Sermon for Ash Wednesday, 18 February 2015
Reflection for Ash Wednesday
18 February 2015
Lutheran Church of the Redeemer,
Jerusalem
The Rev. Carrie B. Smith
Grace and peace to you from God our
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
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| Photo by Danae Hudson |
It’s an odd ritual,
and yet we do it every Ash Wednesday: we hear these words from Jesus about not
showing our piety before others, and then we immediately have black crosses
smudged on our foreheads and go on to work, to the bus, or to the grocery
store. While we may not receive rewards for doing this, we most certainly
receive strange looks.
But on this
day, in this particular week, when we wear the mark of Christ on our heads, we remember how twenty-one Christians
recently lost their heads for no other reason than that they were baptized
members of the Body of Christ.
For this
reason, the simple liturgical act of being marked with the cross today takes on a
deeper significance. Most of us in this room have never needed to keep our
faith a secret, and have never truly experienced religious persecution. But whether
or not we, in our contexts, are in mortal danger for wearing the cross of Christ on our
bodies, our hearts are in solidarity today with those twenty-one men who lost their lives for the same cross. God grant them rest eternal, and may the
peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard the hearts and minds of
their loved ones in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Of course, it
now must be clearly stated that to think of the cross we are about to receive as
some kind of flag of solidarity or symbol of triumph would be entirely missing
the point of the day and of the church season to come. “Beware of practicing
your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no
reward from your Father in heaven” says Jesus. The ashes we wear on Ash
Wednesday are not signs that we are especially good or holy. They don’t show
solidarity with the persecuted or resistance to the rise of secularism or prove
any political point whatsoever. These ashes are ashes, nothing more, and when
we wear them, we are “outed” not as people of extraordinary faith, but as
people of completely ordinary mortality. We are dust, and to dust we shall
return.
The funny
thing is, facing this simple truth about ourselves can feel as frightening as
any external terror or threat.
I heard a radio news story the other day about a proposal in the United States to sell food
that has gone past its expiration date (or food that simply doesn’t appear fresh anymore) to the
underprivileged. This was conceived as a way of dealing with both the immense
amount of waste in American culture, and the increasing problem of malnutrition
among the poor and the working poor. The innovator of this new program said, in
short: “The idea is that if we make this expired and bruised produce cheaper
than fast food, poor people will buy it, we won’t have to throw it out, and
everybody wins.”
Now, there
is much I’d like to say about this news story. In fact, there’s far too much to
say about this proposed “solution” to poverty and what it reveals about how we
view the value of other human beings, but today, it’s the foundation of this story that has my attention. This is a story about an American culture problem, but deep down it also
reveals a universal human nature problem.
What this
story illustrates is our human aversion to brokenness and our fear of
mortality.
We are so afraid
of imperfection, we won’t even eat a bruised banana.
We are so
afraid of decay, scientists have created a bio-engineered apple which will not
turn brown after being cut.
We are so
afraid of things that are not fresh, and we so value the imperishable, that we will refuse to eat food that has passed its official, corporately stamped, arbitrarily chosen expiration date—but will happily pass it on to others, whose mortality is
apparently less concerning.
And so it is
quite the scandal that on Ash Wednesday Christians wear our imperfections, our
bruises, our faults, our sins, and our mortality on our very bodies.
This is
the day we get real with ourselves. On this one day a year, we wear our
expiration dates on our foreheads.
Someone has
even said Ash Wednesday is the day all Christians celebrate their funerals in
advance.
Isn’t that a
lovely thought!
This could
all seem very depressing indeed, if it weren’t for the presence of God’s imperishable
grace, love and mercy amidst the dust, decay, and death of this perishable world.
American Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton even makes the case that Ash
Wednesday isn’t a sorrowful day at all, but rather a joyful one. A feast, in
fact! He said Ash Wednesday is a joyous feast because it is on this day that we
let go of the false promises of the
world, the false hopes of immortality, the false trust in these frail bodies,
the false sense that perfection and achievement and beauty are what will make
our lives worthwhile, and instead rest completely and totally on the goodness
and love of God which we have seen in Christ Jesus and the cross.
Thomas
Merton writes:
“In laying
upon us the light cross of ashes, the Church desires to take off our shoulders
all other heavy burdens—the crushing load of worry and guilt, the dead weight
of our own self-love. We should not take upon ourselves a “burden” of penance
and stagger into Lent as if we were Atlas, carrying the whole world on his
shoulders. . . Penance is conceived by the Church less as a burden than as a
liberation. It is only a burden to those who take it up unwillingly. Love makes
it light and happy. And that is another reason why Ash Wednesday is filled with
the lightness of love.”
I must
admit, it’s a new concept for me to think of Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent
as being “light and happy”. We’re accustomed to thinking of this as a “heavy”
time, a time of solemnity and restriction: No
Alleluias during the liturgy. No
desserts at Wednesday night church fellowship. No meat on Fridays, depending on your tradition. No coffee, no chocolate, no
Facebook…depending on your personal piety.
But seen in
this new light, Lent can be a journey to freedom rather than a forty day sentence
to serve. As Merton points out, this can be forty days of shedding our reliance
on our own abilities, and forty days of increasing our need for God’s grace and
love. This can be forty days of liberation from dysfunction, and forty days of getting
into right relationship with God, with our neighbors, with our own bodies.
Today can
begin forty days of giving thanks that we are dust, but that dust is not all
there is. After all, it was dust, imbued with the breath of God, which brought
you, and everyone you know and love, into being. This same dust was made holy
when Jesus, the Son of God, walked with us, experiencing all our joys and
sorrows. It was from the dust and dirt of the tomb that Jesus was raised,
conquering death once and for all. We are dust, and to dust we shall return. But
because God so loved the world—dust and all—this is not a message of gloom and
doom, but rather Good News of light, love, and liberation.
We are dust.
God is love. Thanks be to God.
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