goal of lent, rather, spiritual excises, the means, by which we are made more free for others.

These exercises are meant to reveal the reality in my own heart because the heart is easily deceived, and if my heart is being deceived, I am most definitely going to be deceiving others. My humanity might appear to others to be fully alive and happy, when in reality my soul is stagnant. The gospel warns us today against falls appearances and the invitation if that is the case is: repent.

God sees the reality of our heart, so if you appear to be a happy family in public but then inside the walls of your house there are constant arguments and disagreements, remember that you are more than dirt, this is not how family life should be, so repent and believe in the gospel. The good news is that Jesus is not afraid to enter into our condition of sin, our dirt, and works to give us grace, his own power to overcome conflict through forgiveness.

Paul reminds us that we are called to be ambassadors of Christ, so what I profess must be congruent with my public witness, to prioritize the spiritual so that the human may be fully alive. Perhaps the main reason for the decline of church attendance in the last decades is that people don’t really see Christians as any different than anybody else. We become like the people of God at the time of the prophet Joel from the first reading…. Joel says why should they say among the people “where is their God?” They could not differentiate the people of Israel from any other.

My faith should be leading me to a more authentic, free, joy-filled life amidst any hardship, but if all I do is complain all day or just talk about sports, the weather or how much I can’t stand my boss at work just like everybody else, then my faith is in vain.

Family, the ash on our forehands will makes us visible witnesses of our Catholic faith. Lent is a time to grow in our identity as ambassadors of Christ so that what is seen is actualized from within. If I acknowledge that I am dust, it is only to remember that I am called to be more. If I am invited to repent, it is only because I have been given the grace to do so, and anything that I do in the next forty days must serve that purpose. We live in the new testaments. We believe in the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are not limited by the past nor are anxious about the future. We are fully alive.