Ash Wednesday

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Why do we come to Ash Wednesday service? I know that some of you children are here because an adult brought you, but why are the rest of us here? Some people might say it’s because we’re gluttons for punishment, because it satisfies some sad part of ourselves to hear that we’re all sinners and need to repent, to hear that we’re all “dust and to dust we shall return.”

But I don’t think it’s that. I think we come because we have a deep sense, that maybe we can’t even explain in words, that things are not right. That, somehow, our lives, or the world, is not the way it’s supposed to be, and that in one way or another we are caught up in that. We have, on the one hand, this vision of what life should be––it includes equality and justice, it includes compassion and mercy, and we believe that it should be for everyone, poor and rich, healthy and sick, sinners and saints––but on the other hand we live in a reality where that simply isn’t so.

I think we come to service on Ash Wednesday because we are drawn to speak truthfully about that disconnect, and because we hope to hear that things can be made right.

Traditionally, the church has named the cause of this not-right-ness in the world as sin, something we should confess. But honestly, I’m not sure that sin is a helpful word anymore. Most people don’t know what it really means, we don’t use it outside of church in our daily lives, and in the church it’s often weaponized, and used to create more suffering in people than it describes. 

I think that Jesus actually offers us a better word to describe this disconnect, which he uses in our Gospel reading: Hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is when we acknowledge the way things are supposed to be, when we proclaim our commitment to making that way a reality, but then we don’t act in such a way as to make it a reality or to live as if the world is that way. Hypocrisy is saying one thing, and doing another. Hypocrisy is betraying our values, betraying our inner selves, by behaving contrary to what we profess.

Another word for it is inauthenticity. It’s when we know who we are inside, when we know who our true self is, but we don’t live it out.

So what is the truth, the reality, that we know but do not live out? What is the truth that we betray?

It is that we are created by God.

It is that our true selves, our authentic selves, are made in the image of God. 

It is that God created and named us as “very good.”

It is that, in baptism, God’s own Spirit came to fill us, making us holy.

It is that we share in Christ’s death and resurrection life.

This truth is who we are. We are beloved children of God, created and restored to goodness.

Our hypocrisy, our inauthenticity, our “sin” is that we know these things to be true, we know this to be the genuine, the ultimate reality about ourselves and our world, but we do not live this way.

There are many ways that we do not live this way, many ways in which we are hypocritical, in which we betray our God-created selves, and part of the whole forty days of Lent is uncovering and naming those in order to move away from them and towards our true selves. This is what repent means - it means turning, moving, from one direction to another. Of course, we can’t accomplish repentance, we can’t return to our true God-created selves in just one evening––it’s too much.

But what we can do tonight is to acknowledge that this is what we do––we live disconnected from the selves God has created us to be––and that this disconnect is the cause of pain and suffering in the world, for us and for others.

This acknowledgement that we consistently betray our God-created selves is what we call confession, or lament. In a few minutes, we will confess together that we have been inauthentic in our lives, that we have sinned, because we who were made for love, did not love.

We will lament together that we who have been filled with the Holy Spirit would not or could not allow that Spirit to move us.

We will confess that we who have been freed have used that freedom to be free from God.

We will acknowledge that our failure to be true to ourselves, to be bearers of God’s image, to see ourselves and those around us as “very good,” to remember that we are holy, has led us to be cruel, unjust, inconsiderate, exploitative, indifferent, unconcerned. We will acknowledge that our inauthenticity and hypocrisy hurts not just ourselves, but all those connected with us.

And we will turn to God to remind us of who we are. To forgive us, to heal us, and to help us, once again, to be our authentic selves. We will implore God to remind us who we truly are, and to give us the courage and strength to live with integrity.

And God will. Among other ways, God will do so through the sacrament of Holy Communion that we will soon share. In Communion, God-the-Son gives to us his very own body and blood, returning us to our unity with Christ and reminding us that we are therefore a people of resurrection life. We come to the rail each individually, but we share together in the one bread and the one cup––and in the Lutheran church, symbolically is still reality––and in this sharing we return to the love of God that is the essence of our existence. We eat and drink, and are restored to our relationship with all of Creation that God named “very good”––to the grain and the fruit that grow from the ground, to the sun and the rain that nourish them, and that nourish us. For that holy moment of Communion, God reminds us and returns us to our most authentic selves, and strengthens us to strive to be true to that for the rest of the week. In Communion, which we will celebrate tonight, we experience what it is in when things are made right.

This evening marks the beginning of Lent, when we acknowledge, we confess, we lament that what God wants for the world and what the world is are not the same right now. Lent is a time when we are called to face our hypocrisy, our inauthenticity, our sin. It is uncomfortable work, difficult even. But it is also a time to experience that God returns us to who God has created us to be, to experience that God blesses us with reconnection, and there lies the source of our courage and our strength for the journey. And so, even tonight, especially tonight, we say, Thanks be to God. Amen.