What Ash Wednesday tells us about what Jesus really wants.

It is a time of wrestling with weighty issues of faith and of community; of justice and of the nature of GOD. To wrestle and prepare one another for greater unity. To heal the broken, to care for the weak, to help flip over and reverse this whole great system that is out of balance, that gives too much power to the powerful and too much poverty to the poor.

Ash Wednesday  |  Text: Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

The Great Divide

We make a lot out of the things that divide us as Christians: the Eucharist, the real presence, the resurrection, sexuality, gender. But what really divides the church more than anything is whether or not we wipe off our ashes on Ash Wednesday. For real. I’m not even joking. This is the perfect metaphor for the great Christian divide.

1. Is Jesus telling us to keep our faith a secret?
2. Or are we to share our faith with all the nations, as Jesus says at the end of this same book we call Matthew?

Both options make sense and both have support. But we need to make decisions and come down on one side or the other, so does Jesus want us to wipe our foreheads or not?

I’m not sure. I do think, however, that this text makes more sense when given some context.

This is the middle of the Sermon on the Mount; the sermon that begins with “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” The Beatitudes. A sermon of reversals and comparisons. A sermon in which we are told about GOD’s love for the weak and GOD’s disappointment in the strong. A sermon in which the outcast is given a place at the table at the expense of the insider’s double-portion. It is a sermon that isn’t just about strengthening one’s personal faith, but participating in the great Shalom, the great Kingdom of peace and justice.

So when Jesus begins

“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.

we are to hear that sense of reversal, that sense of comparison. The weak will have the Kingdom as the strong have this world. So heavenly rewards are for those who do not benefit from this world.

But Jesus links this to public piety–about doing things to be seen–with then receiving no reward in heaven. What he is saying is that public piety brings temporary reward. It brings fame and success in our world. It brings you success here in this world because you come off looking holier and better than your neighbor.

Public Piety

The slick observer will notice that Jesus is setting up a different hierarchy: a race to the bottom. A race to prove one’s self less pious than your neighbor so that you get further down the earthly list so that you can get further up the heavenly list. Jesus even seems to reward that thinking at the end of the passage when speaking to not “storing up treasures” on earth, but in heaven.

Isn’t that another form of the game, of the success? Isn’t that its own form of public piety? Isn’t the competition to be more anonymous and more secretive with our giving more of the present-day competitive spirit than of Jesus’s call to humility?

As a priest, I’m trying to tailor this message so that you can hear it from where you sit, but I’m conflicted, as all of my piety is on public display. This seems like part of my job: to be publicly pious. Or at least to show others what piety looks like. I can’t afford to run into the closet to pray so that others don’t hear me. I’m praying in public constantly!

Elsewhere Jesus describes the problem of the rabbis who wear their phylacteries extra long–these are the tassels that adorn the bottom of their robes, around their feet. The intention of the phylacteries is to give a reminder of prayer with every step, every time the tassel would brush the foot. Jesus doesn’t condemn the phylacteries, just the ones that are overly ornamental and long–intending to be seen and noticed–to display their wealth.

What if Jesus’s condemning of public piety here is more like that? What if it isn’t the piety itself or that it is seen or even that it is overtly public, but that it isn’t actually piety anymore: it is advertizing? What if the problem isn’t the display, but the act of displaying?

The Love of Pretty Stuff

This caused all sorts of problem in the church as we love our pretty things: we love all this stuff around us that reminds us our faith and our tradition: all this stuff that just looks churchy. But in many ways it has become a perverted piety, for it stops being the vessel for finding GOD and becomes the idol.

This is why, during the Great Reformation, the reformers broke the stained glass windows, burned the hymnals, and destroyed the ornate chalices because these objects stole the people’s focus from GOD. This is where the simplicity movement in worship became a force in the church–as a seeming remedy for a church that had become too ornate and precious.

Of course, I condemn the violence of our history, but it was a huge, needed wake up call for the church: a church that worshipped the golden calf of its own beautiful GOD substitutes. Something we aren’t immune from.

As much as we want our faith to be so cut and dry as is this a public or a private deal? it isn’t. There’s a reason we fight about this stuff. There’s a reason why I began by saying this fight, public or private / showy or secret is the true divide of the faith. Because this is the divide that has endured from the beginning, from long before Jesus came around. The divide of the Pharisees and the commoners. And it is a divide that our culture is greatly struggling with today. A culture that doesn’t know how to describe us as individuals and as a community at the same time. That struggle to square a sense of freedom from our neighbors and responsibility to our neighbors. This question is more pertinent than ever.

A Holy Lent

Today, you are called to a Holy Lent. I invited you to remember what this season has meant to the church and to wrestle with what it means for us today. It was a time in which three things happened:

1. Newcomers were formed to be brought into the faith.
2. Notorious sinners were being prepared for reconciliation and to be brought back into the faith.
3. And the whole faith community is to go through a time of mindfulness: to be thinking of repentance and reconciliation. What it means to bring people in and back in, even those who have done things that have broken the community.

It is a time of wrestling with weighty issues of faith and of community; of justice and of the nature of GOD. To wrestle and prepare one another for greater unity. To heal the broken, to care for the weak, to help flip over and reverse this whole great system that is out of balance, that gives too much power to the powerful and too much poverty to the poor.

This is the Lent we are being called to. This is what it means to do the work of faith. All of our petty squabbles distract us from the actual work, from the actual practice of our faith. All of the divisions and the decisions to be on one side or the other help us understand part of what is going on, but they are prone to keep us from the work, to take our eyes off the real prize.

To wipe or not to wipe. That is the question. But the answer Jesus gives us is make the Kingdom.