Ashes and Skin

John 8:12-30 

Listen Here.

Grace, Peace and Freedom are yours from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

I AM.  Jesus says.

I AM the light of the world.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about light and darkness and this biblical statement of Jesus, along with the claims made in John 1 that God has shown a light in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

It is a powerful image. 

Is it one little flicker in the giant sea of darkness?  Is it a bomb of light exploding the darkness?  Is it a search beam shining into the corners where evil hides? 

I love this image, and yet I am torn… I am torn because our Western world has turned light into good and darkness into bad at the expense of people’s bodies.  What am I talking about?  The danger of saying light = good; dark = bad is that people will look around at their neighbors and begin to apply that to the skin tones of those around them. 

Of course we all know that’s ridiculous.   But it happens. To us all. There is plenty of research to confirm unconscious bias in our perceptions of the lightness or darkness of someone’s skin and our associated fear of that person. 

Fear.

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.

Maybe it should say, the sun shines in the fearfulness and the fear cannot overcome it.

The thing is that the Light of the World came into the world to shine like the sun for those who are hurt most by our human systems of oppression and brokenness and separation from the God who loves us.  And the oppressed are on every point of the spectrum of sun-kissed hues.

So I yearn for a way in English to say that the ash on our faces and the dirt in our souls is a very different kind of dark or black than the rich hues of chocolatey brown that humans come in.  Because it is. 

Young children have spoken of wanting to wash off the chocolate of their skin…but chocolate is beautiful, the rich, velvety darkness of skin is named and claimed as God’s very own.  Some of us were made out of deep rich soil and others of us out of clay and sand, but each and every one received the breath of God into the earth that formed us. 

We must separate, and I don’t know how, the beautiful and God-affirmed variety of people-colors from the negative, even evil, associations we have with darkness.  And I tell you this, tonight, on Ash Wednesday, because this is the kind of holy work we enter into this season.  The kind of holy work where we become more and more conscious of the things that are holding us back.  And the things that are holding our brothers and sisters back. 

Lent is the season we stop our busy-ness, reflect on our mortal reality, and begin the hard work of repentance… and repentance begins with acknowledging there is a problem.

People of Bethlehem, we have a problem.  We live in a society where the voices of some of our brothers and sisters are not heard because of the color of their skin.  We live in a society that benefits those of us with translucent skin and holds back those who have more pigment.

Here is the thing.  Most of you already know this.  Most of you didn’t come here tonight to hear something you already know.  And most of us don’t know what the heck to do about it.  We participate every day in a society that gives people that look like me the benefit of the doubt – like when I step into a convenience store and fill up my mug with ice and no one questions or even looks askance at me wondering if I might be planning to steal some of that soda.

The first thing we do is pay attention.  We notice that we have an advantage, as small as the one I just gave or as big as what kind of loan I can get for my home. 

We pay attention. 

We remember we are all, every one of us, just simply dust.  In this together. 

We begin to take it all in, to reflect on what it all means, and we pray.  We pray hard that God might open our eyes and our hearts to know the truth of the world God has made in all its brokenness.  For who knows what God has in store? 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  And Light of the World who clothed himself in a dusty body with a big more pigment than me, anyway. 

We are the ones whom God loves so crazily that he would come to wear these same ashes you and I wear – whether they come from the terra preta of the Amazon basin or the ground down granite of Minnesota.  Come to die, lifted up like a lantern on a cross, shining for the whole world to see just how much God loves us.

Time to pay attention.

Will you pray with me?
In your love, compassionate God, keep us in this tension. In your severe mercy see this pain to bring action and change. We pray this through Christ our Lord, in whom the dividing wall of hostility has already been broken down. Amen.