Who Knows?
Ash
Wednesday (Years ABC)
14 February 2018; 12 Noon and 7 p.m. Said Mass with Imposition of Ashes
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church
14 February 2018; 12 Noon and 7 p.m. Said Mass with Imposition of Ashes
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland,
Oregon
The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
I read in the
blog of a friend, a priest in Nahelem, that she was not “doing Lent” this
year. She is gravely ill with a
degenerative respiratory illness, and may not make it to Easter. As I recall, she said, “I may be having a
real life—make that real death—experience of ashes to ashes and dust to dust in
the next few weeks. I don’t need any
extra reminders, since it is about all I can think of. And I’m not sure that 40 days of effort are
going to make any headway on my besetting sins—they are what they are and if I
haven’t changed yet, I doubt whether one last heroic effort of a month or so
will change anything. And my time is so
limited that I feel that a better spiritual practice for me is to enjoy the
good things God gave that I know I love and value.”
I felt very
sad to hear how poorly she’s doing, but was in awe of how well she understood
Lent and what it’s about.
We often get
Lent and Ash Wednesday completely wrong.
I’m not talking about the naughty choir boy’s snickering at the line in
the liturgy, “Remember you are BUT dust.”
Our misunderstanding is far deeper and pervasive, and comes from not
understanding the context of all the scriptural talk about sin, punishment, the
wrath of God, and penitence. We think
it’s all about heroic efforts to convince God to not be so angry at us. At a more pedestrian level, we think that
it’s about showing to ourselves and others how pious, how spiritual, we
are. We keep those ash marks prominent
on our foreheads and go boldly back into the world to let others see. Or some of us wrongly think that we can take
the ashes out into the world and give other people a chance to show off their
spirituality without the inconvenience of actually getting their behinds into a
church: ashes to go, indeed. But it’s all there in today’s Gospel: Jesus says if you do a good thing for show,
the show is all there is: “they have received their reward.”
For Jesus,
it’s all about doing good things in secret, without trying to have anyone
know. “God, who sees in secret, will
bless you.”
Reading about
my friend’s vacation from Lent, I was struck by something that happened to me
yesterday. I was available most of the
day to hear confessions and give absolution in the Church. For whatever reason, not a single parishioner
showed up. That’s OK: we are Episcopalians and “All may, none must,
but some should.” But yesterday, I was
one of the last group, one of the one’s who should confess. After finishing in the Church, I talked with
my Spiritual Director and made my confession.
It was greatly centering and soothing.
As we talked, and we went between my sins and the things in my life that
drive them and trigger them, I found myself confessing like many other people I
have heard over the years: I told not
only the hurts and harms I had done other people, but wondered about the hurts
and harms done to me. For, as much as we
want to keep these two separate in terms of accepting responsibility and making
amends, from the point of view of our heart, of how we feel, they often are one
and the same. This is not simply
because of the collective, the corporate nature of sin, and the fact that all
sin of all people is interconnected.
It’s more personal, deeper. My
own failings are often reactions, hurt reactions, to the failings of
others. And as most counselors and
Twelve-Step sponsors know all too well, much of the harm we do is the result of
addiction, compulsion, and things beyond the control of our wills. An alcoholic will drink. A junkie will shoot up. A hurt person will lash out. A person with low self-esteem may
overcompensate and act with the self-absorption of a blissfully clueless
narcissist. Even though we are
responsible for our actions, often our actions are beyond our control. Again, the hurt we cause and the hurt we feel
are in a real sense one and the same when viewed through the heart’s lens. When we confess our own sins, it is important
to focus on what we are responsible for, and not what other people are. But that said, we often find that in plumbing
our own hearts for the sources of sin we find the hurts we have suffered from
others. And in discussing such a thing
in confession, we are actually talking about our need to make amendment of life
and make restitution to those we have harmed, but also and, I think just as
importantly, our need to forgive the others who have hurt us.
Our English
word “confess” is odd, just like the Latin it translates, Confiteor. It means not only fessing up and accepting
responsibility for and rightly naming our misdoings, but it can also mean
extolling and proclaiming our faith, like the Augsburg Confession or the
Westminster Confession of Faith, or St. Augustine’s faith proclaiming spiritual
auto-biography, the Confessions.
We often
misunderstand all these scriptures about penance and sin. We think it is about judicial angels, no
harps and angelic choirs, but with wigs and gavels and the occasional sword or trumpet
to announce punishment thrown in. But
no: these scriptures express how when we
are hurt, or scared, or sick, we want the world to be orderly and make
sense: this must be a punishment. It must be from an angry God. We need to change to make nice with the big
guy up there who is putting us through the wringer. Sickness feels very close to guilt, doesn’t
it? This emotional truth is what is
behind the Great Litany’s conflation of all these things. “Spare us Good Lord!” “Good Lord, deliver
us.” Not just from sin, and temptation,
and rottenness, but from sickness, plague, flood, and fire, war, and “dying
suddenly and unprepared.”
But the heart
of the matter is always this: God is love, not rage. The passage from Joel expresses it well in
passing: God is punishing us, right? But
if we repent and turn from our evil ways, “Who knows? Maybe God will relent and turn. And he may just leave us, from among the
offerings we have put on the altar to placate the Deity’s anger, something for
us to eat.” Who knows? Maybe God is kind and loving, just like Jesus
taught. Maybe those images of God’s
wrath are more about our own feelings of conviction than they are about the
heart of our loving Abba. Maybe he
already loves us and accepts us, and wants us to pull up our socks and get on
with life. Who knows? As Jesus taught us, we can hope.
In the name
of Christ, Amen.
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