Ash Wednesday February 25, 2009 “Series B”
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, in which we attempt to follow our Lord on the road to Jerusalem and the cross. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, prepare our hearts and minds to appreciate anew the gift of our Lord’s redemption, which we receive through our faith and baptism into his death and resurrection. Open us to the truth of your Word, that we might be strengthened in faith in your gift of grace. We ask this in Christ’s holy name. Amen.
This evening we begin another Lenten journey. I say another, because for many of us, the keeping of Lent is a treasured 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, year after year. We have come to realize that this extra time we devote to our Lord, enables us to celebrate with renewed spiritual vigor, God’s gift of grace, poured out for us through Christ’s death and resurrection.
And the guiding word for us, as we begin our Lenten journey, is our Lord’s call for personal reflection upon the true meaning of our spiritual life, our relationship with God. According to our Gospel lesson, Jesus teaches his disciples: “Beware of practicing your piety (or your reverence toward God) before others, in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven…” He then goes on to say that if we truly want to show reverence to God, we need to avoid a public display of our faith, and be secret about our offerings, our prayers, and our fasting – the disciplines of Lent.
When I read our Gospel lesson for this evening, and began to put some ideas together for my sermon, a couple of crazy thoughts popped into my mind. The first crazy thought that I had, was that “just maybe, as Christ’s church, we have taken this secret business of our faith too much to heart. Perhaps our faith has become so secret, so personal, that we feel we don’t need corporate worship and study of Scripture to grow in faith.
After all, if St. Mark’s is like St. John’s, there are less members of our congregations coming out and participating in this mid-week Lenten “tradition” that has proven throughout the ages, to be a source of spiritual growth for Christians. In fact, I would posture to guess that our weekly attendance at worship and Sunday school might have declined over the past several years, as well.
But it is a crazy thought to think that when Jesus suggested that we go into a closet to pray, that we avoid public worship and the gathered community of the faithful. Jesus didn’t do that! According to the Gospels, we are told that “Jesus, as was his custom,” worshipped in the synagogues of the towns and villages that he visited, every Sabbath. So
if Jesus didn’t avoid public worship, what are we to make of this text?
I believe 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 hear the history of God’s desire for his creation, expressed through his Word, which confronts us as law and Gospel.
It is there that we begin to learn what it means to be a child of God, through our participation in the fellowship of a community, that is defined as God’s own family. And it is there, that we are disciplined in faith and experience the continual gift of God’s redeeming grace. This dimension of faith we cannot learn in a closet.
However, I also believe that there is a personal dimension of faith. This aspect of faith results, when through the power of God’s Spirit at work in our lives, we begin to assimilate or take into ourselves our identity as a child of God. It is the ongoing process of personally realizing the truth of our baptism, and that through the grace of God in Jesus the Christ, we have a future as God’s sons and daughters beyond our life hear on earth.
Thus, it is to this personal dimension of our faith, that I believe that Jesus addressed his comments. Through the use of hyperbole, Jesus is saying, “Don’t just go through the motions of worship, but allow the power of God’s Spirit access to the secrecy of our hearts, that the Spirit might take what we experience in corporate worship, and make it a reality.” It is what happens when instead of just going through the motions of worship, we actually find ourselves loving and worshiping the God of our salvation. And that is not such a crazy idea! It is the power of God’s Spirit at work in us to assure us of his grace for our lives.
The second crazy thought that I had centered on verses 16 through 18. Here Jesus says: “Whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting… 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 sees in secret…”
Isn’t that a strange lesson to be read on Ash Wednesday? Doesn’t this text seem to contradict what we have just done, as we began our worship by tracing the sign of the cross on our foreheads with ashes? How are we to reconcile this ancient tradition of the church, with this teaching of our Lord? Perhaps it is a contradiction of our text, if we wear that smudge on our face in order to show others how religious we are, as a badge of our piety. But it can also have deep meaning.
Up until the time I went to seminary, being born and raised in Western Pennsylvania, I had no ideas what this tradition meant – other than it enabled me to distinguish which of my friends were Roman Catholic. At that time, there seemed to be a lot of mistrust between Protestants and
Catholics. In fact, I can vaguely remember that my parents kept some kind of score card running on marriages between Lutheran and Catholics. When the couple decided to worship as Lutheran, I would hear, “That’s one for us.” Or if they decided to worship in the Catholic tradition, I would hear, “Well, we lost that one.”
And how often I would hear, “We don’t do that. It’s a Catholic tradition, not Protestant.” That’s what I heard about receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday. That’s a mark of a Roman Catholic.
Well, can you imagine my surprise, or should I say shock, when I cam to worship on Ash Wednesday at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, and the service began with confession and the imposition of ashes. I was really confused. Fortunately, I was sitting next to one of the faculty, and so, I leaned over and asked him, “I thought this ashes thing was a Catholic tradition.”
Dr. Siirala responded, “Yes, Ron, if you mean catholic with a small ‘c’. The Roman church doesn’t own this tradition, it belongs to the universal church. It is a tradition that enables us to enter Lent with the realization that our life on earth is finite, that we will die. If we take that to heart, then we might truly come to appreciate the gift of Christ’s victory over sin and death.”
I sat silent, pondering 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, with those stark words, “Remember that you are dust…” some of the ashes fell in front of my eyes. It was a spiritual realization of my finite nature, and my total dependence upon the saving grace of God for my future.
Following the service, Dr. Siirala suggested that I needn’t leave the ashes on my forehead for the rest of the day, as if I had been branded. “Go to the restroom and was your face,” he said. “But as you do, remember your baptism, that in that sacrament you have been cleansed by the blood of Christ, united to his death and resurrection, and through the grace of God, made an heir of eternal life in his kingdom.”
I did as Dr. Siirala suggested. I went tot he restroom, wet a paper towel, and washed the ashes off of my forehead. And when I looked up in the mirror to see if I had gotten them all off, a bead of water had formed where the ashes had been. And for the first time in my life, I truly began to grasp the significance of my baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
I share this incident with you, this secret, closet moment in my life of faith, because I believe that it can help us realize what our Lord calls for us to do, as we enter into our Lenten journey. He is not asking us to avoid the corporate dimensions of our faith, but to take those experiences and allow God’s Spirit to make them our own – to make us his own.
And that is not a crazy thought! Only when our heart is open to God’s Spirit, only when our inner life comes alive in Christ, can we truly fast, pay, give our offerings, speak our prayers and serve our God with true devotion. Then it doesn’t matter who notices us! What matters is that we are conscious of standing before God, as finite people whom he has redeemed, through his tremendous gift of grace, poured out for us through our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection.
That’s not a crazy thought. That’s the journey of Lent!
Amen.
