Sin, repentance, death—sounds like a great time for kids! Okay, maybe it isn’t fun and it isn’t sunny, but that wasn’t the question. The question was whether or not Ash Wednesday is appropriate for children. My answer is yes… but it requires some preparation on the part of the parents. I think children who are just brought to an Ash Wednesday service without having been prepared beforehand will either be confused or frightened. As parents it is our responsibility to tell our kids what is going to happen in the Ash Wednesday service. Just knowing what to expect can alleviate a lot of anxiety. The songs are not usually upbeat happy songs. The tone is usually somber. Everybody lines up and has black ashes put on their foreheads and the pastor says, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.” Then we have communion. It can be pretty confusing for a kid… but it can also be quite powerful for a kid as well. It just takes a little time from the parent.
Here is what I’m going to tell Wyatt, who will be in the worship service. I will spread this out over a few conversations:
“Ash Wednesday is the first day of a church season called Lent. Do you remember the season of Advent, the season that leads up to Christmas? Well, Lent is the season that leads up to Easter. The cloths on the pulpit and communion table, as well as the stole that I [Pastor Everett] wear during Lent will be purple. Lent is about 40 days long and it is a time of year when we pay extra special attention to how we are living our lives and we ask God to help us to keep following Jesus. To begin the season of Lent, on Ash Wednesday we think about how much we need God. We need to be reminded that we are to love God and love others, but that we can never do this without God's help. You will come forward with mommy and I [the pastor] will draw a cross on everybody’s foreheads with ashes. I [the pastor] will say, ‘From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.’ Those words come from the Bible and I am [he is] saying them to you as a reminder that we are human beings and we need God and that God has come to be with us through Jesus and that human beings and God come together through Jesus. There is nothing to be worried about. Everyone will be getting the cross on our foreheads, kids and grownups, because we are all human beings and we all need God.”
Through these or similar words I will have introduced the themes of sin, repentance, reconciliation, and death. The first three are pretty obvious, but death is merely implied in these words in a way that a kid can understand and that won’t cause the fears that can often come to kids when death is mentioned unnecessarily. They might even think that everyone at the Ash Wednesday service is going to die… at the Ash Wednesday service! You never know what connections will be made in our minds when we are kids. So I don’t think death, although it is a major theme of Ash Wednesday, needs to be addressed with younger children. Because Wyatt is a pastor’s child and because I’ve done ten funerals in my short time here, Wyatt knows way more about death than most six-year-olds. We’ve talked about it a great deal and in fairly great detail. However, in preparation for Ash Wednesday, I don’t think that I really need to get into the subject of death with him. I’ve told him that we get the ashes in order to remind us that we are human beings. Death is a part of being a human being, so I’ll just leave it with us being reminded that we are human beings and because of that we need God.
Here are also some other words that might be used a lot during worship that you might want to touch on with your kids. “Sin” is what we call it when we live in ways that are against what God wants for us—when we treat other people badly or when we are greedy and so on and so forth. We all sin but because God loved us so much that he sent Jesus to die for us on the cross, God is willing to forgive us and wants us to try to sin less and start living more the way God wants us to live. But we can’t do that by ourselves. We need God’s help. “Repentance” means when you decide that you’re going to stop doing the wrong thing, say you are sorry, and then start doing the right thing. “Reconciliation” is a long word that just means “to bring back together.” When two people get in a fight and then they make up they are coming back together; they are reconciling. Through Jesus, God brings us together with God and brings us together with each other. That’s why we have communion a little while after we get the ashes on our foreheads. Communion helps us to remember that through Jesus we have been brought back together with God and with each other.
Those are just some ideas. Like I said, Wyatt will be in the worship service. Josselyn, since she is only three-years-old will be in the nursery. I will, however, spend some time with Wyatt preparing him beforehand. I will be at the church early on Wednesday evening and I would be willing to spend a little time with any children to supplement their parents’ preparation by walking them through some things and letting them see the bowl of ashes and other things to disarm any anxiety or confusion they might have. Also, if there are
Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help prepare our kids for Ash Wednesday.
Grace and Peace,
Pastor Everett
