Ash Wednesday: How Will We Be Recycled?

Ash Wednesday   February 14, 2024
Isaiah 58:1-12 Ps.103
1 Cor. 5:20b-6:10 Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

Lectionary Link

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.

Ash Wednesday for Children

 

Recovering Hypocrites?

Ash Wednesday        February 26, 2020

Isaiah 58:1-12        Ps.103       

1 Cor. 5:20b-6:10    Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

Lectionary Link

Welcome to our annual face painting event.  Our foreheads were painted with the invisible oil of Chrism when at our baptism it was said, "You are sealed with the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ own forever."  We belong to Christ in our life.

Tonight the ink is the black of palm ashes.  We recognize our dual natures; our spiritual and our physical.  In the creation story, we were made with dust and deity as the Spirit formed the human person from the clay to become our body and the Spirit left something of the divine upon us in the formation.  The conjoining of spirit and dust left a mediating soul, nephesh, a soul of mind, emotions and will, to negotiate between our bodies and the divine image spirit upon us.

Today we cherish the unity of body, soul and spirit, even as we know that at some point in the times of our lives this unity will suffer division.  The body, our flesh, will like a wooden home burned by fire, will eventually return to dust.  Our bodily home will return to dust.  And we use the ash paint to retrace the mark of our first branding.  We confess that we will still belong to Christ in our deaths.

We know that our bodies will return to dust, and so we prepare for this, in part in this Ash Wednesday liturgy.  The ashes represent in our imaginations the fast forwarding of our bodily lives to their ashen state.  Like Native American Braves going to war,  we paint our face with the image of our future state as preparation and as spiritual, emotional, and intellectual inoculation of our lives against the death that we know that we will face.

This is not a macabre scene of Goth-like face painting; this is a poignant reminder to cherish our lives in which our souls and spirits are unified with our bodies.  It is to cherish our lives and the lives of other with the best of holy living as the only way to celebrate the unity of body, soul and spirit.

This is event is not an event of private piety even though we feel it in a very personal way; it is a deeply social event because just as we are personally connected in body, soul, and spirit, we are also irretrievably connected with each other and with all brothers and sisters in our world.  We don't live alone; we live in community.  We are our brothers' keeper; we are our sisters' keeper.  The law was given to us to let us know that we belong to each other, together caring for each other and being committed to justice for each other.

We know that our bodies are connected to this earth as well.  And if we steal from the good earth by mistreating our environment we are harming our brothers and sisters of the future.

Today, you and I are invited to a holy Lent.  I would suggest to you that as the words of Jesus rebuked the hypocrites of his day, the actors of piety who did not perform justice, so too, we are the hypocrites who bear the rebuke of the words of Jesus.

And if we be hypocrites, I would suggest there is only one kind of hypocrite to be; let us be the good kind of hypocrite, what I would call "recovering hypocrites."

How do we become hypocrites?  We divide the first and second great commandments.  We might say that we love God and point to all of our religious behaviors as proof of our love of God.  But these practices become hypocritical if we do not show an equal commitment to love our neighbors.

The Isaian prophet was rebuking his people for having religious fasts and religious behaviors without having the behaviors of care for the people who were neighbors in obvious need.

So today let us admit our hypocrisy.  Let us admit that we often are proof of "do as I say and not as I do."  The positive aspect of being a recovering hypocrite is the fact that we always proclaim a perfect standard which we always are failing at completely living up to.  God is holy and perfect and asks us to keep and profess this high standard even while we know that we can never attain it.

So it should keep us always as humbled recovering hypocrite, always on the path of repentance.   Let this day be the first day of our Lenten program to admit ourselves into the program of recovering hypocrites.  Let this Lenten season inspire us to plan some recovering behaviors, of more prayer, more study, reading the Bible, giving up bad habits to devote our energy to causes of care for other people and our earth.

Would you join me in this season of Lent in a program of recovering from hypocrisy? With the help of Christ and the Holy Spirit, may we become more successful at holding together the first and second great commandments: You shall love the Lord your God with all your life resources and love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Amen.

