Sermon for March
3, 2019
Ash
Wednesday
St.
Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Wyandotte, MI
The Rev.
Vicki Hesse,
For readings, click here
“Take
my lips, O Lord, and speak through them;
Take
our minds and think through them;
Take
our hearts and set them on fire
with
love for You. Amen.”
Today
is Ash Wednesday, when we
smear
ashes on our foreheads.
The
first time I had ashes placed on me,
I
was struck by the grittiness of the ashes against my forehead
and
the tickling dust on my nose.
That
surprise was followed by the horror that
I
looked like someone who forgot to wash her face.
And,
for me, *that* day marked a turning point.
That day, in this liturgy –
rich
with scripture and steeped in tradition –
that day marked when, embarrassed
by a dirty face,
the
fact seeped into me that I was mortal.
That day I reluctantly became
willing to become willing
to
accept my humanity.
That day I began to realize how
we are all
utterly
dependent on God for our very being.
To accept mortality is to accept our humanity.
Today, we meet a God
who confronts our fragile humanity
with radical compassion.
Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr reminds us,
“The goal of all spirituality
is to lead the naked person
to stand trustfully before the naked God.”
He continues,
“The important thing is that we’re naked;
in other words, that we come [to God]
without title, merit, shame or even demerit.
All we can offer to God is who we really are,
which to all of us
never seems like enough…”[1]
Today, we offer to God who we really are:
human, and vulnerable.
Today, we meet a God hates nothing God has made.
Putting
ashes on your forehead is perhaps
one
of the most powerful accessories
you
may ever wear. Why?
Because
strange things happen when we
publicly
acknowledge our mortality –
it
can free us to enter conversations
that
might not otherwise take place.
By
naming our mortality, our falleness, in community,
we
can be pulled up by the grace of God.
By
naming our mortality, with ashes, we are not
“practicing your piety” as the Gospel
suggests.
By
naming our mortality, with ashes, we are permitting proclamation of God’s
everlasting love.
The
psalmist echoes our place as creatures,
not
the Creator
for
the Creator “knows whereof we are made”
and
“remembers that we are but dust.”
To accept mortality is to accept our humanity.
Today, we meet a God
who confronts our fragile humanity
with radical compassion.
In
Paul’s letter to the Corinthians,
Paul
“wore” (airquotes) his “ashes”--
his
“afflictions, hardships, calamities,
beatings,
imprisonments, riots,
labors,
sleepless nights, and hunger.”
Paul,
vulnerably, acknowledged his mortality, his humanity
…and
in so doing,
he
entered into a conversation
with
his beloved friends from Corinth
that
might not otherwise have taken place.
Paul
“wore” his embarrassing ashes to teach the Corinthians
that
faith was not a protection from
hard
times or from challenges.
See,
the Corinthians had been called “imposters”
by
society, and in response,
they
began to argue amongst themselves.
This
argument led to hardship, sleepless nights, calamities.
The
people of Corinth found that
faithful
Christian living was a daunting affair.
Paul
knew they felt vulnerable and so
encouraged
them to turn their energy
away
from each other
and
reorient their hearts toward God.
The
Corinthian society of argumentation
is
not unlike what we face today –
in
the increased fear of people who are not like us,
increased
grief that things are not the way they used to be,
and
increased acting out in anger.
And,
let’s face it,
faithful
Christian living can be daunting as well.
We
“wear” our ashes every day, as we face afflictions,
hardships,
imprisonments, and sleepless nights, too.
Do
you know someone afflicted
by
the disease (dis-ease) of alcoholism,
whose
families are hoping
someone
will see the ashes on their foreheads
and
answer their cries for help.
Do
you know someone imprisoned
by
consumerism or greed,
hidden
behind society’s acceptance of priority of “things”…
To
name this imprisonment is to acknowledge mortality.
We
cannot take all those possessions with us,
no
matter how tightly we hold onto them.
Do
you know someone wearing the ashes
of
exhaustion as they work for justice,
witness
to the needs of immigrants,
or
feed people who are hungry or homeless.
