St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Lowry, MN
Ash Wednesday – 02-18-2015 – Isaiah 58, Ps. 51, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
As if Christians weren’t odd enough, here we are tonight observing Ash Wednesday. How weird is Ash Wednesday? In a world of plastic surgery to keep us from aging, in an American culture terrified of the mortality of the body, in a society that denies and doesn’t like to talk about death, here we put ashes on our foreheads to remind ourselves that we are dust and to dust we are returning.
In a county and culture that doesn’t like to bring up imperfection or mistakes, as a part of a species that hates admitting guilt and does anything to shift blame and scapegoat…here tonight we confess that we are utterly broken, in bondage to sin, and that we are to blame. We sing songs that admit fault and read Scripture passages that expose us. And here we put ashes on our foreheads to admit our guilt.
Ash Wednesday is a remarkable observance. It is a massive counter-cultural oddity. More than counter-cultural, it’s counter-intuitive—it goes against our nature to do what we’re doing tonight. Think about it, what are two of the most haunting things in the human experience? Death and guilt. Tonight we lay our soul’s bare to the reality of both.
And like anything which scares us, we resist. Ash Wednesday and Lent have become watered down. At least the American Christian culture has done just that—we’ve bypassed the drama of the day and season and we’ve reduced it all down to a 40-day petty behavioral modification; we’ve cheapened Lent to look more like an extended New Year’s resolution time where we give up trivial things like cookies and Television, rather than engage the heavy subjects of guilt and death.
I’m guilty of this. I’ve reduced Lent to a ‘read more,’ give up beer, give up candy, and give up eating after dinner resolution time. But think about how trivial that is!—in response to the suffering of Jesus, in response to our own individual and communal brokenness, in response to the reality of death…I attempted to read 10 more minutes, spare a Newcastle, give up a jolly rancher, and over-eat a little bit less?! It’s almost embarrassing…as if the drama of Psalm 51, Isaiah 58, and the final days of Jesus are concerned with my bizarre little self-help plan.
In Psalm 51 “the psalmist lays bare his soul”[1]—I have ‘done what is evil!,’ (Ps. 51:4). This isn’t a, God I accidentally ate chocolate. This is a poignant confession of serious sin. In Matthew 6 Jesus rips on those whose spiritual practices are insincere and selfish (cf. Matthew 6:1-2, 16-19). It’s not a Congratulations, you fasted and prayed. It’s a profound call to humility and sincere relationship with God.
In Isaiah 58 God lights up Israel in a thunderous reminder that their responsibilities are for the poor and the homeless, not superficial fasts (not superficial Lenten ‘give-ups’). I mean just take a listen as God throws down the hammer in a litany of indictments:
Announce to my people their rebellion…their sins.
…they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
Is not this the fast that I choose:
…loose the bonds of injustice,
…let the oppressed go free,
…share your bread with the hungry,
… bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked…cover them…
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness…
In other words, THEN you’ve impressed me. THEN you’re doing something. I don’t care about your petty rituals or your fancy fasting. Seek the lessening of human suffering and that’ll be a Lenten ‘give-up’ with which I am impressed.
Now I don’t want to completely shame any of you who are giving up trivial or petty things during Lent. There is nothing wrong with a little behavioral discipline (…and a little failure and humility to remind us how imperfect we are). If there is at least one profound thing about giving even small things up for Lent—it is that the practice almost always reminds us how weak and incapable we are and how easy it is for us to fail. I mean, for many of us, it takes some serious effort to withhold from the most menial of things—chocolate, TV, Facebook, alcohol, tobacco, fast food, etc. The fact that such moderate behavioral changes require such extreme focus and intentional effort and still have a huge rate of failure, shows just how incompetent and we are…and such recognition of our limitations is indeed a Lenten practice.
But if it takes such significant effort and focus to not eat sweets, or read more, or swear less, think about how much we fail at pursuing justice for the homeless and the poor, at increasing our giving, at loving our enemies, at worshipping God sincerely and with humility, at forgiving those who’ve wronged us, at obliterating racism, at resisting greed, etc. If we can’t abstain from even cookies how are we at all capable to deal with the extensiveness of human evil!?[2]
But this is the point of Ash Wednesday. Lent is a profound opportunity to get into painfully honest touch with the reality of our sin, the reality of our limits, the reality of our mortality, and that we cannot overcome any of this ourselves, that we need each other, the Body of Christ, and above all, that we need a Savior.[3] That painful realization is what Lent is about. It’s about our incapability—our incapability to escape sin, our incapability to escape death, and thus our absolute need for a Savior.
And so tonight we deeply contemplate all of these things. We confess our sin in the most haunting of ways. We sing it. We put ashes on our foreheads.[4] We kneel at communion railings. We listen to painfully honest scriptures which cut us deep and blast us for our apathy, our self-centeredness, our hate, our idolatry, and our ignoring of the poor, the hungry, and the suffering. We boldly name the inescapability of sin, the inevitability of death, and the necessity of Jesus.
So tonight we pray. We pray in confession and we pray for transformation, Come Lord Jesus, we are dust. And the good news on an otherwise sobering night: the ashes on our foreheads do remind us of our sin and death—our need for a Savior. And the ashes in the shape of a cross remind us that we have one. Amen.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV—Year B (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 185.
[3] Rolf Jacobson, Ash Wednesday, Sermon Brainwave, Podcast #402, http://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=594.
[4] “In ancient Israel the symbolism of ashes was understood to be a forceful reminder of [our] sin and of the [certainty] of human death.”—in Brueggemann, Texts for Preaching, 182.
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