Finding our Ground (Ash Wednesday, Year ABC)

 

Finding our Ground

Ash Wednesday (Year ABC)
22 February 2023; 12 noon Liturgies of the Word and of the Ashes;

7 p.m. Spoken Mass with Imposition of Ashes 
Homily Delivered at The Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist,

Medford, Oregon 

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Isaiah 58:1-12; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21; Psalm 103:8-14

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

 

The burial rite in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer has the following instruction:

 

“Then, while the earth shall be cast upon the Body by some standing by, the Priest shall say, ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.’”

 

Note the conflation of the ideas of dust, dirt, and the ground in which we are buried with ashes: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Marking the forehead with ashes was the sign of mourning and penitence in ancient Judaism.  That’s why we use it in this rite calling us to the practice of a holy Lent. 

 

The Chinese character for ashes is telling:  it is a hand combined with the character for fire.  Ashes, in this view, are fire you can touch.  The ashes we use today are made by burning the palms from last Holy Week.  The ashes remind us of fire that consumes, but also of the life and verdure consumed in the fire.  Ashes are fire we can touch. 

When we impose the ashes, we are told the words said to Adam and Eve as they were cast out of the Garden, “Remember you are but dust, and unto dust you shall return.”  Dust and ashes.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

This season is not about going through the motions, about public display, about drama queen horror at our lowly state.  That’s what Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel—don’t make a big show of this.  What counts is what is going on inside, in your secret places.

English Civil War era Anglican priest and poet Robert Herrick is best known to most of us for his great Christmas anthem "What Sweeter Music" with its line "that sees December turned to Spring?"  But Herrick also wrote a poem for Lent: “To Keep a True Lent”: 

Is this a Fast, to keep
The larder lean?
And clean
from fat of veals and sheep?

 

Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish?

 

Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg'd to go
Or show
A down-cast look and sour?

 

No: 'tis a Fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat
And meat
Unto the hungry soul.

 

It is to fast from strife
And old debate,
And hate;
To circumcise thy life.

 

To show a heart grief-rent;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin;
And that's to keep thy Lent.

 

Jan Richardson expresses this a bit more intimately in her poem “Rend Your Heart: A Blessing for Ash Wednesday”: 

 

To receive this blessing,
all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so that you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go.

Your entire life
is here, inscribed whole
upon your heart’s walls:
every path taken
or left behind,
every face you turned toward
or turned away,
every word spoken in love
or in rage,
every line of your life
you would prefer to leave
in shadow,
every story that shimmers
with treasures known
and those you have yet
to find.

It could take you days
to wander these rooms.
Forty, at least.

And so let this be
a season for wandering
for trusting the breaking
for tracing the tear
that will return you

to the One who waits
who watches
who works within
the rending
to make your heart
whole.

 

We often miss the point when we talk about Lent as a season of “repentance,” “penitence,” and “confession of our sins.”  We often think of these terms simply as turning aside from violating God’s laws or commands, making amends, and making nice with God to get him (and this view always has God as a him) over his anger at us. 

 

But sin as a concept is far broader than this petty legalistic view.  And God is a lot greater than a crotchedy, peevish, and angry old man.  Most modern theo-logians define sin either teleologically or relationally:  something that turns us aside from what God intends when God creates us, or anything that separates or alienates us from God, ourselves, or others.    God loves us regardless, and so it is more a question of talking about things that in our own hearts and minds separate us from the love of God. 

 

Danish theologian Soren Kirkegaard said

“Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God . . . Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God.” 

 

We must not forget the fact that we fall short of what God intended when he made us.  1 John says: 

 

⁵ This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. ⁶ If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; ⁷ but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. ⁸ If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. ¹⁰ If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. (1 John 1:5-10)

 

In all of this, we must remember the truth expressed in the collect for Ash Wednesday:  God hates nothing God has made and forgives the sins of all who are penitent, that is, who turn back.  

 

Confession and repentance are processes that help us know who our real selves are, and make us more and more accepting of that and less fearful of standing before God as who we truly are. 

 

The English word confession comes from the Latin Confiteor, meaning acknow-ledge as true.  It comes from the prefix con (with) and fateor “allow or admit”.  The point is that we allow or acknowledge the truth together with someone, whether God, our community, or simply another person, perhaps a friend, a counselor or spiritual director, or, as the 1662 Prayer Book says in its exhortation to a holy Communion, to a “discreet and learned Minister of God’s Word.” 

 

Lent is a time to intentionally reconnect, both with what God intended when God made us, and with God himself.   We are told that to do this, we must be humble.  The Latin word for humble, humilis, is related to the noun for the ground, humus. In Vergil’s Aeneid, the vines of Italy are described as humilis, not “humble” so much as “trained to grow grow close to the ground.   In the story of creation, the man and woman are called human because they are made from the soil, the humus: “Unto dust thou shalt return.”  So being humble means being down to earth, close to our origin the dirt, sending down roots and being grounded. 

 

For a holy Lenten fast, let us not rend our garments, but our heart:  open it to Jesus, and use these forty days to wander through our secret rooms at our leisure, seeking grounding.  

 

Accepting who we are is the key in this grounding, in this getting close to earth, in this humility.  We are God’s creatures, whom he declared “very good” when he made us.  But we have turned aside from the beauty he saw in us when he declared us “Very good!”

 

If we open our hearts to Jesus, he will heal us.  He will give us strength, and the inner peace needed for the journey.  He will indeed make us anew in his own image, and bring us to his glory and joy.  

 

Thanks be to God.