I don’t know if you saw the “Barbie” movie last summer, but if you did, you may remember a surprising and wonderful moment that is particularly relevant for us this evening.  

Barbie lives in a dream house, of course, in a land with other Barbies and a smattering of Kens—a dream world in a way, but a world of surfaces.  

Every day is wonderful and yet, for those with eyes to see, shallow and empty. 

Life for Barbie is an endless dance party. One sleepover after another. 

That is, until something interrupts all that—and naturally, discovering what it is will be the engine of the movie.  

But in one particular moment as all that interruption is just beginning, we find Barbie living the dream at another day’s dance party.  

She’s out there on the floor among all the other Barbies—and then out of the blue, she looks at her friends and says, “Hey, do you guys ever think about dying?”

And for a moment, everything stops—everyone is speechless, confused, weirded out.

But it only lasts a moment, and the party starts up again, as if nothing has happened, as if the question has not been asked, as if the music has never stopped—except, of course, for the Barbie at the center of the movie, it has.  

Unlike the others, she can’t help but be struck by her own seemingly random question.  

Except that, as we know, it’s not a random question, at all.  

It’s a question that puts her on the threshold of moral awakening, as the movie will go on to show. 

And it’s a question that many of those around her can’t or won’t ask, for a host of reasons.  

I think this is a helpful lens for us on Ash Wednesday. 

Because I suspect we also know people whom we love dearly, but whom we also recognize as unable or unwilling to ask some of the deeper, harder questions about life.  

The church has always wanted to invite us to joy, which it understands as different than just having fun.  

Fun’s great and has its place—the church gets that, too—but it tends toward distraction, and that’s where the church’s questions come in.  

I don’t think we much need to rehearse those questions here.  

We’re clear enough on what they are.  

The bigger message is that joy points to something deeper.  

Joy is what we find by asking the deeper, harder questions and in discovering the grace in that asking.  

Joy affirms that the sacred is all around us, even in our fun.  

But it takes eyes to see it; it takes a capacity to be thankful for it; and it takes ears to hear it calling us into something bigger than ourselves.  

It takes some getting to—some pushing through—to arrive at joy.  

This is the heart of Ash Wednesday.  

Ash Wednesday invites us over the threshold of moral awakening and into the ongoing work of seeing grace at work, especially as we learn to love our neighbors as ourselves.  

It takes a particularly solemn form, and not everyone connects with that. 

I mean, one minute it’s Mardi Gras and then abruptly, the music stops, and it’s Lent, with its promises and reset intentions and ashes.  

I get why some people don’t go for it. 

But it’s trying to carve out time and space for us to do this hard and necessary work of stripping away distractions and noticing the world as a moral field, and so it asks the questions that it’s awkward to ask and puts front and center the realities that we may want to keep hidden. 

Redemption in its many forms is sorely needed by so many. 

Lent reminds us that much of our own ongoing search for redemption and for a sense of God’s presence in our own lives will be found in joining that work. 

That’s what these 40 days are for.  

So we do these strange things, receiving and bearing ashes.  

And we ask these strange questions of ourselves and our world.  

But we do all this in the hope that it will show us the light that shines in darkness, the grace that amazes, and the genuine joy of life in God. 

Amen.