Christian
living can be daunting.
We
may feel as imposters and vulnerable.
And
that’s why Paul reminds us,
We
are called to faithfulness,
not
to earthly success.
Like
the Corinthians, we, too, can reorient our hearts.
To accept mortality is to accept our humanity.
Today, we meet a God
who confronts our fragile humanity
with radical compassion.
For
almost forty years, L’Arche founder Jean Vanier
has
set up homes where
people
w/ developmental disabilities,
people
who volunteer and
people
who staff the community
live
together full time.
Surely
they face afflictions, hardships, and sleepless nights.
Vanier
wears his ashes in this way, saying
“We are all “broken”…
[for]
to be human is to be bonded together,
each
with our own weaknesses and strengths
because
we need each other.”
In
a 2009 interview,[2] he shared this insight:
“…the big thing for me [in
this community]
is
to love reality
and
not live in the imagination,
not
live in what could have been
or
what should have been
or
what can be, and somewhere, to love reality
and
then discover that God is present.”
For Paul, as for Jean
Vanier, and for us,
the ashes are not
the end of the story.
These ashes mark the beginning
of Lent.
The beginning of
preparation,
of reorienting our
hearts,
of remembering our
humanity and God’s Divinity.
I wonder, what is your
humanity, your reality right now?
What is the way that
you “wear” your “ashes”?
In
the letter to the Corinthians,
Paul
shares a litany of paradoxes~
“We
are poor yet lavishly rich.
We
are struggling yet rejoicing.”
The
Message translation of this passage strikes the paradox:
“We
are …
true
to our word, though distrusted,
ignored
by the world, but recognized by God;
terrifically
alive, though rumored to be dead; …
immersed
in tears, yet always filled with deep joy;
living
on handouts, yet enriching many,
having
nothing, having it all…”
These
paradoxes we acknowledge today,
in
this Ash Wednesday worship.
Today,
we name and face
the
tragic gap between our appearance and our actuality.
This is the beginning of
preparation:
reorienting
our hearts and
recognizing
our humanity and God’s Divinity.
In
confession, we state to God,
that
we no longer want to be that person;
we
want to become a different kind of person.
Confession
is an affirmation of our becoming
and
permission to proclaim God’s everlasting love.
Neil
DeGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist & author once wrote:
“The knowledge that the
atoms that comprise
life on earth[3]
–
the atoms that make up the
human body,
are traceable to the crucibles
that cooked light elements
into heavy elements …
under extreme temperatures
and pressures.
These stars- …they collapsed
and then exploded-
scattering their enriched
guts across the galaxy-
guts made of carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen,
and all the fundamental
ingredients of life itself.
…[those stars] become part
of gas clouds
[forming] the next
generation of solar systems-
stars with orbiting planets,
[which]
now have the ingredients for
life itself.
So that when I look up at
the night sky,
{Tysson says}
and I know that yes we are part
of this universe,
…perhaps [the most
astounding fact is that ] …
the universe is in us.
Repeat “The universe is in
us,” he says.
He concludes…
“We
are stardust brought to life,
then
empowered by the universe
to
figure itself out—
and
we have only just begun.”[4]
Today,
we wear our ashes
by
naming our sins before God and before each other.
Today,
we wear our mortality
on
our foreheads and trust the promise of eternal life.
Today,
we remember God’s gracious remembering of us.
Because
God, the universe, is in us.
In
this world where we are stardust,
and
to stardust we shall return;
Can
we place our trust in the One
who
brought to our dusty world
the
salvation of God?
Amen
[1] Richard
Rohr, Simplicity: the Freedom of Letting Go, (New York, Crossroad, 2004) p. 97
[2] Cited on
February 9, 2013 at http://www.onbeing.org/program/wisdom-tenderness/234
[3] This
quote arises from what is known as the “Most Beautiful Video.” “The Most
Astounding Fact” is a video adaptation of Neil Degrasse Tyson’s famous answer
to the question “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about
the Universe?” read by Tyson himself. Found here: https://youtu.be/9D05ej8u-gU
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