Hypocrisy=Separating Loving God from Loving Neighbor

Ash Wednesday        March 6, 2019

Isaiah 58:1-12        Ps.103       

1 Cor. 5:20b-6:10    Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

Lectionary Link

For those of us who might be crassly literal about our Gospel reading for tonight, we might think that the words of Jesus falsify my ministry, and the ministries of all clergy who are the visible leaders of their flocks. We  want as many people as possible to be seen praying on on the streets where our houses of faith are located.  And we won't even judge your motives for being seen at our places of worship; unless you're only there to sell us Amway products.

The words of Jesus paint a target on us as religious leaders since we are one's seen in holy haberdashery and how can we avoid being seen wearing such colorful vestments.  We have the "uniforms" which announce that we are "religious."

I really don't think the words of Jesus are about the only authentic prayer and piety being done in one's private rooms or closets.  If Jesus only wanted private prayer, we'd all be bedside Baptists or pillow Presbyterians, lonely Lutherans, marooned Methodists or erstwhile Episcopalians.  Is Jesus implying that only private piety is valid?  Is Jesus discouraging any public display of piety?  No PDA's, no public displays of affection for God.  Is Jesus saying this about public displays of public affection for God, "Get a room, a very private room?"

What Jesus is highlighting is that we can have pious public behaviors for all of the wrong reasons.  What Jesus highlights is the issue of letting good motives of the heart be expressed in the outer lives where we live in the main location of our lives.  We don't mainly live in private rooms or on street corners, but we live in our bodies and our bodies can have many locations and our bodies can be in private rooms or on street corners.

So what is the issue?  The issue is the motive of our hearts in our piety and practice of our religious faith.  Having a right heart is the issue.  Having a clean heart is the issue.  One of the Psalms for Ash Wednesday is the cry, "Create in me a clean heart O God and renew a right spirit within me."  Isn't having a clean heart the main issue in how we express our piety? 

Lent is a season when we ask God over and over again to do some spring cleaning in our hearts.  The prophet Jeremiah wrote the heart of each person is, above all things, exceeding deceitful.  Jesus said out of the heart comes all manner of evil.  Sigmund Freud said, the unconscious mind is polymorphously perverse.  Martin Luther indicated that we are continuously depraved even as our depravity co-exists with God's grace whose Holy Spirit within us becomes the only clean heart we can ever have; but we have to learn to get out of the way so  the Holy Spirit as a pure heart can be expressed within us.

Having the expression of public piety without the social and communal ethical and just results is what seems to driving many Americans to the religious category of "nones."  Not catholic monastic sisters but persons who have deny membership in any religious group, church, synagogue, mosques.  Social researchers who ask the "nones" about why they refuse identity with religious groups, often respond that religious people behave and think badly.  The "nones" believe that they can be spiritual or ethical without being religious.

This situation is a challenge for us who are not "nones."  We are threatened with our irrelevance and obsolescence of our public piety.

But this is hardly a new issue for any community of faith.  The issue was raised by the prophets and by Jesus and by many other writers of the New Testament.  It has to do with pretending to keep the first great commandment without keeping the second great commandment.  It is pretending that we can love God without loving our neighbor.

I can put on a good show of my love of God as a I participate in pleasing liturgies, even as I walk out of worship and ignore the crying needs of so many people who live close to me.  Jesus shocked the law abiding young rich man when he told him to sell what his possessions give to the poor.  Ratify your love of God by loving your neighbor as yourself.

The writer of the Epistle of James noted the hypocrisy of gathering for prayers while one's brothers and sisters were living in poverty.  The writer of the Epistle of John wrote that we cannot say that we love God whom we can't see if we don't love our brothers and sisters whom we can see.

So what is the clean heart issue in making our piety both privately and publicly valid?  The issue is love.  St. Paul wrote that we can all of the religious gifts and look very religious, but if we don't have love, we are noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. 

What do we have to say to the "nones" today?  Public religious piety in the history of churches has gone on while ignoring or supporting slavery, while living with the subjugation of women, while refusing the protection of children, and while refusing the just inclusion of LGBTQ persons in our faith communities.  If public religious piety does not result in the comprehensive care of the people in our world and the wise stewardship of the earth's resources, then we are guilty of being noisy gongs and clanging cymbals.  The "nones" are saying to us, "Who needs you?"  Even our secular constitution and our democratic ideals are making the law of love known as justice extend to more people than our religious communities are reaching.

