Leaving Fraudulent Religion and Embracing Intercession

 Ash Wednesday   March 2, 2022
Isaiah 58:1-12 Ps.103
1 Cor. 5:20b-6:10 Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

Lectionary Link

On this day we begin the season of Lent, a penitential season, not because any of us feels any more sinful or inadequate to good living now than at other times of the year, but as a reminder that our greatest sin is when we live and act like we don't need God and each other.

Lent is not about my sin or your sin; it is about our separatistic individual ways of living in denial about communal responsibilities.  It is also about our fearful individual ways when we allow our communities to act in harmful ways against the common good and feel absolved because "I am not responsible that people in my community do not have enough to eat or have places to live."  Lent is a time to confront our own communities about where we are failing the common good, taking absolution in the "majority that rules made us do it" excuse.

The readings from Isaiah and Matthew remind us that being religious is not a matter of individual performance in public of religious acts without the attending deeds which bear out the truly religious virtue of loving one's neighbor as oneself.  Dividing the practice of religious acts from the actual practice of loving our neighbors is the dilemma that we must confront and if we don't, we make Lenten observances simply more individual performance in public of religious pieties.

Lent is a time of confronting ourselves with the question: Do we practice pieties and religious behaviors as a way of justifying ourselves as we actually avoid doing the hard religion of performing the justice of loving our neighbors?

What good is our fast, when so many in the world have the involuntary fast of being hungry?  We can treat fasting as an intermittent diet regime for improving our individual health (which is true) and leave our fasting unconnected from the practice of denying ourselves excess so as to share more with people who do not have enough.  Lenten fasting is not about our individual diet program; it is about a reorientation of our life assets for the common good.

Lent is about understanding our lives being communally connected.  Yes, it is good to practice some intentional deprivations so that we are better prepared when actual and unplanned deprivations are forced upon us.  What did St. Paul learn about all the forced situations of deprivations that came to him?  He interpreted them as his communal connection with the people to whom he ministered.  Lent may be a time for us to learn the interpretation of living intercessory lives.  We don't live unto ourselves; we don't suffer unto ourselves; we don't experience joy or success unto ourselves; we do it in community in a very shared way.  If we can learn the intercessory secret of living, we don't have to be people who are people bitter about being picked on by God with bad luck.  We don't have to be people who feel better than other people because of our good luck.  Rather, we can always feel together with other people who do experience the same things, and this intercessory insight gives our prayers a poignant relevance, because we're always walking in the shoes of someone who is going through a similar experience.

Today as the ashes are applied as the fast-forward presentation what our bodies will eventually be, let us cherish our lives in our bodies now by validating our religious piety with the necessary love of our neighbor, so that our piety isn't fraudulent.  And let us learn the secret of the intercessory life; our lives are deeply connected.  We matter to each other because our lives are always sharing common experiences.  The intercessory secret is to know that we are sharing common experiences which enables us to find significant ministerial matches in our prayers and in the gifts that we share with others.

In this Lent, let us leave fraudulent piety by making sure that we are loving mercy, doing justice, and walking humbly before God.  And let us learn the secret of intercession; we are deeply connected with others in human experiences so let us pray with authenticity and minister with graced timely sensitivity.  Amen.

Cherishing Mortality Through Authenticity

Ash Wednesday   March 2, 2022

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 liturgy.  No we're not like Native American braves going to war, so what is purpose of the ashes?  Most of us in some way have some vanity about how we look and we use various cosmetic means to make us look better to ourselves.

Ash Wednesday is a different kind of face painting, a different kind of cosmetics.  What are we doing?  With ashes imposed on our foreheads, we are trying to present to ourselves what our bodies will look like some day just before they have reach the phase of being in a state of transformation into something that might actually be useful to let either a rose or a weed to grow in the earth.

The dust of the ashes is revist of the Genesis creation story in the laboratory of God who makes humanity and uses one part dust and dirt and one major part Holy Spirit. The mixture of the two made the soul which came to be the great interior mediator between the body and the direct image of God upon us.  The soul includes mind, emotions and our will, our choosing power.

Our bodies are very important; they are the address and the location for spirit and soul.  Our observation of what happens in time, change, and aging indicate a separation of soul and spirit from the body which gets left behind to become dust.  So the ashes of Ash Wednesday, symbolically represent the final earthly state of our bodies before they transform on the invisible level to be recycled within the physical world to contribute to the future physical life of the world, becoming fertilizer for weed or flower or tomato.

We represent the future of our bodies with these ashes, not to depress ourselves, because when our bodies have become ashes, we will be gone.  We place the ashes on our head not to depress ourselves but to cherish the wonderful mixture of body, soul and spirit which is the genius of human life.

And because we cherish this combination of body, soul and spirit, we want this formula to be live with authenticity.  That is what the words of Jesus asks of us, authenticity.  How do we make body, soul, and spirit all agree about what is the highest expression of human living.

The highest expression of human life is not to look religious in public; it is to be authentic when our private lives in our closets agree with the deeds that we do in public.  The Greek word for hypocrite also means actor.  An actor plays someone whom he or she isn't.  Acting is fine for the theatre, but the purpose of faith is to unite the entire person, body, soul, and spirit to express the highest values of love and justice. 

And authenticity is a life time task; we don't get there right away.  Being authentic also means learning; learning that the standard of perfection is always higher than we thought it was.  So it means that we always have room to grow.

Let us today, cherish our lives in our bodies, while we have our location in them.  Let us also cherish the earth as the "body of God,"and be good stewards of our environment.  How do we cherish life in our body?  By living authentically.  Jesus and his words are God's gift to us to teach us to live authentic lives.  And may this Lent be for us a journey in further authenticity, as persons, as a parish, as a country and as world citizens.  Amen.