Year A
The Rev. Denise Vaughn
Walk a Holy Lent
Dear people of God, today in the name of the Church we are invited to observe a holy Lent. We are called to use these 40 days of Lent as a time of reflection on our sins, the ways we separate ourselves from God and from one another. It is a season of examination and preparation for the heartache and joy of the cross to come. In a few minutes, I will invite you to come forward to smear ashes on your forehead which will be perhaps one of the most visible Christian rituals we experience in the church. You can’t tell just by looking at someone if they have been baptized or confirmed, and there is no physical evidence on Monday morning that we have received communion the day before. But the smudge of ashes, the sign of the cross on our foreheads, can be a visible sign of our commitment to walking the way of the cross with our Lord.
No sooner do we make that commitment to walk the way of the cross when we hear Jesus tell us to “beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them? Could Jesus be referring to our leaving the church today with these ashes visible to others on our foreheads? I know I have struggled through the years as to whether I wanted to walk around all day with ashes on my forehead. In Jesus’ time, people demonstrated repentance for sin by tearing their clothes and covering themselves with ashes to make a show of their piety, along with making a show of their prayers, hoping to impress onlookers and perhaps, God. No wonder Jesus urges the disciples not to practice this piety so that they will be praised by others, but to practice their piety so that others will be helped and God’s name will be glorified. Jesus is inviting the disciples to renounce one’s self for the sake of the kingdom of God and to consider the motive behind their actions.
Some years ago Archbishop Desmond Tutu gave the seminary graduation sermon at Sewanee, TN. It was a packed church, standing room only, the presiding bishop on hand to celebrate Holy Eucharist. The archbishop, not a large man, was swamped by the massive pulpit, and spent most of the sermon battling with the sound system. When, all of a sudden he stopped talking. At first everyone thought that the sound system had finally won, but as they listened more closely you could hear he was whispering. His voice was the voice of quiet stillness after the earthquake and the wind and fire, and his words echoed in the hearts of those there in a way they could not in any hall. “Do not be like the hypocrites” he said.
Do we make the commitment by taking on these ashes to walk the way of the cross with our Lord so that we are prepared for Easter, or are we hoping to impress our neighbor and possibly God? Jesus asks his disciples then and today, to not be holy because it is what the world expects of them; rather, to learn to live holy lives because we want a closer relationship with God; to lose ourselves and find God. These ashes are a sign that we renounce ourselves for the sake of God’s kingdom. To be able to lose ourselves and find God, we need to be reminded that this life at some point will end, we are dust and to dust we shall return.
The ashes we use today come from the palms that were waved on Palm Sunday to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem. We welcomed with cry’s Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! And as we cheered we also knew that Good Friday was coming. Jesus will die; yet we still cheer his coming. When we bury people, we commend their souls to God, acknowledging our mortality: “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” What a paradox our faith is! A paradox because death does not have the final say for those who believe, we have been assured of life forever with God, but the danger in Lent is that we go through the motions of discipline without learning how to live Lent. We tear our clothes and cover ourselves with ashes but we never ask ourselves how this should change the way we live our lives.
All of our worship, all of our ritual comes down to this: in the end none of it will save us. What will save us is our faith in God stored up in our hearts, not in the material things that rust and turn to dust as we do, but in our paradoxical faith. In the end, all that matters is our need for God. We long for God because God made us that way, and longing for God takes time, it takes regular worship, prayer, fasting, self-denial, meditating on God’s holy word, self-examination and repentance, and sometimes we grow weary. It is easy to settle into being satisfied with the outward visible signs instead of satisfying the inward hunger for God. We have this hunger for God, a hunger that only God can fill, and our hearts are restless until they rest in God.
To the almsgivers sounding their horns, the pray-ers piling up words, the fasters in ashen misery—Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.” But those who give themselves in prayer, who empty themselves, who hunger to be filled with God’s goodness, rewards will come. Only a few verses before in this Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his disciples, “Blessed are those who hunger….for they will be filled.” Blessed are those who hunger for God; God will indeed fill them. Jesus is inviting us to renounce one’s self for the sake of the kingdom of God.
We are to live the Easter vision by refocusing our habits, our priorities, and our direction. I’m sure this is how Desmond Tutu got to be Desmond Tuto. This is what we are called to in a holy Lent. May we have a holy Lent. With these words the church calls us to begin our preparation for Easter. Nothing that we do in Lent will make us more acceptable to God whether we leave our ashes on as visible symbol of our faith or remove them; God has already accepted us in the saving work of Christ. Our practice of piety is to glorify God not so much by giving up something but by taking up something—the cross of the risen Christ and following him.