Contests, Ash and Implications

Ash Wednesday

The big news so far this week has been the upset at the Super Bowl. The Denver Broncos beat the team that the odds-makers had favored for the win, the Carolina Panthers. Perhaps this isn’t such big news for all of us; some of us aren’t exactly football fans, or aren’t big fans but are yearly drawn into the hype of the Super Bowl if, for no other reason than to watch the crazy, cute, and ridiculously expensive commercials that debuted during the Super Bowl broadcast. But the win, and an upset at that, certainly made the top of the news cycle for the start of the week.

The thing is, the outcome of the Super Bowl is usually big news for a day or two every year. But even if you are a fan, unless you are a huge sports aficionado, you probably can’t tell me right now who won the contest five years ago or eleven years ago or fifteen years ago. Such fame and glory is fleeting. The wave of celebratory high-fives, hometown parades (do they even have those in the midst of winter?) passes away, the next news cycle brings us news of a more recent contest or conflict, like the one that took place in New Hampshire yesterday [Presidential primary] and life goes on as usual. Until next year.

Today, we begin the season of Lent. It is a season in which we strive to take note of our relationship with God and attempt to do something that draws us away from our “life as usual.”

Ashes are smeared on our foreheads in the shape of a cross. We hear once again the words that accompany that smearing: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

These words will remind us, of course, that we are mortal. They return us to a story and an image ripe with creation overtones”. We recall that God lovingly made human beings from the dust of the earth. We are also reminded that the same God who can do great things like create humanity from just plain dirt which, at God’s command becomes filled with the very breath and Spirit of God, can surely heal us of any brokenness, sin, or struggle upon which we might be tempted to fixate during this season of penitence and repentance.

Some of us will embark on our personal journey through Lent by taking on a new discipline. During my early years, Lenten discipline generally meant giving something up. That same practice persists for many of the faithful today.

The idea for those of us who choose fasting or some kind of abstinence as a Lenten discipline usually follows one of two lines of intention: Fasting brings us closer to Christ by imitating his wilderness experience of fasting; or sacrificing something that we find pleasing or which for us has taken on the character of idol, has value for the sake of our relationship with Christ. It benefits us by eliminating that particular distraction from our lives.

Perhaps you have other reasons for choosing abstinence as a worthy spiritual discipline.

Others of us might commit to a new activity during the forty (make that forty six, depending on how you count) days as our particular form of Lenten discipline. A new discipline can serve to direct our attention to our relationship with God and our need for repentance.

A call to intentional prayer may awaken our spiritual energies by deepening our awareness of God’s presence in our lives. The Lenten devotional booklet that we developed and distributed here at Grace beginning this past Sunday includes two suggested activities to assist with your Lenten discipline, and I’m sure that you can come up with countless others.

As we read today’s scriptures, however, we become aware of how complex this season of Lent and our choices of its observance can be.

While earlier in the gospel of Matthew we are instructed to let our light shine so that God might be glorified, this gospel seems to instruct a quiet, personal, seemingly invisible piety; so – should we turn out the light?

And yet, today we will leave the church with the very visible and unmistakable sign of penitential Christian witness upon our faces. How on earth do we balance the call for the quietness of our hearts with our very public call to repentance? How can we be sure that we wear these ashes, as the psalmist pleads, with a “clean heart and a right spirit within” us?

The scriptures point to the implications of our expressions piety for the shaping of our hearts – but it is not we who do the shaping - that is God’s purview.  While it is our hearts that need healing and redirection – for if our hearts are aligned with God, our behaviors will be also – we acknowledge that any attempt on our part to change our hearts is about as lasting as our memory of who won the Super Bowl.

For all the years that I have chosen a particular Lenten discipline, be it abstinence or new practice, Easter Sunday has always come, followed soon after, by the disappearance of my resolve for sweeping change in my spiritual practices. I forget my resolve – I forget that for which I was reaching.

While Jesus assumes the spiritual practices of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting will be part of the lives of his followers, he warns against the false motivation of superficial reward or public acknowledgement. Instead, Jesus calls us to the kind of service he himself modeled – humble service, a sincere servant mentality, and a reliance on God for God’s constant creative, redeeming, and sanctifying care and shaping of our lives. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The kind of humility that Jesus shows us is about looking at what is true and real. It is humility born of God’s love, as through Christ, God grounds us in the truth of who we are: finite, flawed, dependent on God, and completely, utterly, totally loved by God, despite our brokenness, our sin, and our flaws. Loved so much are we, in fact, that God takes on Godself the task of holy remembrance of the baptismal relationship that leads us to Easter joy.

As we begin our Lenten journey, we accept ashes as a sign of penitence and mortality and the truth of who we are. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Yet it is out of dust that God has created humankind, and all that grows upon the earth, deeply rooted in the holy soil of God’s own making.

We are invited to spend this Lent learning to trust that God is gracious and kind and forgiving and merciful, and constantly recreating us in God’s image through the forgiveness of our sins. We are invited to recall that what humans think of us isn’t as important as our relationship with God and what we do for others – acting with justice, loving, and extending mercy, and walking humbly because we are loved by God.

We are invited to take on the discipline of doing some action solely for the purpose of pleasing God, or giving something up in order to make room in our lives for God’s Spirit to come in and move around in us.

God wants to be the focus of our attention and longing. God wants to be our audience and our reward. God wants the memory of the grace in which God holds us to become a lasting memory, one that moves us to true humility and permanently shapes our lives and our hearts.

I would like to close with a poem written by Pastor Jan Richardson for the blessing of the dust we receive today. In this poem, she reminds us what the Almighty can do with dust, and dares us to remember and to trust in God’s promise.

Out of dust we are created, back to dust we shall return. With the cross of oil marked in baptism, and the cross of ashes marked this night,we belong to God. Forever.

She writes,              

Blessing the Dust
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

Did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

Amen.