Ash Wednesday February 13, 2013
Isaiah 58:1-12 Ps.103
2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10 Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21
Preached at a Joint Ash Wednesday Service with Advent Lutheran of Morgan Hill
What are we doing here tonight? Right now you are put in the situation of
listening to me preach unless you can let your minds wander to much more
exciting places to be, and I’m sure that there are many.
After preaching these same Ash Wednesday Scriptural
readings for 31 years, you’d think that I’d exhausted them by now or at least
exhausted lots of listeners. But now I
come with fear and trembling into a house of Luther where the preaching is
exceptional and I am used to Episcopal listeners who don’t expect me to say
anything profound because it’s all been said better in the Book of Common
Prayer, preferably in Tudor English.
The Ash Wednesday liturgy provides us with a
challenge; we have hundreds of years represented in the Scripture lessons and
2000 years of church history that bring us to this event tonight. We have a room of people who have some shared
community discourse in religious practice but also a room of people all of whom
have individually taken on faith vocabulary in very personal ways within your
own spiritual histories.
So how can I expect to speak and control the
meaning of anything that I say? My
knowledge is only my partial knowledge and my partial knowledge reaches out to
your partial knowledge to see what kinds of meanings can arise.
I feel like the best way to be honest to this
meeting of people, all of whom have but partial knowledge is to respond with a
discourse that admits the state of having partial knowledge. And so I choose the discourse of offering to
you a string of aphorisms. At first, I
thought that I should pay tribute to Lutheran numerology by offering a 95 point
sermon, in honor of Luther’s famous 95 Theses nailed to the Wittenberg Castle
Church Door, but 95 points would take too long and if I just taped it on your
door, it would surely be recycled in the morning. So, no outlined sermon with 95 points. So I offer you aphorisms in response to the
question what are we doing here tonight?
As Episcopalians are we here in violation of
our number one rule: Thou shalt not be
seen in church more than once a week, unless there is a funeral or wedding…and
if the wedding is on Saturday, that’s close enough to Sunday to not have to go
to church on Sunday.
We’re here to offer thanksgiving that Orchard
Valley Youth Soccer does not offer games tonight to affect our attendance.
(Although there are probably teams practicing).
We here to show our sacrificial beginning to
the Lenten Season by missing American Idol.
We are here to paint our foreheads with the
ashes that simulate our bodies’ future state, something like Native American
braves putting on war paint to frighten our opponent death not to come too
soon.
We here to pay tribute to the church calendar
that offers us 6 different seasons as an annual curriculum with Christian
knowledge divided up into seasonal emphases so as to give us a full review of
catechesis each year. And Lent is our
Spring training when we promise to simulate the tests and ordeals of life so as
to build different kind of faith muscles so that we might understand better our
calling to follow Christ.
We are here to ponder the appointed reading
from Scripture particularly the conjunction “as if” raised by the prophet
Isaiah. “Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced
righteousness.” We confront ourselves
with the possibility of our own hypocrisy:
Do we perform and practice our piety as if it could be a replacement for
practicing righteousness? Do we do this
as a way of convincing ourselves that we are okay with God? Do we suffer a major disconnect between our
churchly life and our life outside of the church?
We are
here to ponder our religious piety. Do we take on the voluntary fast for religious
devotion; and ignore those who have the involuntary fast of hunger and
starvation forced upon them by their conditions of living?
We are here to fast. Which fast would you rather choose? Giving up food for a day? Chocolate or wine for Lent? Or the fast that the Prophet Isaiah says is
preferred by God? Getting rid of
injustice. Feeding the hungry. Releasing the oppressed. Clothing the naked. Bringing the homeless into my house. God, I’d much prefer my own religious rituals
as a preferred fast to really dealing with these harsh realities of the world.
Do we see prayer as public performance with
great worry about our liturgical correctness and we cannot hear the authentic
prayer of desperate people who are crying, “help me God, help me somebody?”