We begin this season of Lent convicted by our need to sew together continually the first great commandment and the second great commandment.  This is always the challenge for us to live authentic private and public lives of piety.  We can only validate our love of God by loving our neighbors; all of our neighbors.

Tonight, let us not despair because of our failures.  Let us be thankful for when love has prevailed; when our private and public pieties have been made valid by God's grace.  But let us not be hypocrites to the "nones" of the world; let us not display our religious piety if we are not rigorous in our attempts to love our neighbors as ourselves as we seek to care for them with the very same care and acceptance which we want for ourselves.

May God help us during this Lenten Season to hold together the first and second great commandments, and if we are successful at love, we can know that our public and private prayers and religious ministries have been valid.  Amen.

Total Depravity or Lapsarian Lite?

Ash Wednesday        March 1, 2017

Isaiah 58:1-12        Ps.103       

1 Cor. 5:20b-6:10    Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

It is wonderful to be with you again on Ash Wednesday.    As the new pastor in town in 2001, one of the initiation rites was for the new guy to preach on Ash Wednesday. And I have survived several preaching occasions here in the past and hope to survive tonight.

Being in a house of Luther tonight, I should at least quote something from Luther as a starting point of reflections upon beginning this season of Lent.  In a letter to his colleague Philip Melanchthon, he wrote: "If you are a preacher of Grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here we have to sin.”

Be a sinner and sin boldly.....that sounds rather contradictory coming from a preacher.  As an Episcopalian we might be regarded to be Lapsarian Lite.  Lapsarianism refers to beliefs about the Fall of humanity.  Reformers like Calvin and Luther followed St. Augustine in espousing the total depravity of humanity.  Though there are Anglicans and Episcopalians who can be severe about the degree of the Fall and human depravity, but probably most Episcopalian might be called Lapsarian Lite, because we believe that God still sees goodness in the Divine creation of men and women even after they fell into sin.

The total depravity of humanity, is that really a Lutheran belief?  I grew up among moderate Lutherans in Minnesota where "darn tootin'" used to be most severe curse words ever heard from the lips of Ole, Sven and Ingemar.  How could these understated Minnesota Lu'terns really be those who upheld the doctrine of the total depravity of humanity?  Were they were really frightened by the possibility of living really extremely sinful lives?

Perhaps it is my inter-Christian duty to evangelize regarding our Lapsarian Lite position.  Could it be that I might rehabilitate the notion of sin tonight?  Could I make the case that the New Testament actually presents sin as a positive notion? 

Our Gospel reading for tonight occurs in the Sermon of the Mount section of Matthew.  The words of Jesus invite his listeners to exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.  In short, he was saying the practice of God's law has to be deeper than the ways in which the clergy seem to practice it in public and in their proposal of all sorts of religious behaviors.  After all, clergy get paid to look religious and to say religious things and to require religious behaviors.  However, the practice of God's law must go beyond appearance.  And dealing with all of the skeletons in the closet of our private lives is a much more daunting challenge.  Indeed, all of us need to be in the closets of our private lives crying out, "Create in me a clean heart O God.  And renew a right spirit within me."  Why?  Because the words of Jesus require that we be as perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect.  And if this is the final standard, we can understand why Luther and others would hold to the total depravity of humanity.

And if sin is always falling short of the perfection of God, then what is point?  If we're all sinner, then we must be in good company, or perpetually bad company.  How can the notion of sin be understood to be a useful and insightful teaching for us tonight on the first day of Lent?

The New Testament word for sin comes from archery.  In Greek, "hamartia", meant that an arrow which has been shot, falls short of the target.  Aristotle, used the word to describe what happened as a result of pride and hubris.  Because of pride, one misses the mark.  So, sin means that we fall short of the target that we have been aiming at.

And here is the dilemma.  If the target is to be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect, then we will always be archers who miss the target.  And if God forgives us for missing the target then what is the best way to sin?  What is the best way to keep shooting our arrows and falling short?

First, we have the target that we are aiming for in life.  To be perfect as God is perfect.  And let's put out a string to show how far away that is.  And I am going to shoot an arrow.  And see how far I miss the target by.

