The ashes of wasted love.
Burning up something that is precious and priceless.
The wreckage of the love of which we are capable.
Sin.
Today it is quite literally rubbed in our faces.
The ashes are brand new, I just burned up the palm fronds from last years Palm Sunday, when we welcomed Jesus in as Our King, and then we crucify him five days later.
We burn up those fickle palm branches. Palm leaves stink when they burn.
Sin.
We tend to obsess on Sin or to not take it seriously enough.
The Christian understanding of Sin is much more mature than the cheap moralism, the petty self elevation at the failures of others, the gloaters, the scornful rejection of human frailty, and the self abuse that we normally associate with the word “Sin”. Those are immature understandings of Sin.
The true problem with Sin is that it is quickly and ultimately boring and repetitive, the same old thing over and over again, the same old story over and over again. The same mistakes and waste.
Being stuck, withering our God breathed humanity into a cheap caricature, that is what Sin ultimately does.
The mature Christian understanding of Sin is not so much that God rejects or judges sin as God rescues us from the power of Sin that drags us down.
God takes on our death in the death on the cross, and we take on God’s life in the resurrected life of Jesus.
So The Christian take on Lent is not that we wallow in our own sinfulness, rather we bath in God’s graciousness.
It is not that we reject something that is killing us and those around us, rather we are turning toward someone who is wonderful.
Scott Cairns says it best in his poem titled “Metanoia”. Metanoia is the Greek word for repentance.
“The heart’s metanoia,
on the other hand, turns
without regret, turns not
so much away, as toward,
as if the slow pilgrim
has been surprised to find
that sin is not so bad
as it is a waste of time.”