Who Knows? (Ash Wedsnesday)

Who Knows?

Ash Wednesday (Years ABC)
14 February 2024; 12:15 p.m. Said Mass with Imposition of Ashes 
Homily Delivered at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Grants Pass, Oregon  

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

Joel 2:1-2,12-17; 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. 

 

A few years ago, I read in the blog of a friend, a priest in Nahelem, that she was not “doing Lent” that year.  She was gravely ill with a degenerative respiratory illness, and did not, in fact, 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 sick she was, 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.” 

 

Many of us usually start Lent out by making confession.  Many also don’t.  That’s OK:  we are Episcopalians and “All may, none must, but some should.”  I am usually in that last group and when talk with my Spiritual Director and make my confession, it is always greatly centering and soothing.  As we talk, and I go between my sins and the things in my life that drive them and trigger them, I find 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 hurt or sickness simply must be a punishment.   It must be from an angry God.  That way it at least makes sense:  having a mean angry God seems better that the void of randomness. So we think 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 and self-blame than they are about the heart of God.  Maybe he already loves us and accepts us, and wants us to pull up our socks and get on with life.  Who knows?  Maybe God is better, kinder, and gentler than we ever imagined.   Jesus taught us to look for and follow our loving Abba, our papa. In this, there is hope indeed.  

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.