Ash Wednesday (BLC)
March 1, 2017
Psalm 51, Joel Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Grace to you and peace from God our
Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
If you have
ever taken care of a baby, you know that one of the tricky things no one ever
tells you about is how to clean in all of their adorable little baby rolls. You
know, the ones that result from all that baby fat, especially on their chubby little
thighs and around their neck. Isaac is a pretty lean baby everywhere except his
ample cheeks, but the one baby roll he definitely has is right under his chin. He
also happens to be a pretty messy eater, dripping milk all down his chin. The
result, I realized one day, was that milk gets trapped in that roll of fat, and
because it is such a tender area, and he is so resistant to raising his chin
(unless sister Grace is doing something interesting behind him!), it is really
difficult to get it clean.
Turns out,
this isn’t just an Isaac problem. I found a whole baby forum topic addressing
this issue! Milk and dirt get stuck in baby rolls, and it causes irritation,
and eventually, I suppose disease. The problem is that you can’t even see it
happening because it is hidden behind all of that adorable baby fat, until one
day, the baby does raise his chin and you see the damage that has been done by
that little bit of grime hidden in tender skin.
I know, you must
be wondering: why would I begin my sermon with such a gross description of baby
hygiene? The short, snarky answer is this: because today we talk about sin, and
sin is gross.
It’s gross,
that is, until it can be cleaned away.
And that,
really, is what Ash Wednesday, and the ensuing season of Lent, are all about.
It’s about noticing the sin in our lives, the way those little sins (or maybe
big sins) get stuck deep in the tenderness of our hearts where we cannot see
them and may even forget about them, and over time they start to irritate our
souls. The longer they remain, the more irritation they cause. Eventually, if
never tended to, they cause disease. The only way to find healing from the grimy
sin that gets stuck in the hidden places of our hearts is to wipe it clean.
And this is
what brings us here today. Today we begin a 40-day Lenten journey, a journey on
which we take intentional time for self-reflection, trying to find those hidden
places where grime has built up and has started to cause irritation in our
hearts, where that irritation has even affected our external lives: our
relationships, our faith, our way of seeing and being in the world. Tonight,
and
Such an
action, such a journey, requires a tremendous amount of honesty, doesn’t it?
Honesty with yourself, honesty with God, and eventually, perhaps, honesty with
another person. I read a beautiful reflection this week by someone who
converted to Christianity after attending an Ash Wednesday service. She was,
going in, pretty skeptical of Christians and Christianity, assuming it was a
religion full of bigotry and science-deniers. But, she went, and she reflected,
“I realized something: this was a place where people told the truth. The
liturgy made them do it. They told the truth about themselves – that they were
mortal, that they were sinners, that they were scared. I had been a lot of
places in my twenty-some years of life. I had never been anywhere quite as
truthful as that Ash Wednesday liturgy.”
But, further
on in the reflection, she also observed that, while the liturgy makes us tell the truth, we aren’t so good at it on our
own. And that really resonated with me, too. Perhaps that is why I love the
liturgy so much – it forces me to tell the truth, and gives me words to
articulate what I need to acknowledge. It forces me to recognize that, try as I
might to be the person God wants me to be, I still fall short. I still need to
return to the Lord our God, and repeatedly confess my sins: things done and
things left undone.
Martin
Luther knew this. You might say, he was obsessed with his own sin. In fact, it
was his obsession with his sin that led him, finally, to recognize the
incredible gift of grace, to make the revelations about grace and forgiveness
that led to the Reformation 500 years ago. Still, even with the knowledge of
grace, or perhaps because of it, confession remained deeply important to him.
He even came close to calling it the third sacrament. That’s why he included it
in his Small Catechism that we will be studying during Lent. Luther suggests
that the best way to go about reflecting on and confessing our sins is to use
the 10 Commandments. His explanations of this staple of a faithful life are so
helpful, because they not only say what we should not do, but what we should instead
– and I personally find it is not so much the “things done” that gets me as it
is the “things left undone.”
It is, I
will tell you, a very convicting way of looking into those hidden, gunk-filled
parts of our lives. It would be useful to choose a different commandment each
day as your tool for reflection, even, as a tool to hold you accountable to be
as truthful outside of the liturgy as we are within it.
Because
truth is another thing that seems hard to come by these days, isn’t it? We live
in a “post-truth” era, they say, in which no one knows what news to believe,
what facts are real, who can be trusted and who cannot. I found it terribly
ironic that it was in this time in America that we also witnessed the biggest
blunder ever to hit the Oscars: at the biggest moment of the night, when the
winner of best picture was announced, they
said the wrong movie! Can we not
even believe the Oscars anymore?? Yet out
of the confusion, La La Land producer
Jordan Horowitz, who had just given an acceptance speech for an award he didn’t
win, spoke a refreshing word of truth, announcing to the crowd who the true
winner was, and inviting his colleagues from Moonlight onstage. A Washington Post article on the blunder said, “What [Horowitz] did
wasn’t exactly revolutionary. He told the truth even though it was difficult
and awkward and embarrassing, because he had just stood in front of the world
and thanked his friends and family for an award that wasn’t his.” The article
goes on to observe, “When the truth is inconvenient, a lot of people spin it or
bend it to their will.”
 |
| Jordan Horowitz tells the truth |
Aren’t
we also guilty of this in our own confession of sins? Perhaps we search in
those hidden spots and find something, but then think, “No, that wasn’t a sin,
because she deserved it,” or, “I was just saying what needed to be said,” or, “I
know Jesus said that, but surely he didn’t mean it literally,” or, “I thought
maybe I should do something to help, but it didn’t seem safe, so I took care of
myself, and ignored the problem.” So many excuses, so many ways to bend the
truth so we don’t feel so bad about ourselves, so many ways to spin our sins
into something that looks noble and good. And yet, Jordan Horowitz stood up on
that stage and said, “Moonlight is
the winner, not us!” This is incredibly embarrassing, and no, the mistake
wasn’t his fault, but rather than spinning it to save face, or leaving it for someone
else to deal with, or trying to stay up on the pedestal just a moment longer,
he willingly told the truth. And especially in a world in which the truth no
longer seems as important as making ourselves and those who agree with us look
good, his truth-telling was remarkable.
On
this Ash Wednesday, brothers and sisters, and throughout Lent, let us strive to
be truthful: to acknowledge the ways we have actively hurt others, as well as
the ways we neglected to help; to recognize the ways we have put our own safety
and concerns above those of our neighbor in need; to name the ways we lament that
this world is not as God would have it, but then don’t do anything about it; to
confess that we have not always been the servants Christ freed us to be when he
died on a cross and rose again to save us from the bondage of sin.
For
when we honestly confess, when we finally lift our chins toward God in prayer,
God can wipe clean that gunk that was hidden deep inside, that irritates our
tender hearts and causes disease in our lives. We know that God can and does do
this – he sent us his Son Jesus Christ to teach us, to heal us, and finally, to
die for us and rise again to prove that with God, sin and death don’t have the
final word.
As
we continue together through this season of Lent, let’s not keep our heads bent
down, looking at our belly buttons, but rather, let us continually raise our
chins in prayer, and ask God to clean away that gunk, so that, as we live in
the forthcoming promise of Easter joy, we might also be prepared to love and
serve God in newness of life.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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