(Scriptures: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17, Psalm 51, Matthew 6:1-6,
16-21)
Here we are once again at Ash Wednesday and the beginning of
Lent. Here we are to get our ashes –
normally ashes are something to put in the ashcan, but today on Ash Wednesday
we put them on our faces. Today starts
Lent, and during Lent many of us will be giving up various things – chocolate,
alcohol, and such. I’ll let you know
that this year for Lent I’m giving up red beets – as I give them up every day
of the year, every year. When I was in
first grade, a classmate tried to shove a piece of red beet up my nose, and I
was so traumatized that I have never wanted to be in the same room with a red
beet again, and fifty years later, I still don’t want to get anywhere near a
plate of red beets. But anyway…..
My title for this sermon is “Keeping It Real” – because
that’s a theme running through all of our readings tonight – keeping it real. Our reading from Joel calls on us to “rend
our hearts, not our garments”. The optional
reading from Isaiah goes into more detail, imploring us to fast, not by bowing
our heads but by caring for our neighbors. It’s not enough to abstain from food for ourselves
if we’re not willing to repurpose that food to feed those who unwillingly go
hungry every day. Psalm 51 is a straight-up plea for mercy, in
which the writer, traditionally said to be King David after he repented of his
sin with Bathsheba, throws himself on the mercy of the court, on the mercy of
God Almighty, asking for a second chance.
And in our reading from Matthew’s gospel, Jesus speaks of charity,
prayer, and fasting, and tells us to do these secretly – that is to say, not to
draw attention to our religious observance. And actually, it gives me some
cognitive dissonance, some sense of mental disconnect, on this night in which
we mark our faces with ashes, to read a passage in which Jesus tells us clearly
not to mark and disfigure our faces for the sake of public piety. But, of course, ashes – along with sackcloth –
is an ancient symbol of mourning – and Jesus’ point is that the ashes on our
forehead must be accompanied by real grief for our sin, or the ashes will have
no meaning. In all of these readings,
God is urging us to seek, not religious observation, but spiritual
transformation. We are not to care for
appearances, but are to think and speak and act in ways that truly change us
and the world around us. We’re being
called to keep it real. And on this Ash
Wednesday, here are a few things that are real.
Death is real.
Tonight as we receive the ashes, we are told “Dust you are, and to dust
you will return.” Death will come to
each of us – sooner to some than to others, likely sooner for me than for many
of you, but in due time to all of us. No
one gets out of here alive. We each have
a finite amount of time on this earth, which we can use or squander, and for
which we will answer to God in the life to come.
Sin and the consequences of sin are real. In our various traditions, our worship
services may or may not include a public prayer of confession, which we read
every Sunday – and we’ll be reading a prayer of confession later tonight. But, if you’re like me, even as we read the
prayer of confession, we may pat ourselves on the back and think to ourselves,
“Well, I didn’t kill anyone this week, didn’t cheat on my wife or husband,
didn’t steal anything, didn’t lie, didn’t say any bad words, didn’t get drunk
or stoned, didn’t even cut anyone off in traffic…, and of course I made it to
church today – so God should be happy with me this week.” We may recite the prayer of confession without
any gut-level awareness of just how broken we are, of just how far our words
and actions fall short of God’s will, of just how hurtful, how devastating our
words and attitudes and actions may be to others…how much pain we may be
inflicting on others without even being aware of it. And perhaps more hurtful than our actions are
our inactions – that is to say, what we’ve left undone may be even more hurtful
than what we’ve done – and for church folk, our sin is often connected to our
inactions. The children who went to bed
hungry whom we could have fed, but didn’t; the homeless for whom we could have
arranged shelter, but didn’t; those who our society makes scapegoats and targets
for abuse or arrest for whom we could have spoken up, but didn’t. To quote Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of
evil is for good men” – and I’ll add, for good women – “to do nothing.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said that “In
the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our
friends.” My purpose in saying all that
is not for us collectively to wallow in guilt, or for us to all cry out in
unison, a la Jimmy Swaggart, “I have sinned” – but rather to say that God is
calling us away from self-satisfaction so that we can be open to further
transformation. As the Psalmist wrote, “The
sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart
God will not despise.” Growth, change,
transformation often begin precisely at that place when our hearts are broken
by the world as it is and by our attitudes as they are, and it is precisely at
that point of heartbreak that God can meet us and move us to where God is
calling us to be.
Which brings us to a third thing that is real: God’s grace, God’s forgiveness, is real. Psalm 103:14 says that “God knows how we are
made, and remembers that we are dust.”
God knows limited and broken we are.
God has promised that, “if we confess our sins, God who is faithful and
just will forgive our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” God has promised that if we repent, God will
remember our sins no more. Micah 7:9
says that God will hurl our sins into the deepest sea. We worship a God of second chances.
A fourth thing that’s real:
Resurrection is real. We will
die, and we will rise again, either to spend eternity with God or apart from
God. John in his first letter wrote: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we
will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is
revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
A final
thing that’s real is the need around us.
Fr. John McNamee, former priest at St. Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church located
near 11th & Master Streets in North Philadelphia, began an essay
written on Ash Wednesday with the words:
“Ash Wednesday should be omitted here.
Ash enough the soiled
streets
The limp limbs of this old woman
Whom I tend with sacraments and such.
Last Ash Wednesday
Burying Jack Beattie in winter cold
We huddled so close around his grave that
Wet sod wedged off our shoes onto his casket
Making our earlier Lenten rite almost trivial.”
And McNamee goes on from there with notices of more deaths
and struggles, more mentions of neighborhood people for whom life is like an
unending diet of ashes, morning noon and night, 24/7/365.
While our Bridesburg and Port Richmond neighborhoods are
different from the neighborhood around St. Malachy’s, the needs are no less
real; the pain is no less real. And the
opportunities to be channels of God’s grace are no less real. And so perhaps, as a Lenten observance, if we
don’t feel called to give up something, perhaps instead we can take on
something, perhaps a new spiritual practice such as daily prayer or meditation
or Scripture reading if we’re not in prayer and the word daily, perhaps to find
some way to care for our neighbors, either as individuals or as part of a
helping ministry or community agency. And
perhaps that helping can extend beyond Lent, to become a regular part of our
lives.
When I got a draft of the bulletin, I noticed the postlude is
“God bless America.” And that choice for
a postlude reminded me that when the prophets spoke of sin, they spoke to people
– often people in power – but also the peoples, the nations, they led. So repentance comes at an individual level,
but can also come at a national level. And
so I will end my Ash Wednesday sermon with the words of II Chronicles 7:14,
which were originally addressed to the ancient Hebrews. I want to emphasize that in its original
context the reference to “my people” means the ancient Hebrews, but we as
people of faith, as people who worship and serve the living God, can take these
words to heart as well: “If my people, who are called by my name,
shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will
hear from heaven, and forgive their sin, and heal their land.”
Amen.
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