Ash Wednesday

 

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Today, we join together to begin our Lenten journey to the cross.  These 40 days are a special time of dedication and focus in the church.  It is a season of repentance where we remember both our sinful nature and our need for God’s forgiveness.  But much more importantly it is a time for journeying with Jesus.  A time to focus more deeply on how Jesus is calling us and where Jesus is leading us to be.  And so, it is also a time where we often heighten our observance and engage in Lenten disciplines like prayer, mediation, bible study, fasting, almsgiving and service to others.

The lessons appointed for today are perfectly designed to help us enter into Lent.  Our reading from Isaiah, a repeat from two weeks ago, talks quite pointedly about what God desires of our times of fasting a devotion.  In it, Isaiah reminds the people of Israel that one cannot meaningfully fast and humble ourselves before God if we are not first also caring for our neighbors and seeking justice for the oppressed.  It tells us that God cares not for our outward signs of piety if they are used only to justify ourselves and mask our lack of concern for others.  Then Paul in Corinthians reminds us of the importance of maintaining our relationship with God even in times of difficultly or strain. 

And then our gospel lesson for today takes these themes even one step further.  For Jesus exhorts us, even in the midst of these calls of repentance, to closely examine the motivations behind our heightened religious practices during this season.

Jesus sternly warns against the pitfalls he has witnessed among those who engage in religious practice for the wrong reasons before exhorting his disciples to behave differently.  This passage ends with the famous line “Do not store up for yourself 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.” 

And when we first hear this passage, so very often the first thing that pops into our head is that if we build beautiful things and do good deeds here on earth, pray, worship, give to the church, serve others, etc, we are somehow amassing points in heaven and no matter what happens here on earth, someday when we die, God will reward us for what we have done when we get to heaven.  And so we can so easily begin to think of our good deeds and religious acts like deposits in some sort of a heavenly savings account to be drawn upon to pay the debt of our sins or to enjoy after our spiritual retirement in heaven.

But God doesn’t work that way.  Notice that there is no future tense in this passage.  Jesus is not so much talking about life after death as how we live our spiritual lives here today.  The heavenly reward that Jesus is offering is not some far off boon we will receive after we die, but a deeper relationship with God right here and now.  For it is that relationship that is the focus of this whole passage and really the focus of Ash Wednesday and all of Lent.

And this message seems more important now than ever.  Because, we are undoubtedly living in a time of heightened anxiety.  A time where we are constantly being assaulted by all manner of ominous news, pushed from all sides and expected to react in the moment to all sorts of things.  And all of that also causes the temptation to just check out and back away entirely because it can all feel overwhelming.

But Lent calls us to something completely different.  The Lenten season invites us to do far more than just survive until we can escape away to paradise one day.  Lent invites us to seek and receive those spiritual rewards that Jesus promises right now here on earth.  It invites us stay deeply rooted in the present, in how our faith practices and our spiritual disciples can calm us, comfort us, confront us and carry us, through any and every struggle we might face.

Ash Wednesday reminds us that while we are fallible, Christ is not.  It calls on us to repent, to literally turn around, to return to those things, those practices, the support of this community, that have the ability to uphold and sustain us.  Because Jesus isn’t going anywhere.

So as we come forward and receive the mark of Christ on our mortal bodies, I invite you to consider the discipline of Lent.   Now I know that the very word discipline can be a stumbling block for many on this Lenten path.   A Lenten discipline to modern ears can sound very much like a punishment, a spiritual trip to the principal’s office of you will.  But that is not what discipline actually means.  It comes from the same Latin word as disciple meaning to be taught or to learn.  So a Lenten discipline is not a punishment but an opportunity to learn and grow.  Perhaps we would be better in this day and age to call it a Lenten apprenticeship or internship than a Lenten discipline.   Their very purpose is to help us learn about God, grow in our faith and deepen our relationship with Christ.

And so this year I am inviting you specifically to take some time to really reroot yourself in Christ this season.  To slow down, take a step back and connect deeply with that which sustains our faith and our spiritual practices that bind us together.  Worship is going to look and feel quite different this season.  We are going to take time to really be together as a community, to sing together in simple shared song, to have silence, to hear and listen deeply to the stories of salvation told in their entirety. 

And I hope that you will give this Lenten discipline the opportunity to extend in your lives well beyond the time we spend together in worship.  We have many opportunities this season to experience scripture retold in the ‘Chosen’, to give alms in through mite boxes and to serve others services projects.  And I hope you will take these practices home as well, maybe take a candle home and take a few minutes a day to just pray in silence, or say morning prayer by yourself or with us on Facebook, or do a journaling exercise, or take some time in nature as the weather turns. 

No matter how you do it, I invite you to apprentice yourself to Christ this season, setting aside your time, attention and talents to focus on deepening your relationship with God.  Not out of habit or obligation, not to be seen by others, or to atone for our sins but because God so deeply desires a relationship with us that he would send his own son to die for it. Amen.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2nd Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 8:26-39 So today we are having our Ministry Celebration.   A day where we celebrate our shared ministry together.   The ministry of all believers.   And especially the often overlooked and unseen ministry of folks who quietly toil away at activities inside and outside the church, that make a huge difference in the life of the church and the world but often goes unnoticed.     We wanted to take time recognize all the ways that the people of St George’s work together to make this place what it is.   And this day has been in the works for months.   We worked out the whole summer schedule, we picked a date, we planned and announced things, we got things set up.   And then a couple of weeks ago I went and actually looked at the texts for today, and they are a mess.   This is really not anything near the bible texts I would have picked in order to talk about the church’s shared mission.   So much so I seriously thought about trying ...
Read more

3rd Sunday of Easter

  John 21:1-19 I know we like to spend a lot of time talking about women leaders in the church, but this week we are going to take some time instead to talk about the men who Jesus chooses to be leaders in his church.   Specifically, two very important men, Peter and Paul. The first great public leaders of the church.   Between them they really were the two most authoritative voices in the early church.   Peter with his work in Jerusalem and the surrounding regions and Paul with his groundbreaking ministry to the gentile peoples across the empire in Turkey, Greece and eventually as far as Rome.   They both converted thousands, founded dozens of churches, wrote letters so instructive and important we still read them today and laid the foundations that allowed he church of Jesus Christ to survive, grow and thrive into a community of faith that has sustained billions of people for more than 2000 years.   These were undeniably great leaders who accomplished a...
Read more

Holy Trinity

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 Today is the Festival of the Holy Trinity.   The only week in the entire church year devoted to a doctrine of the church.   It is a festival devoted to entirely to an idea.   Unlike most of the commemorations of the church year which focus on specific events in the life of Christ or biblical events in the history of the church, Holy Trinity Sunday focus on the doctrine of the Trinity, the concept of God as Three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit united together as a single undivided God.   But the Trinity is complex, confusing and always shrouded in mystery.     We struggle to find language to even describe much less understand the nature of the Trinity.   Countless books and seminary classes and sermons and lectures have been devoted to the topic, yet many of us still struggle to understand how God can be three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and yet still one God.   And I was bad at my Systematic Theol...
Read more