Ash Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let us pray: Dear Heavenly Father, this evening we begin another season of Lent, another journey in faith as we attempt to follow our Lord on the road to Jerusalem and the cross. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, open our hearts and minds to appreciate anew Christ’s gift of redemption that he offers us through our baptism into his death and resurrection. Enable us to grasp the truth of your Word, and strengthen our faith in your gift of grace. This we ask in Christ’s holy name. Amen.
For most of us, the keeping of Lent has become a tradition, which we have learned from an early age. And these mid-week hours set aside for worship, prayer and the study of God’s Word are a blessing to our faith. We have come to realize through the years that this extra time we devote to our Lord enables us to celebrate with renewed spiritual vigor, God’s gift of grace through Christ’s death and resurrection.
Now, I realize that this is an unusual year for our Delaware Township congregations, as John Canon suffered injuries in a car crash, and Pastor Garland has retired. Thus, I and the members of St. John’s, would like to warmly invite the members of Jerusalem and St. Mark’s to join us this year in our mid-week services. In fact, I have chosen as a topic for our mid-week study, a comparison of the catechisms of our two traditions, in the hope that we might deepen our appreciation for our respective faiths.
I realize that I did not attend a Reformed or United Church of Christ seminary. However, I did participate in the Reformed – Lutheran study as a presenter of the Lutheran perspective on the sacrament of Holy Communion in our cluster. These were studies that led to the adoption of the documents that enabled full communion fellowship between our churches. Thus, I will attempt to present a fair representation of both of our traditions. But if I fail, you can certainly correct me.
Our Wednesday evening schedule for this study is as follows. We begin with a light supper, usually centered on soup, at 6:00 PM, followed by a one hour study at 6:45 PM. We then close the evening with devotions. If you wish to come for the supper and fellowship, all we ask is that you let us know, so that we can prepare enough “soup.” However, if you don’t want to come for this brief time of fellowship, please join us for the study, which will be held in the lounge at the other end of the building. We look forward to sharing this Lenten journey this year, with you.
We here at St. John’s have enjoyed cooperative ministry. As you know, a long portion of our history was as a union congregation. And in addition to our joint services on Ash Wednesday and Thanksgiving Eve, we have for the past two years offered a joint Vacation Bible School with St. Mark’s. But our congregation is also involved with 11 other congregations in providing a week-long program of confirmation instruction, conducted at our church camp. As a result, we pastors meet several times a year in order to plan for this adventure.
We usually meet at Josie’s and my camp, because it is centrally located to the congregations involved. We meet for several hours, share a meal, and then enjoy a time of fellowship. Well, to make a long story short, I will skip all of the frills, and get to the point, especially, because, as we pastors age, we might repeat an illustration or two, and I’m not sure that I might not have told this story before.
Following one of our meetings, Pastor Bob, who had just gotten a new fly rod, wanted to give us a demonstration of how good it worked. And since there were a few fishermen among us, we left the table and went out to the front yard of my camp. Bob then put on a show of what that long rod and course line could do – perhaps to entice some of us who were not fishermen, to take up the sport.
With precise movements and stately grace, he stripped line off the reel and cast it farther and farther across the yard. His line, tipped with one of his hand-tied flies, shot out with an elegant rhythm. It traced a perfect arc in the sky. He provided us with a pretty picture of his skill that day. Of course, when given the chance, none of us could come close to emulating his skill.
Of course, there is no pond or stream in the front yard of my camp. It is just thick, tuff grass. For all of the beauty of his casting, all of the grace with which he flung that line – it was nothing but practice. He would catch no fish in the front yard of my camp. In fact, all he did was snag his line in the grass, and have to retrieve it. But when one of the novice fishermen made a comment about his beautiful style, my pastor buddy Bruce, who is also an excellent fisherman, blurted out, “I didn’t see you catch any fish!” And we all laughed, for several minutes.
This brings us to our Gospel lesson for this evening. Jesus teaches his disciples, “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.” Clearly, this illustration brings this to mind. Bob showed us his finesse with a fly rod, but he had no reward, other than the awe of those of us who had no idea as to how to emulate his skill. He had received from us appreciation, but he caught no fish.
But Jesus then goes on to suggest that if we truly want to show reverence to God, we need to avoid public display of our faith, and be secret about our offerings, our prayers, and our fasting – the disciplines of Lent. And quite frankly, Jesus’ suggestion of going into a closed room to pray in secret, or his suggestion that we fast in secret, are appropriate texts for us to ponder this night, as we enter our new Lenten journey. For they have too often been misinterpreted by many Christians.
