Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday
Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made and dost forgive the sins of all those who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Ash Wednesday
Scripture citation(s): Isaiah 58:1-12; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
A Sermon by
The Rev. Mark Schultz, Associate for Pastoral Care
on
Isaiah 58:1-12; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
✛
Remember that thou art dust
Array
(
[0] => 60725
[1] => 60762
[2] => 60755
)
book: [Array
(
[0] => 60725
)
] (reading_id: 73353)bbook_id: 60725
The bbook_id [60725] is already in the array.
book: [Array ( [0] => 60762 ) ] (reading_id: 73077)
bbook_id: 60762
The bbook_id [60762] is already in the array.
book: [Array ( [0] => 60755 ) ] (reading_id: 73649)
bbook_id: 60755
The bbook_id [60755] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Remember that thou art dust.
It is a terrifyingly vulnerable thing to discover yourself
Fully seen.
Fully known.
And, despite it all,
Fully loved. By the one who sees all the secret places of our hearts. By God.
Terrifying, in part, because it demands response.
Will we let ourselves be seen, known, loved?
Will we let that seeing, that knowing, that loving
Shape us?
Will we discover ourselves anew, alive,
In the loving regard of the one who truly loves us?
And perhaps the most terrifying question of all:
Will we let that love, trust that love, to judge us?
Remember that thou art dust.
That’s a remembrance that we generally resist.
Surely we’re more than that.
Surely God wants to see more than that.
Surely we’re better than that.
But it’s a salutary remembrance
A liberating remembrance
And this is where we must start today:
Remember that thou art dust.
Jesus’ understanding of hypocrisy in our Gospel
Has a lot to do with a public performance of religiosity
in order to personally reap the social benefits
of being perceived as righteous, of being seen by other people to be good
Without having to make any real sacrifices for the sake of the good.
This is Isaiah’s critique as well.
If we look good, if we’re seen to be good, then maybe we actually are.
For a very long time, and perhaps for some still, now,
That’s what the church was to many:
A place to perform a kind of righteous put-togetherness that might pass for goodness,
An opportunity to show others that we’re doing okay. We’re church goers. We’re alright.
We’re good folks. We’re not broken. We’re not wounded. We don’t have problems.
We’re respectable. We don’t struggle. We’re okay. We go to church.
The difficulty is: that’s never what church was for.
The church has always been a hospital for sinners.
We are wounded. We do have problems. We do struggle.
And we could help each other in our struggles
If we would actually allow ourselves to be seen.
If we could be honest about our wounds.
If we could consent to be the dust we are.
And this means allowing ourselves to be seen by God
Not as we might like God to see us
Not as we might curate ourselves for God
But as we are: a fallen and sinful people,
A wounded and struggling people
A sin-sick and broken people
So that God’s vision of us
Piercing to the very depths of us
Can shape us
Into the people of grace
That God has called us to be
That God has always imagined us to be.
And what we are being asked to do this day, this Lent
Is to allow God to see us
Not because God doesn’t see us
But because if we allow God to see us, if we will consent to being seen,
We will not resist the grace of God’s vision of us.
And make no mistake, I’m not suggesting that any of this is easy
Or even conventionally desirable.
Those rewards of being seen in secret that Jesus talks about?
Paul names them: afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, sleepless nights,
hunger, being perpetually misunderstood,
all for the sake of love, for the sake of justice, for the sake of righteousness,
real self-sacrificial goodness,
The expectation, shared by Jesus and Isaiah, being that
Living the faith will necessarily have public consequences:
There is no private religion worth the name;
The fast you undertake in private is meant to pitch you out
Not to some grand recognition of your piety or goodness,
But toward your neighbor’s good, another’s good…
Otherwise it’s not religion at all,
but a vaguely spiritualized hobby of dubious meaning, value, or merit.
Indeed: religion without sacrifice is pernicious.
So allowing ourselves to be seen by God: there are transformative consequences.
The breaking of oppression’s yoke will not be welcomed by everyone.
We will be seen in a certain way by the world, but the only vision that matters is God’s.
In that vision, we are dispossessed of the performance of righteousness,
Of the simulacrum of righteousness that is in fact human sin
Dispossessed even of ourselves, of anything that is not God,
And yet having nothing that is not God, we possess everything that is God
Because God’s All possesses us: holds our dust,
supplies us with an endless glory of goodness that has always been mean for us.
So, yes, being seen by God will turn our world upside down
and lay us bare before the naked Reality of Love that is God
and that desires to transform us into love.
And of course there’s more,
Because what Lent shows us, what Lent insists on showing us
What Lent brings us to understand in the journey from this day to Good Friday
Is that the eyes with which we must be seen
Are the eyes of the one we human beings killed on the cross of Calvary
The blood-bleared eyes of Jesus Christ
In whose sight
We recognize ourselves as we are, as a people who
—death-infected, sin burdened and wrath-poisoned—
Would use all the power at our disposal, all the rightness of which our dust is capable,
all the contempt and impatience and rage of an empire
To kill and condemn a man whose only “crime” is that he loved us with all his being,
And who even now refuses to condemn us.
No, enduring the vision of God is not easy.
But it is needful
Because in the cross, we see something else, too:
Not just the fruit of our sin
But God desiring to be seen by us
completely giving himself to us and for us
Pouring out the infinite depths of his immortal life
into our finite, mortal, sin-darkened and death-infected hearts.
We see that our wrath, our death-centeredness, is exhausted in him and by him.
We see our finite contempt, our sinfulness, coming to an end
As it is met with an infinite ocean of love
We see in the wounded heart of the God-Man Jesus
An opening onto eternal life
And we glimpse, in the light of this Life, in the Light of this Love,
The Blinding Light of the Cross,
We glimpse, we see, who we were made to be:
The one in whose image we were made to be
And we see that this light of mercy and of grace is meant for us, is reaching out for us
And we know beyond any shadow of a doubt
God’s judgment on our lives.
Because in the cross, make no mistake,
God sees us, and yes, God judges us:
God has declared judgement on the world, on us,
On all of humanity
And the awful dread judgement of God on us
Is:
Grace
Gift
Life everlasting
And joy unlimited
And peace beyond understanding
And forgiveness beyond all imagining.
If we would go to the foot of the cross,
We would discover that nothing is more precious to the Almighty God of Infinite Majesty
Than our little human dust
And we need no longer fruitlessly labor to be more or better by our own power:
We can be marvelously precious in God’s eyes, by his power, by his unmerited grace.
This, too, is what it means to be seen by God.
Will you be seen by God this day? This Lent?
Will you let grace open you to the harrowing healing of God?
Will you let God love your weakness and your pain?
Will you let your crucified Lord see you in the dark and secret places of your heart,
and love you, even there?
Will you let the nail-pierced hands of your Lord, your truest Friend
Tenderly gather up the dust of your life and give it his own glory,
Even as in him our glorified dust is seated at the Father’s right hand on heaven’s high throne?
Will you become by grace the very righteousness of God alive in the world?
Will you let God see you?
If you would, then first: Remember that thou art dust.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
