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St. Charles' Episcopal Church - Saint Charles, IL
Ash Wednesday - Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Joel 2:1-2,12-17 -- Psalm 103:8-14 (733) -- II Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 -- Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Rev. William R. Nesbit, Jr.

In 1988, from May to November, Yellowstone National Park burned.The nation's first national park, still the most popular, went up in flames. Small fires that had seemed easily manageable at the start, blazed out of control in the summer's severe drought. Although fire fighters and equipment had been in place from the beginning, they were nearly helpless in the face of the conflagration, barely able to preserve the most historic buildings from annihilation. Finally, in September, rain and snowstorms dampened the majority of the fires, so that by November they could be completely extinguished. The flames left behind what many visitors called a lunar landscape on earth, repainted in black and gray, with the charred spires of lodgepole pine rising from a carpet of ash. And thus it happened that in one summer, Yellowstone National Park was utterly destroyed, never to be the same again. Or so it seemed.

People spent the winter mourning over the destruction of the land, as well as, I will confess, over the loss of tourist revenue. Experts estimated how many decades it might take before the park's ecosystem, over a third of which was consumed by flames, would recover. Folks in coffee shops and bars debated how long it would take for heat-sterilized soil to be able to support life, if ever. And wildlife scientists questioned if animal populations in that area would ever revive.

One of the lessons we learned from the Yellowstone fire is that we humans are not nearly as smart as we think we are. We're sure we have the answers; we know exactly how things ought to be. And we spend our lives, - we waste our lives - fighting for control, making the rules, being in charge. Yet our fighting for being in charge generally makes a mess of things. If not for a long-standing human policy of putting out all park fires immediately - because fires are "bad" - then the fire of 1988 would not have been nearly as destructive. This apparent paradox holds just as true in our own lives as it does in the forest. We want to make the rules; we want to do things our way. But in the process we assume we know better than God; we reject obedience to God, and that rejection leads to our destruction.

The ashes we will wear today come from the burned palms of Palm Sunday. You remember the story of Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem, surrounded by crowds waving palm branches and laying them in his path as they hailed him as king and Messiah, as David returned. This is the same crowd that, later when Jesus disappoints them, cries out to Pilate, "Crucify him, crucify him!" And so these palm ashes are the ashes of that disappointment, of Jesus failing to meet their expectations. These are the ashes of our disappointments as well. These are the ashes of all of our hopes that God does not fulfill as we would wish, the ashes of our dreams of how the world should work, the ashes of the people we wish God had made us, the ones that are taller, shorter, richer, thinner, prettier, smarter - you fill in the blank.

Today we put ashes on our foreheads as a sign, a sign of our recognition that too often we let our ideas of what should be, keep us from what God has in mind for us. We come together to confess that we have followed our own wills rather than God's will. We acknowledge that we are merely the creation, not the creator, that our knowledge is limited and transient.

Dust we are, and to dust we shall return.
Those desires that hold us apart from God's will
we choose to burn, to wear as ashes.
We surrender ourselves to God,
we admit that we are wrong.
And with our return to obedience,
God will lead us into a new life.

What happened to Yellowstone? With the next year's spring rains came wildflowers blooming in sunlight that had never before reached them. With the clearing of old timber, deadfall, and underbrush came new tree seedlings, whose sprouting was triggered by the heat of the fire. With new open spaces for grasses and meadows came food and habitat for even more animals. By the next year Yellowstone was clearly healing; within five years the ecosystem was healthier than it had been before the fire.

God does not promise us a life free of fires, nor is that what we should seek. What God offers is the promise that, if we surrender our will, those fires can be the refiner's fire that will purify and strengthen us. God will, through the saving action of Jesus Christ and the sustaining power of the Holy Spirit, draw us through those flames; and lift us out of the ashes of our desires. And we will find springing forth around us, in ways that were previously unimaginable, the wild abundance of God. Amen.