Ash
Wednesday - Year C March 2, 2022
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17a Psalm 51 Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
A man went to a Friday afternoon baseball
game. While there, he did what most people do when attending a baseball game…
he had a hotdog. About halfway through his delicious Ballpark frank, he had a
startling revelation. It was Friday. It was Lent. And he was eating a hotdog. So,
he spent the next 1 ½ innings (or 30 minutes) trying to decide if his sin was
in eating the hotdog or in forgetting that it was Friday. In the end, he
decided to avoid the problem altogether and never attend another baseball game
on a Friday.
Thirty years ago, I presided over my first
Ash Wednesday service. I was a cold February night and our chapel was
half-filled with worshipers of all ages as we started our Lenten journey
together. I felt really good about how it all went down, until the next day
when 25+ people called the church office to complain… “that woman wore pants to
church…”
I follow popular bible study author Beth
Moore on Twitter and this week she shared her fear about celebrating her first
Ash Wednesday since joining a more liturgical church last year. She was
thinking of giving up whiskey chugging, but
decided that might not be a good choice since she doesn’t whiskey.
Fortunately, there were many friendly voices to encouraged her to embrace the
Lenten season as a time of reflection and spiritual growth, not a time to get
stuck in the performance of arbitrary fasts or tasks of contrition.
Many people look from the outside and
think of Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season as a time of punishment or
purposeful denial – a place where rules are the most important thing. I think
that view misses the point.
The observance of a Christian calendar began
as the year was divided by bishops and congregations to help us reflect on the
things that can help us live a more holy life. Easter Sunday is the most
important day of our year, the grandest and the best celebration that the
church has to offer, and each Sunday during the year is celebrated as a
"little Easter." The fifty days after Easter take the church on a
journey to the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit filled the lives of those
who were gathered and waiting, as Christ had commanded, recorded in the book of
Acts.
But with the emergence of the Easter
Season and Pentecost as a time of high celebration, people also saw the need
for a time of preparation and discipline. To focus on piety and repentance, the
season of Lent was born. It was a time when people who wished to be baptized or
join the church were trained and brought into Christian fellowship. It was also
a time to examine and reflect on one's relationship with God, with oneself, and
with the church and community.
Some of the practices of the early church
have stood through time. Early Christians fasted for forty or more days before
Easter, usually not including Saturdays and Sundays. They were encouraged to
spend the time that they would have normally been eating in prayer and to
increase their support of ministries that helped the poor.
The practices that we now associate with
Lent, such as fasting, eating fish on Friday, or "giving up" things we are love are not just about
sacrifice. When we create a void in our schedule or our menus, it offers us
more time to reflect on our relationship with God and Christ. Through these
small practices, we may come to know a little bit of the suffering that Christ
endured for our sakes in his crucifixion and death.
Lent is also a time to reflect on the
fragileness and frailty of human life, and on how our relationship with God is
not what we or God want it to be. In the early church, a feeling of true, sometimes
even anguished, penitence led people to periods of severe fasting, to wear
clothing made from sackcloth (a material similar to burlap) or shirts made of
horsehair, both very itchy garments, or to place ashes on their faces or bodies
to signify a penitent spirit. Psalm 51, today’s responsive reading, reflects
the desire to say to God, "I am sorry for all I have done and thought and
said that does not honor you. I know it is because of your love for me that you
forgive me, not because I deserve it."
The first time I received Ash Wednesday
ashes I was in seminary. As I left school, I walked across the Duke campus to
the parking lot, and I noticed that people kept brushing their foreheads as
they passed by. Finally, a sweet Duke co-ed flagged me down, “Ma’am, I’m sorry
to bother you, but you have a smudge of something on your face… would you like
to borrow a tissue to brush it off? “No, thanks,” I replied, “it’s there on
purpose – it’s Ash Wednesday – the start of Lent.” Her blank smile told me all
I needed to know. There, in the bowels of a United Methodist college campus,
she had no idea what I was talking about. So, I countered, “That’s ok, I’ll
take care of it when I get home.”
On Ash Wednesday, we participate together
in the ritual of confessing our sinfulness in an outwardly visible way. Receiving
the ashes is a tangible way of saying "I know that I am a sinner and that
my life is a mere second in God's time. I’m sorry. Have mercy on me." By
itself, that statement seems cold and fearful. But our joy comes from knowing
that this is not the end of the story.
Our Matthew reading talks about practicing
our piety in secret. We may or may not see the ashes on people’s foreheads or
hands, but God sees all of the stuff in our hearts. God knows when we are
giving it our best shot, and God also knows when we are playing to the crowd.
The season of Lent is designed to help us reflect our own mortality and
sinfulness, and also in how the love of God redeems us taking ourselves too
seriously. We love one another because God first loved us. We repent of our
sin, not just today but regularly, in response to the great sacrifice that God
made for us. And in the process, we welcome the new life that we have been
given, and we live it out in the world in whatever ways we can.
When you come up
tonight, instead of a smudge of ashes on your forehead, you may instead receive
a card with a blessing. There is a cross, reminiscent of the cross that you may
have received on your forehead or hand in years before. On the card, there is
also this blessing, May God who has called you forth from the dust of the
earth and claimed you as a child of the light, strengthen you on your journey
into life renewed.
If you take a
card, I encourage you to stick it in the pages of your bible, tape it to your
bathroom mirror, or place it where you can be reminded of the great and
gracious love that God has for you and all of us. And if you feel the need for
physical ashes, when you go home, light a candle, blow it out, and use some of
the soot from the wick to mark your forehead or the back of your hand. There’s
nothing magical about the ashes themselves… it’s all about the process of
remembering who we are and where we are going.
In the shadow of
this Ash Wednesday and these next 40 days of Lent, we are blessed, because know
that Easter day will come. In six weeks, we will experience anew the
life-changing resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. The seasons of Lent and
Easter seem very different. But it is because we celebrate them together that
we can keep our lives balanced.
Only when we hold together the knowledge
of our own sinfulness AND the joy that is resurrection on Easter
morning, can we have full knowledge of who God is in our lives. We must
hold those two things in equal tension with each other, for until we do that,
we cannot honestly reflect on our lives; past, present, and future. We are
lucky because we know how Lent will end, not just with Maundy Thursday and Good
Friday, but with Easter sunrise and joy. We know that after death, there is
life, life eternal, and because of that special, holy day, this Lenten journey
is filled with both joy and hope.
Tonight's gospel lesson from Matthew
reminds us that we cannot get too swayed in either direction, that there is a
balance between being too pious and not paying enough attention to what God
requires of us in our Christian walk. Whatever disciplines we follow for Lent,
and all the other seasons of the Christian year, we have to practice them for
the right reasons. We pray and fast and give to others in service to God,
because these are some of the ways we can acknowledge God's love for us,
especially considering Christ's sacrifice for our sake.
None of us is immune to the temptations
that separate us from God, such as the unwise use of power and money, or things
that keep our focus away from God's purposes, so we must keep before us the
call to live in such a way that we are constantly reminded that God's way is
our way.
Pastor Rich Villodas summed it up well:
Ash Wednesday is not a day to manufacture guilt. It is a day to recognize our
brokenness, frailty, and trust in God’s love. It’s a day to freely come before
God and declare, “I am human, I am dust, and I am love.”
Amen and amen.
Peace, Deb
No comments:
Post a Comment