Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!

Today is Ash Wednesday so as you might expect, I have been thinking about ashes. How should we think of them, as problem or promise? Seems to be a paradox. Puts me in mind of the phrase "Ashes to ashes, we all fall down." Now most of you probably recognize this bit of doggerel from the children's nursery rhyme. However as I pondered the text for today, and the phrase popped into my mind, I could not place it so I asked Cindy what it was from. She told me, then I went to the internet to see what I could find. It is ironic that I am grateful for our modern forms of communication! I found that theories abound as to what it means -- it might be a social commentary on dancing during Puritan times in England a few hundred years ago, a maybe comment on the Black Death, that is the bubonic plague - who knows? Could be a commentary on things like Shrove Tuesday or the Mardi Gras which are followed by Ash Wednesday. Whether intended or not, to me that phrase conveys the thought that as a result of the fall, because we are fallen, separated from God, all too often engaged in one way communication, and therein lies a problem. So today we are marked with a smudge of ashes, in the shape of the cross. Ashes are a sign of that problem. I suppose you might say they are a communication, a reminder from God, if you will.

Communications again. I am old enough to remember mainframes, early pcs, pcs, intranet, internet, laptops, cell phones, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries. All designed to make life easier, to free us from the confines of the office. Oops. Must have been a communication problem because just the opposite has occurred. Instead we are bound more and more to these things, laptops don't free us to do more work, they demand that we do more work. Email doesn't free, just the opposite. In addition, civility is disappearing from written communications; if you do not answer within 30 minutes you are either rude or inept or both. Cell phones interrupt services, sermons, even funerals! What happens if you get a call while you are in prayer - do you put God on hold?

We want to stay in touch with everyone else, but it is as though we have put God on hold. Do we really want to stay in touch with God? I think we do, but our conversations with our Creator often seem to be one-sided - we speak, demand, plea, want, but do not listen. In Isaiah God tells us: "Because when I called, no one answered, when I spoke they did not listen."

I do not think this is a stretch, but it seems like not only our money but also the things our money buys -- our communication devices, our toys -- often become our treasure. Staying in touch with one another seems to be our treasure.

We do not so much wear our piety on our sleeves any more, because our piety has been replaced by gadgets, which we often wear on our belts.

We are out of touch with God. And the ashes we will receive shortly are a sign that we were born out of touch, they are a sign of sin, a sign of death.

Death we bring on ourselves because we forget we are created in the image of God.

We might be thinking here we leave here empty tonight, ready for Lent, but we do not leave empty if we rely on God's love and mercy to fill us. We are called to rediscover who we are, as God's people, to face fear, failure, with dignity, with courage. God asks us to communicate with him -- in two-way communication -- and the ashes that are marked on our foreheads are a sign of that communication. The cross represented by those ashes is burned on our foreheads, in our hearts, in our beings, by the Holy Spirit, even as we walk wet in our baptisms. Sin and death no longer have any hold over us, even as we return to ashes, God is not done with us yet. That cross on your forehead is a sign of the death that brings life.

AMEN.