Joel 2; Psalm 51; 2 Cor 5-6; Matt 6
I commend you for being here this evening. Ash Wednesday is an extraordinarily challenging day for Christians. On Ash Wednesday, we are confronted with the reality of ourselves. We are confronted with our own mortality, with our own death. We come face-to-face with the reality that, without God, we are absolutely nothing. Without God, we are dust. And we are reminded that when we lose sight of that, we lose sight of God.
This is what Ash Wednesday is about. It is an acknowledgement, or a reminder, that we, as God’s people, have lost sight of God. On Ash Wednesday we allow ourselves to feel most fully what we feel a little bit on Sunday, although we allow ourselves to gloss it over pretty quickly–that we are estranged from God. We allow ourselves to feel the great gap that exists between us and God–the doubts, the uncertainties, the question that plagued the prophet Joel– “Where is our God?” We have lost sight of God–we are in need of reconciliation with God, as Paul so rightly points out in our second reading. Today we look at ourselves, and, if we are honest and brave, we allow ourselves to become aware that we, as individuals and as a people together, have strayed from the path of God and now feel distant and disconnected and alone.
How did this happen? Should we go back to the garden of Eden and blame all of this disconnection on Eve and Adam? Should we excuse our own actions and avoid taking personal responsibility by talking about original sin? No, I think we are beyond that. I think we, as a church, have finally achieved a spiritual maturity where we do not have to blame our disconnected relationship with God on a mythical couple that is meant for child-like intellects.
So what happened then? Why do we still come here on Ash Wednesday? Why do we still reflect on this feeling that we need to be reconciled with God? How did we, as a people in this place on this night, come to lose sight of God? Well, God is where God has always been, but we–we’ve been looking in the wrong places. We are here tonight, having lost sight of God, because we are searching for God not where God is, but where we want God to be. We come to this Ash Wednesday service–we have a need to acknowledge and be reminded that we are nothing without God–we feel disconnected and in need of reconciliation with God because we–we–as God’s very own children, as one of the peoples for whom God created the world–we are selfish and self-involved and obsessed with fulfilling our own wants and needs. We are here because we have lost sight of God, and we have tried to make something of ourselves without God, and because we are searching to find God within ourselves.
I have been struggling for a few weeks about whether and how to say what I am about to say to you. I do not believe that pastors should preach about sins in such a way that the congregation is singled out while the pastor remains aloof and distant from the sin. When I have preached on sin and human failings, it’s always been from the perspective that we are all in this together, because we are not called to judge one another, but to forgive. But there is an uncomfortable truth that needs to spoken–on Ash Wednesday–about this congregation’s having lost sight of God because we search for God where we want God to be, and not where God actually is.
This truth is made visible in one of the questions I asked this congregation during the annual meeting: “given St. John’s limited resources of time and money, should it be spent caring for the members of the congregation or for those in need in the community?” I asked you where we should focus our energy. On St. John or on the wider world? Internally or externally? On ourselves or on others? And the answer was overwhelmingly–80%–that we should spend our energy on St. John, on the members here, on ourselves. The people of this congregation want to find God in ourselves. We want to believe that when we serve ourselves, we are serving God. We know that we’ve lost sight of God, and this people desperately wants to find God again, but what I’m seeing here is that you, like many other well-intentioned Christians, want to find God by looking within these walls, within these relationships, and within this community. But this is not where God tells us to look. (Although if it is any comfort to hear, I’ll tell you that you are not alone in this self-serving belief. The mistaken belief that we will find God when we serve our own community has tempted Christianity since Emperor Constantine. North American Christianity fell whole-heartedly into this belief in the twentieth century–the peak of the “golden age” of church-going was built on this idea. And today, many churches that are struggling continue to believe that they will find God within their church walls, if only they look hard enough.)
But we will not find God here. We will not be reconciled to God in this way. We cannot hope to find God by turning inwards, as Luther says, by curving in on ourselves. We cannot hope to gain new life in Christ or to rise from our own dust by turning to ourselves. When we live to ourselves, we die to Christ.
We will not find God by looking inwards because God is out there. God is present with those who are suffering, God is with those who are in need, God is out there, in the world, beyond church walls, amongst those whom we think are farthest from Christ. We catch sight of God in the hungry and the thirsty, when we feed them and give them something to drink. We catch sight of God in the stranger and the naked and the prisoner, when we welcome them and clothe them and visit them. As Jesus says, “truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:34-40) It is when you look outside of this place that you find God. It is when you serve others that you see God. It is, actually, when you pour out yourselves as alms for the suffering of others that you find God. When you pray for others, you find God. When you fast–for others–you find God.
And in these acts, God raises you from the dust. In these acts of pouring out yourselves for those who are suffering, in meeting the needs of others with a broken and contrite heart, in dying so that others may live, in becoming poor so that others may be rich, in taking nothing so that others may have everything–in these acts God seeks you out and finds you, and brings you through the dust of Ash Wednesday and into new life in Christ.
So how can we bear this knowledge for the next fifty days of Lent? How can we carry the condemnation of Ash Wednesday through until Easter? Well, what I never struggle to say, and what we must cling to in order to make it through our own sin, is that while we may have turned away from God in seeking to serve ourselves, God has not turned away from us. While we may be looking for God in the wrong places, God is not hiding from us. Because of Easter, because of Christ, we know that God is reconciling us to God’s self. You see, there is a cross of water, given to you in baptism, underneath the cross of ashes you are about to receive, that is God’s promise that God is creating in you a clean heart, and a right spirit. Our own Lutheran martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reminded us that “baptism in the name of Jesus Christ means both death and life.” “Now is the day” that God is restoring to you the joy of your salvation. And God is sustaining in you a willing spirit so that you will, like Christ, take this path of the next fifty days until Easter, in service to those most in need, fasting to bring God’s new life to their dust and their ashes, and seeking and being found by God by dying to yourselves and being brought to new life in Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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