How can we sin in a good way?  And how do we sin in a bad way?

Jesus came to show us how to sin in the right way.  What do I mean by this?

Well some people sin by shooting their arrows at targets other than God who is perfect.

Some people want the target of fame.  Some want the target of wealth.  Some want the target of looking like they are the most religious person in the world.  Some want to be the best-appearing Episcopalian or the best appearing Lutheran.  And when we have the wrong targets in life we can harm ourselves and others.  If we want and use something too much we can become addicted to something and we lose our self-control.  If we make religious behaviors reasons for being too proud of ourselves, then we do not understand the real purpose of religion.

The secret of sin is how can we sin in the very best possible way and still please God?  So here I am encouraging us to observe Lent by learning how to sin well.

How can we be good archers even while we know we will never hit the perfect target?

We have been taught the ten commandments.  And we can have the appearance of keeping  9 of the 10 commandments.  We believe in one God.  We don't have idols that we worship.  We observe worship time.  We respect parents, marriage, truth, other people's property and life.  But the hard commandment is the 10th commandment.  Thou shalt not covet.  Thou shalt not have wrong desire.   And this is the most difficult commandment because we do not seem to be in control of the direction of our desire.  We may not act out on wrong desire, even when we have wrong desire and so wrong desires can be very troubling for us.  Wrong desire can motivate us to want even good things for the wrong reason.

So what do we do?  We, like the Psalmist, ask God, to create in us clean hearts and renew right spirits within us.  We believe in the work of Jesus Christ to baptize us with the Holy Spirit and to make our bodies temples of the Holy Spirit.

And if we can begin to find the Holy Spirit within us as deeper than even our desires, then we can begin to find the right direction for our desire.

I want all of our target holders now to get in alignment with the perfect target of God.  If by the Holy Spirit, we can begin to shoot the arrows of our desires toward the perfection of God, all of the lesser targets will then help us in our growth in perfection.  Our desire for fame can become the esteem we get from seeking to love God.    Our desire for fame can become our task of making forgotten and needy people famous and recognized in our lives.  The money and wealth of our lives can become things which we appreciate and use in the service of God.  We can understand that being a good Lutheran or being a good Episcopalian can be in the path of our efforts to more like God.

So here is the good news about sin for us during Lent.  It is unavoidable and all our best friends, are sinners too.  But if we understand ourselves as being archers who shoot the arrows of our desire toward God because we are given direction by God's Holy Spirit, then we can understand how God's grace is working for us.

If we are shooting our desire, our deeds and words towards the perfection of God, we can know that God's grace helps us achieve what we do in the direction of God’s perfection.  But we also know that God's grace helps us to make up for what we always lack in perfection.

The grace of God allows us to participate in God's perfection as if it were our own because we are judged only  by our willingness to be associated with the mercy and grace of Jesus Christ.  We ride the coattails of Jesus Christ into the perfection of God.

So, do we ever lose our designation as sinners?  No.  Apart from association with God's perfection we are always missing the mark.  But in association with Jesus Christ, whatever we lack is always provided for us on our behalf.

We have the Lenten adventure of sin.  Let us ask for the Holy Spirit to direct our desire and convert it as an energy to shoot the arrows of our life practice toward the perfection of God.  If we can bring all the targets of our lives in line with our quest for the perfection of God, then we can enjoy all of those targets as motivational rewards toward excellence.

Let's give all my helpers a big hand of applause for their wonderful assistance.

And to all of us for Lent, I say, Archery anyone?  Creative sinning anyone?  Or as Luther would perhaps say, "Bold sinning anyone?"

Let us Prayer:  Gracious God, let each of us know the Holy Spirit deep within us to transform the desires of our hearts and motivate us in the direction of God's perfection.  And let each of us know and choose to receive God's grace as the gift of God in participation with divine perfection.  And God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit give us a holy Lent.  Amen. 

Aphorisms for Ash Wednesdays

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

Lectionary Link

     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 put on his list: great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger.  We should reflect upon our easy conditions in noting that suffering for the Gospel has been spread out unevenly throughout history and space.  We should put all of our problems in perspective:  Our problems are the problems of middle to upper middle class residents living in a Bay Area suburb.  How many people in the world would love to have our problems?

  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.