Ash Wednesday 2.26.20

A reading from Joel.

Blow the trumpet, Zion, sound the alarm on my holy mountain.

Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming.

It is near.

A day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness.

Like blackness spread upon the mountains, a great and powerful army comes.

Their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.

Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.

Rend your hearts and not your clothing.

Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.

Who knows whether he will not turn and relent and leave a blessing behind him, a green offering and a drink offering for the Lord your God.

Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the aged, gather the children, even infants at the breast.

Let the bridegroom leave his room and the bride her canopy.

Between the vestibule and the altar, let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.

Let them say, Spare your people, Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations.

Why should it be said among the peoples?

Where is their God?

The word of the Lord.

Reading from 2 Corinthians.

We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

For our sake, God made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain.

For he says, At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.

See, now is the acceptable time.

See, now is the day of salvation.

We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way so that no fault may be found with our ministry.

But as servants of God, we have committed ourselves in every way, through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labor, sleepless nights, hunger, by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God.

With the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left, in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute, we are treated as impostors and yet are true, as unknown and yet are well known, as dying and see, we are alive, as punished and yet not killed, as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, as poor, yet making many rich, as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

The word of the Lord.

Jesus said, 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.

So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others.

Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret.

And your father who sees in secret will reward you.

And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others.

Truly I tell you, they've received their reward.

But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you.

And whenever you fast, do not look dismal like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting.

Truly I tell you, they've received their reward.

But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others, but by your father who is in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal.

But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes, and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Overgathering to do something that might seem a little bit at odds with the gospel, but keep in mind this is a practice that predates bulletin boards, TV, and radio ads.

This is a practice in which we declare publicly that God has more for our lives than we are living.

And this year we intend to do something about it.

And it becomes, I think, this really strong choice between practicing piety before others and practicing repentance before others.

And I want to suggest to you those things can be very different.

Unfortunately, I think we've made them very different.

Today is a day that reminds us, though, that any real practice of piety requires repentance.

I want to suggest to you that wearing ashes on our head, this is the one day of the year when you can go to the grocery store and see people with a black smudge and not say, um, you've got something on your head.

This is the one day of the whole year in which we get to identify ourselves as bulletin boards.

And I want to say there's something really interesting about it.

Because if we could just remember that, if we could be very public with the statement, I want to live bigger, then we might actually hold one another more accountable for it.

We might actually say, Hey, didn't I see you with that stuff yesterday?

Come on, you can do this.

The world needs you to do this.

That's our opportunity as a congregation.

Now there's this interesting thing that we get to do.

You see, the whole point of the day is that God, the vine grower, would like to trim off the dead branches from our vines.

The truth is, all that does is weigh us down.

God is not interested in us being a bonsai tree and clipping our growth to keep us small.

God wants to trim off the dead parts of us so that we can not only grow, but so that we can produce fruit for the world.

And not just apples or oranges.

God wants us to produce wine.

The point of all this repentance and penitence is to nourish the world and to nourish the world with the fruit of the vine with joy.

Sometimes we think, boy, I'm just gonna prove my faith to God.

I'm gonna be miserable.

That'll show God.

I think that'll show God the wrong thing.

So if you're thinking about giving up something for Lent and taking it back on after Easter, I want to discourage you from that way of thinking.

I want to encourage you to use this time, as Paul says, today is the day of salvation to adopt something that would make your life bigger for the rest of your life, not for the next 47 days.

Today you have the support of a community.

Today you have the blessing of your priest, today you have the blessing of your God.

Do not settle for something that will not mean anything to you in 40 days.

Pick something larger.

These ashes are the reminder.

We can take this, I think, in a couple of ways.

They're the reminder that we're made from dust, and to dust we're going to return.

If God wanted us to last forever, then God would have made human beings out of iridium.

But God chose to make us out of dirt so that we could return to dirt.

So here's our opportunity.

Five years from now, ten years from now, will we look back at our lives and say, I wish I'd been more stingy.

I wish I'd helped fewer people.

God, I wish I hadn't been so kind.

Or will we say, I wish I'd given more?

I wish I'd loved bigger.

This is our reminder to live our lives backward.

The scriptures are very clear that the things we do that are pity, that are stingy, that are self-absorbed, those things will die with us and they will not live on after us.

But there are things that will outlive us, like faith, hope, and love, like goodness, gentleness, kindness, self-control against such things there is no law.

Every small choice we make is an opportunity to choose things that will perish with us, or to choose things that will live on and after us.

Being kind, being grateful, being patient with these small things.

And today is our reminder to pick things that live, but do not pick things that die.

And there's a wonderful part, you know, the liturgy today is pretty full of weight.

And all of that we're going to end up giving up to God and being forgiven for.

Though we might feel unworthy to approach God's table, God's gonna say, My power is bigger than your feelings, so you all come on.

We're going to do that in just a minute.

And here comes, I think, the most important part.

There are behaviors in our lives that we look back on and we say, I can't believe I wasted so much time doing that.

I can't believe I was so hateful.

I can't believe I got that tattoo.

Whatever it is we pick, we can bemoan and we can wail.

So I want to tell you, and maybe you read it this morning, that those are our limitations, not God's.

The truth is that God is looking at every single one of us today and hoping we will see ourselves like God does.

So no matter where you've been or what you've done, God looks at us and says, I'm so glad for who you've come to be.

Be that person.

There is a bartender downtown, you may have read this this morning, and he competed internationally, and he had to make his own cocktail up.

And curiously enough, he did it with some really bad-tasting alcohol, and he also put in some ashes.

This is true.

There was ash in the cocktail, and boy, it was amazing.

And that's the power of God that even our worst decisions, even the vices of our past, even the things we regret for the rest of our lives, God is able to say, I can make an amazing flavor out of that for the world, if you'll just offer it up.

So this is what we come to do today as faithful people, to offer up our lives to the world, even in the small moments, so that life can grow.

If Lent makes you miserable, give it up for Lent.

But I hope Lent, like any real training, will be difficult at first and produce fruit to nourish those you love, to nourish your love of yourself, to nourish your relationship with God.