Do we fuss over our public clothing, our
Sunday-going-to-meeting clothes, and robes and albs and chasubles even while
others do not have adequate clothing for their own warmth or dignity?
We are here to acknowledge all that is done
in our names for which we take no personal responsibility. Do we ponder the way we absolve our personal
responsibility within our group identities?
It is the government that goes to war, not I; it is the government that
denies health care, not I; it is our society that has the wrong priority about
the general welfare of all people, not I.
I cannot be held personally responsible for that fact that my country is
disproportionately the largest consumer of the earth’s resources.
We are here to ponder utopia. Isaiah suggests that if we ever start
practicing righteousness and not just religious behaviors within our own
religious communities, then it would result in the promise of God’s guidance in
a restored world.
We are here to think honestly about our
sins? Do we ponder the fact that the
past is absolute; that it happened cannot be denied and that our absolute past
includes our sins and short-comings? Do we come here to identify with the request
of the Psalmist for God to cleanse us from our sins and to create new hearts
within us?
We are here to think about forgiveness. Do we not feel challenged by our own
remembrances of the hurt that others have done to us and the seemingly
impossible task of forgiveness that we must seek as a gift from God?
We are here to ponder the radical words of St.
Paul about Christ. Are we not in awe of
the way that St. Paul states that Christ became our sin so that we might become
the righteousness of God? Christ
represents God’s full identity with us in our human condition so that we can
discover the godly and the spiritual within our human condition and not be
defeated by our own imperfection.
We are here to think about our role in being
witnesses to Christ. How many people
allow them selves to be atheists because they have seen Christians acting
badly? Does the way in which we live our
faith put obstacles in the way for others to believe in God and God’s goodness?
Pastor
Warner and I are probably happy that we don’t have to list on our ministerial
resumes the list of suffering that St.
Paul
We are here for corporate prayer and to
ponder the meaning of such. Public or
corporate prayer is not to impress other people; it is to join in agreement
with other people who share genuine concern for our world. The reason that we do our religion in public
is because there is more that can be done in sharing our gifts together than
can be done if each of us tries to do our religion alone. When we do our corporate prayer let us hope
that the people who need mission and ministry will be the recipients of us
doing public prayer together. Collective
effervescence can result in our worship attaining greater ministerial outcomes
in our world. Indeed let us be public in
our prayer, but not to impress people but to be delivered from individualism
and isolationism that says, “I don’t need you for my life of faith.”
We are here tonight to consider our private
lives. Thankfully most of our lives and
prayers are done in the closet and in secret.
God give us the grace to resist the publishing of all of our thoughts
and deeds. It is good to build our
resumes in heaven and let God see both our secret sins and goodness. It is good when we are hidden to ourselves
and the secret effects of our own ministries.
I have many, many people and mentors in my past life that I never took
time to thank (didn’t know how to thank them at the time) but they were there for me and they have
never known the value of their lives to mine.
I think that this is the kind of heavenly treasure that we build by just
being faithful and not expecting visible reinforcement for being so.
We are here tonight to ponder the witness
that Jesus gave to his heavenly Father. Have
you ever thought that perhaps the most profound witness of Jesus is the example
that he gave of knowing his heavenly parent? As much as we like to build solid doctrine
about how Jesus is the unique Son of God, I get the impression that Jesus wanted
each person to know herself or himself as a unique daughter or son of God. I get the impression that Jesus mostly wanted
to share with us this secret place with God our heavenly parent and to know
that this is the place where we can express our true honest authenticity. And from the place of knowing a treasured
relationship with God we go forth in our public lives, our religious lives
trying to bring to them as much authenticity as we can. And when we fail, we go back to the secret
place of forgiveness and renewal and come out again ready to try to do God’s
will of love and justice on earth.
I do wish all of us a holy Lent; I wish us
well in making strides in authenticity and I pray that each of us will know the
esteem of being recognized as unique and valued by God our heavenly
parent. To know the secret of this
recognition by God is indeed the greatest treasure of all. Amen.
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