If it is true, according to the national surveys that have been published over the past ten years, indicating that nearly 85 percent of the American public declare that they believe in God and consider themselves to be spiritual persons, why is the church’s membership declining? Now I don’t know about Jerusalem or St. Mark’s, but I do know that here at St. John’s, our membership has declined. Even more, I have noticed that there are fewer members willing to take the time to participate in this Lenten journey for spiritual growth, which has saddened me as a pastor.
When Jesus suggested that we go into our rooms to pray, he did not mean that we should avoid corporate worship. Jesus didn’t do that! According to the Gospels, we are told that it was Jesus’ custom to worship on the Sabbath, in the synagogues of the towns and villages that he visited. Jesus often used hyperbole, or obvious exaggeration to make his point, and his Sermon on the Mount is full of it.
Thus, I believe that Jesus is telling us that there are two dimensions to faith development. One side is corporate – our participation in the community life of a congregation of Christ’s church. It is there that we are baptized into the family of God, receive instruction in what it means to live according to our baptism, are nourished and challenged to grow in faith through God’s Word and his presence in the sacraments.
However, I also believe that there is a personal dimension of faith. This aspect of faith results when we begin to assimilate, or take into ourselves our identity as a child of God and a member of our Lord’s redeemed family. It is this ongoing process of personally realizing the truth of our baptism, that we have a future as God’s sons and daughters as members of God’s eternal kingdom.
Thus, it is to this personal dimension of our faith that I believe that Jesus addressed his comments. I believe that it is Jesus’ call to us to take what we experience in our corporate worship, and through the power of God’s Spirit, to take it into our hearts and make it our own. It is what happens when, instead of just going through the motions of worship, we actually, in the privacy of our own being, actually love and worship God. It is the difference between practicing casting a fly rod, and actually catching hold of the fish – the object of our faith’s longing.
With this in mind, let me offer an example from my own life, of what I believe our Lord to means, by making our worship of God private. I grew up in Jeanette, the town where Terrell Pryor has emerged from my alma mater as the number one college prospect in the nation. At that time, Jeanette, was 80% Italian, and I doubt that that has changed. I came to love Italian food, as a part of our school lunch program.
But in spite of the fact that there were several rather large Protestant congregations in town, the vast majority of Jeanette was Roman Catholic. And back then, there was real denominational fidelity between members of the Christian denominations. In fact, I can vaguely remember that my parents kept some kind of a score card running on marriages between Lutherans and Catholics. When a couple from both churches decided to worship in the Lutheran church, I would hear, “That’s one for us.” Or, if it went the other way, I would hear, “Well, we lost that one.”
An in my naivete, when students showed up in school with ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday, I just assumed that this was some Roman Catholic ritual, that separated them from us protestants.
Can you imagine my surprise, or should I say shock, when I came to worship on Ash Wednesday at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, and the service began with confession and the imposition of ashes? Fortunately, I was sitting next to one of the faculty, whom I trusted, and so I leaned over and said, “I thought this was a Roman Catholic tradition.”
Dr. Siirala responded, “It is a tradition of the catholic church, if you mean catholic with a small “c”. In my home church in Finland, this rite has been celebrated since its inception. But Ron,” he said to me, “Don’t focus on the external aspect of this rite, but try to grasp in your heart what is enacted here, and try to appreciate the gift of Christ’s gift of redemption for you.”
For a short while, I pondered Dr. Siirala’s words, until it was our turn to go and receive the ashes. And as the chaplain traced the sign of the cross across my forehead, some of the ashes fell down in front of my eyes. It was a spiritual realization of my finite nature. For the first time in my life, I actually though about being mortal, one day dying.
Following the service, Dr. Siirala suggested that I could go to the men’s room, and wash the ashes from my forehead, so that I didn’t need to feel branded for the rest of the day. But then he added, “As you wash, remember your baptism, that your sins have been cleansed with the blood of Christ.”
I went and did as he suggested, took a couple of paper towels, soaked them in water, and washed the ashes from my face. And as I looked up into the mirror to make sure that I had removed all the ashes, a drop of water fell across my eyes. And I remember crying, for that drop of water reminded me of my baptism, in which I am united to the grace of God, in Christ’s death and resurrection, to free me from sin and death.
That, for me, is the private room to which we are called to enter during this Lenten season. It is not that we should shelter ourselves in the privacy of our own homes, but join the community of Christ in worship and study, in the hope that we might be inspired by what we hear to make our baptismal faith our own, through the gift of God’s Holy Spirit. So let us all come together in this unique year, search for God’s presence, and through the power of God’s Spirit, come to embrace each other with renewed faith and appreciation, as we travel the road to Jerusalem together.
Amen.
