A hope-filled reminder of identity
Ash Wednesday  |  Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

Remember that you are dust. And to dust you shall return.

We remind one another where we came from and to where we will return. The dust, earth, the soil, which teems with life and death, decay and rebirth.

Soil, the top inch or so of the ground, is an entire ecosystem, full of life and countless microbes. It is the most fertile and life-giving place on the planet: that inch of soil.

Ancient farming techniques we still practice tear into the soil, breaking these ecosystems apart and straining them. We are leaching the soil with unsustainable practices and stripping the most abundant source of self-sustaining energy on the planet, and over time, destroying much of the topsoil. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but something we’ve been doing for centuries upon centuries.

The image of being from the dust and returning to it is a comforting image of life, death, and new life, of what we know through Jesus as resurrection — and one we know in sustainability and can observe in ecosystems. 

But our fear of death exists in the life equation, too. And we continuously seek to live without respect for the earth or one another. That we can have what we want — even when facing the prospect of our own extinction. Change is too hard, we’ll say as we eagerly change brands in boycotts or deny ourselves sweets in Lent. 

Our hope, our trust, is in one who changes, who dies, who lives a human life, who comes to save the world. And he says follow me. His journey is ours.

On Secrecy

Jesus tells his followers to pray in secret, to give in secret, in contrast to those hypocritical members of the same faith who show off their piety and proclaim their blessing. This seems like a rebuke of the hashtag generation and the prosperity gospel—and I suppose, in a way, it is. But this is part of Jesus’s most famous sermon that begins with blessing in poverty in spirit — in sadness and grieving, and hungering and thirsting for righteousness, that continues by extending the law, saying that it isn’t enough to refrain from murder, we must refrain from hate, even. He talks about marriage and adultery, refusing oaths, refusing to retaliate, but to stand up to evil in order to reveal it and shame it instead. Then, to love your enemies.

The Sermon on the Mount is a sermon of reorientation. It assumes you already know what you know. That teachers have taught you things, the culture has pressured you, and your church has been focused on things that you have taken deep to heart. And Jesus is saying Yes, and.

We have been taught so much about our world, our lives, our community, what is possible and what isn’t; how to be a good person and what to avoid; how to be generous in the right ways and the phrases we need to say to prove it. And a lot of what we’ve been taught is good and a lot of it is fine and some of it is just not good for us. But we need to rethink a lot of things.

Prayer

This section we just read, from chapter 6 of the gospel we call Matthew may best be described as Jesus talking about prayer. Specifically what we pray, why, and what it really looks like.

We’re used to thinking of prayers as the words we say when our heads are bowed, our eyes are closed, and our hands are clasped together. Formal, postured, prepared.

And many of us have been raised on the teaching attributed to St. Francis in which we proclaim the good news in words as a last resort — that embodying the gospel in prayer includes doing things with our bodies, like serving or sitting with or being a shoulder to cry on. There is holiness in our doing things, embodying our meager human forms, living in a world that is teeming, like the soil, with life in countless other forms.

So we can hear these statements about praying in secret as personal — directions for living our best life, in the right way. But we are also hearing this in contrast to those who would prevent this, or draw our focus from God to their own godliness. This isn’t simply a what-not-to-do, but also a rebuke and a rejection of selfishness and pride; of stealing the praise that goes to God.

In the middle of this Jesus teaches them to pray in a particular way: what we know as the Lord’s Prayer, which is full of prayers for the transformation of the world. For loving God first, for our earthly existence to match the promise of heaven, for all of us to be fed every day so that none may hunger, that our debts to others may be forgiven as we have already forgiven their debts to us. This is what disciples are to pray. A prayer of being forgiven and forgiving others.

Wealth

There is critique and warning — about hypocrisy and storing up wealth — not because secret giving is the way to give, but as relative to the public displays of wealth, power, and pride. Compared with these, we ought to give without regard to fame. To offer without being praised, noticed even. Because the giving is the point. This is a reframing. We might even say that Jesus is trying to move the Overton Window on giving because we are too permissive of pride and selfish reasons for doing good, to the point that we promote selfishness over generosity as our virtue.

The reason this critique stings, however, is because we know that Jesus isn’t critiquing people for doing good selfishly. He’s critiquing people who are being way more selfish than they are doing good. A modern corollary is the billionaire publicly giving $100,000 to a good cause and accepting the adoration of the public. It is more publicity stunt and image laundering than it is an act of good — a genuine sacrifice.

Jesus is trying to reorient us to see these grifts and demonstrations as selfish rejections of grace — because our praying, our living is forgiveness. Which is a whole different project than that. So let us not get caught up in it. Give and be done with it. Because we have other stuff to work on, don’t we?

Welcome to Lent

We are now entering the season of Lent: when we endeavor to learn, to prepare ourselves for being changed. Changed by learning. Changed by forgiveness. Changed by forgiving others. Changed by the resurrecting grace of Jesus.

A grace that says no person is unchangeable or unforgivable. No thing we’ve done is irredeemable. We are each made in the image of God, precious, blessed in our weakness, and promised the world.

And in a moment, we’ll be invited to keep a holy Lent and we’ll rub ashes on our foreheads to remember our mortality and pray psalms that ponder death. And we’ve come here to do this willingly! This is a weird idea of a good time. But here we are. 

Many of us actually crave it, too, don’t we? Crave to remember that we are dust. To have these ashes on our foreheads. Not everyday, of course, otherwise they might commit us, but today it makes sense. We are socially allowed to ponder death without being existentialists. It’s a democratizing holiday, Ash Wednesday, in that way. Death isn’t just for philosophers, it’s for all of us.

But the beauty is in the remembering that death is part of living. It is part of a bigger process. Birth, death, rebirth. That we, like Adam, which means of the soil, we sprout from the teeming life of the surface and grow and thrive and then begin to deteriorate, die, decay, nourishing the soil, only to sprout there again.

We are part of a beautiful biological process called life. And Jesus keeps telling us the most important thing we fragile humans need to remember is that we aren’t alone here. We are part of this process, born of the soil, returning to the soil, nourishing the soil, being born from the soil again. The soil is our starting and resting place. Everything is about all things, everywhere. Which means that we, together, are life itself. So may we love and live and forgive with such joy that every bit of life around us might feel the grace of God.