Ex. 12:1-14a Ps. 78:14-20, 23-25
1 Cor 11:23-32 John 13:1-15
First, God is a God of new covenant.
Time means that contractual relationship have to be continually renewed. We always live knowingly or unknowingly in contractual ways: I will do this for you; and you will do this for me and each other. The big contract that we have, whether we know it or not is with God. "I will do this for you God, and whether I regard you or not, I expect this of the great plenitude of life." In fact we could say that the predictability in what we call natural law can be seen as a contract. "If I throw an apple into the air, it will faithfully come down into my hands, given usual conditions." One could say that the entire universe makes a contract with us all of the time. That being said, we know that when it comes to human social behaviors, we are not as precisely predictable as the consistency of natural laws.
In relationship between parties with high degrees of freedom, different times require that covenant with God be articulated differently. Why? As Joseph Campbell once observed, ancient virtue can become modern vice. Why? People understand covenant within their limited cultural context. The former covenants included the tolerance of slavery, subjugation of women, ethnocentric exclusivity, ignorance of recognition of diverse but significant personal identities, and diet limitations. Covenants can be understood to protect exclusive communal identity which in effect locks lots of people out, from being accepted as beloved persons made in God's image.
What does a new covenant look like. It is a covenant which proclaims the omnipresence of God in all people by an interior law, an interior order. What is the interior order within all people? It is having language. It is the image of Christ, who is called Language or Word from the beginning.
Since we are ordered by language in how we speak, write and act; we need forgiveness where we have practiced disorder. We need our inner scripts corrected by Christ the Word and great playwright of life. And we need to practice acting out the new scripts provided by the witness of Christ. The new law written upon our hearts is this ordering process toward surpassing ourselves in excellence in future states.
Next, we are called to be priestly because Jesus was priestliness itself.
Jesus was not a Levite, and he was not a priest in the Temple, yet the writer to the letter to the Hebrews declares him to be a priest with a timeless connection to the ancient archetype of priesthood, Melchizedek.
Christ is the priest of God for humanity. Followers of Christ are called to be priestly. And followers of Christ have a vocational priesthood for a few designated persons, not to exhaust the priestliness of Christ, but rather to model and call the followers of Christ to their own priestliness.
And what is the nature of that priestliness? Well, following Christ, it is to be both sacrificial offering, and offerer of that offering.
It is to make our lives of suffering an offering to God on behalf of bettering our world.
This is most poignantly experienced when we quit taking our own suffering as uniquely individual, and accept it as in solidarity with the suffering within our world. And since we are not our own but belong to Christ, with him we offer our suffering to God because being human is to be subject to suffering as an unavoidable probability of living.
Accepting our priesthood with Christ, means that we do not pretend to exempt ourselves from the specific requirements of the conditions of our lives which happen to us. Living all our lives as offered to God through Christ is to accept our part in being a member of the kingdom of priest to serve our God.
What does Covenant with God, and accepting our priestly calling require?
Lastly, It requires accepting the time cycles in life as being transformative and redemptive. In the words of Jesus channeled through the Gospel of John, his life was like a seed which falls into the ground and dies. It changes and becomes the sprout, stem, leaves, and fruit.
There will arrive in human existence new circumstances which forces radical change of life/death comparison in appearance and experience. Being in covenant with God with a priestly ministry means that we identify ourselves with the transformative processes encompassing the agony and the ecstasy and we do this with the witness of the Risen Christ providing the hope of a surpassing and reconciling future glory to do the impossible, which will provide us with a convincing meaning of suffering and the purpose of life itself.
Let us be in a renewal of our covenant with God based upon the continuing new circumstances of our lives; let us accept our priestly ministry, of being both victim and priest, those who suffer, and those who offer their sufferings to God in solidarity with the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of the world.
And finally, let us commit ourselves to continual transformation in the cycles of time, as we humbly accept the profoundly difficult transitions, in the hope of being lifted up to future glorious meanings. Amen.
Did you ever think that before we came to know about atoms and other sub-atomic particles, that a fragment of dust or ashes might have been regarded to be the smallest entity in life?
Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. The mere observation of the body put on fast forward either through fire or through long decaying in an ossuary, rendered the conclusion that when the bodies breaks into its smallest fragments, it is but a collection of dust. As dust and ashes the body is eventually recycled into the environment over time depending upon the environment into which bodies are disposed.
How should we think about dust and ashes now that we have come to believe in the existence of atoms and sub-atomic particles? What does our delving into the hyper-microscopic world do to our dust and ashes metaphors? And how does our knowledge of atoms and the sub-atomic world affect our understanding of our Ash Wednesday Scripture readings?
The ancient people, like us, knew of the mystery of the unseeable microscopic and the sub-microscopic worlds. They used metaphorical words like heart and spirit to speak about the inner mystery of life within our bodily flesh. The ancient people, like us knew that the flesh has a shelf life, and the flesh has a event of separation of the inside sub-microscopic life of heart, spirit, and soul from the body.
Even though humanity in many ways has believed in the inward life of soul and spirit, it does not diminish the preferred connection of our inward life with our bodily lives. For all intents and purposes, we rather be living, so much so that we cherish living, and we mourn when we lose people from the realm of the living, and we hope that they continue to live in some way. We hope that they have some substantial continued being, one even as substantial as they were in their bodies which become ashes.
St. Paul wrote about having treasure in our earthen vessel. The words of Jesus exhort us to build up treasures in heaven, in such a way that they cannot be degraded like our bodies which break down back to dust.
Ash Wednesday is about contrasting how our bodies will eventually be recycled with how the mystery and worth of our personhood will be recycled.
Most of us will not make the history books, even while we might be retained for a generation or two in memories within our family and friendship circles. So how will the mystery of our lives be recycled and retained? This is the building of treasure part of our future.
An act of kindness, mentoring a person, and myriads of deeds of love and justice will remain recycled as the fuel of hope forever. Building up the secret treasures of heaven means that we will be bricks in the wall of time forever, unable to be removed and forever contributing with what has been, is, and will happen.
The liturgy of Ash Wednesday is about cherishing our mortal lives so much that we "make hay while the sun shines." That is, we develop our inward lives of language to code our body deeds, our speech, and our writing with the mystery of the treasures of heaven, even the mystery of love and justice played forward forever through our interaction with the people of our lives.
When we think about it, words are mysterious in what they are and how they come to be within us. They are sub-atomic, even sub-microscopic but they are poignantly effective in manifesting the values of our lives through deeds, saying, and writing.
We are given this life in our bodies so that we can develop the treasures within, about which the words of Jesus and Paul refer to. Let us cherish our lives in our bodies so much by developing our words in action lives which determine the legacies that we have with the people in our lives now, but also become the future chain of becoming for the people whom we influence who live beyond us and influence people for their futures.
May God help us cherish our lives in our declining bodies, so that we are mindful to build the basis to influence the enhancement of goodness for people now and in the future. Let the treasures of love and justice from us be how the best part of us is recycled forever. Amen.
Maundy Thursday March 28, 2024 Ex. 12:1-14a Ps. 78:14-20, 23-25 1 Cor 11:23-32 John 13:1-15 Lectionary Link On Maundy Thursday, many Christi...