Fourth Sunday of Lent: Prodigal Grace (a sermon about dumb monkeys, awkward parties and the transformative power of anger)

 Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Robert Pirsig once wrote about a time he visited Southern India and he described a certain monkey trap. Now pay close attention so you know what to do the next time you want to trap a monkey. You hollow out a coconut you fill it with rice and you attach the whole thing to a stake in the ground.  You make a tiny hole in the top of the coconut just big enough for a monkey’s hand to fit through.  And then you leave it and you hide and wait. You know, rice is very delicious.  The monkey’s hand fits through easily and it grabs the rice.  But then, with its fist full of rice, it can’t pull it’s hand out of that tiny hole. If it would just let go and open its’ fist, it would be free. Instead, it squats there bellowing and jumping around but it will not give up its’ rice in exchange for its’ freedom.  And then, you’ve captured your monkey, coconut and all.

Before we laugh too hard at this dumb monkey that won’t let go of the rice, take a moment to ask yourself if you’ve ever done the same thing.  Have you ever longed to be closer to a family member but you’re still seething about that thing that happened that one time. Or you wish you could fix that relationship with an estranged friend, but you’re still stewing over something.

Today’s “Parable of the Dysfunctional Family,” -- I mean “Parable of the Prodigal Son,” there are three main characters. This is a story from the Greatest Hits of the Bible album so you may have heard it before. In this one, the younger son asks his dad for his share of the inheritance--which is a pretty bold move--and blows it all on “wild living.” The older son stays home to tend to the farm, take care of the business and mom and dad which means not…living wildly. When the younger son comes home having spent everything, we don’t know if he’s an excellent manipulator or if he actually feels remorseful. He comes home with a rehearsed apology hoping for a seat back at the table. We know his father is overjoyed that he’s home and throws him a huge party. 

No one tells the older son what is going on. The older son, the responsible one, he was out finishing up a hard day’s work when he hears the music and dancing and he asks someone passing by, “what’s going on up at the house?”

“Your brother came home,” the person said, “and your dad is throwing them a huge party.”

“Wow. You’ve got to be kidding me,” the older brother says. 

The Bible says he stands there in the field angry and fuming lost in in all until his dad comes out and they have a conversation—a heated one. The bible says that the dad pleads with him to come into the party and there Jesus ends the story.  Does the older son go in? Do he and his dad stand there talking all night in the field?  We don’t know. In fact, there’s a lot about this story that we don’t know:  Was the older son exhausted from years of worry just trying to keep the farm going while his parents stressed about the younger brother? Was he shocked that his little brother actually made it home and is alive after years of dealing with all this? Is he trying to process it?  Is he genuinely hurt by all of the family dysfunction? We do know that he’s angry. 

******
It can be easy to name anger as “bad” because it’s great when everyone “just gets along.” But anger can be that thing that wakes us up to when things aren’t right.  Anger can signal to us that things need to change.  In fact, in marriages, (those relationships where people make these formal promises to try to work through conflict and all that) there’s no correlation between anger and separation or divorce. Anger isn’t bad for marriages. Anger makes us take a hard look at something and then can bring people back together. The problem is when anger goes to contempt. 

Contempt is when you feel like the person in front of you is “less than” or worthless, even disposable or a waste of space.  The older son’s contempt is visceral. We can feel it.  His brother doesn’t deserve this party. His dad hears him out while he embellishes the details of his brother’s “raucous living” and all the other imagined outrageous behavior. Indeed, his indignation might be warranted. His dad listens.

Question is: will this moment with the homecoming and the party and the sheer unfairness of it all be a reason (or one more reason) for the older brother to withdraw or harbor resentment? Will it drive the angry wedge in further? Scripture says that the dad pleads with his older son.  (Also: let’s let the dad be the dad in this story and not necessarily a stand in for God the Father. Maybe he is, but maybe he isn’t. The story doesn’t say.)  The dad is begging his oldest son. Maybe he’s begging him to come to the party. But maybe, the dad is just pleading and trying to keep his family together. Everyone is at a crossroads there in the field.

Is the goal here for the older son to suck it up and go to the party, smile and give his little brother an awkward hug, make small talk with the neighbors as he’s expected to.  To just show a little grace? Is that what grace means in this story? Just smoothing thing over while the fire smolders under the surface? 

Is that what grace is?

Ouch.  

Here’s what I think grace is not: I don’t think that grace must be quietly acquiescing or being a doormat.  Grace isn’t some sort of B-level attitude where we just graciously excuse someone else’s bad behavior for the sake of harmony.   Grace is not the opposite of conflict. 

I hope and pray that the dad and his son worked it out, or at least began to talk about it out there in the field. The goal of grace isn’t to try to get everyone hunky dory on the same page. Sometimes the conflicts run deep.  Sometimes we are really hurt by those closest to us (or we hurt them).  Sometimes people’s opinions are a lot to stomach right now sometimes, there is a rude neighbor, or a doctor who screws up, or a selfish pastor, or the intolerable boss, or a family member that did something horrible.

Grace is what helps us maneuver through these differences and not lose sight of each other’s God-given humanity while we do it.  

Grace won’t let us stay with contempt for someone. It won’t let us see people as worthless. It is, as African-American theologian Willie Jennings says, “the ability to see someone through God’s eyes for a moment.”

Sometimes, yes, grace absolutely is the thing that tells us not to make a big deal out of things, to not mountains out of molehills. (hello, welcome to my marriage).  But grace is also what helps us take a deep breath, acknowledge the pain or the conflict or the differences, pull the chair up to the table and participate in the conversation.

Grace is favor that is unmerited. It is undeserved kindness. When we direct it towards other people, grace won’t let us be vengeful it won’t let us drop the person’s humanity. It won’t let us. It won’t let us throw daggers for the sake of meanness or to humiliate folks who we think have said or done stuff that is immoral or unethical or on the wrong side of history, or just, the wrong side of the dinner table.

Grace is extraordinary.

When we direct grace towards ourselves, grace, as Kirsten powers writes quiets “the…inner critic that tells us we are too much, too little, too fat, too thin, too good, and not good enough. It invites us off the treadmill of relentless achievement and success…[grace] shrugs at [our] unachieved new Years’ resolutions and teaches [us] to be kind to [ourselves].”

Grace doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t follow the rules of tit for tat. Which is why the older brother is mad:  (hey, little brother, when you ask for your share of the inheritance, and then act reckless, when you spend all the money, when you pull the wool over dad’s eyes with this whole victimized “woe is me, I was eating the food of pigs, oh please let me come home,” business. No way, You pay for your mistakes, bro, you should get what you deserve.) And instead, the younger brother gets a party. Do you feel the burn?

Just come to the party, the dad says to his eldest.  

Grace is a practice. It’s a lifestyle. An orientation. It’s a way of being in the world. It’s a way of treating people. Just like grace is a practice, UNgrace, as Phillip Yancy calls it, is also a practice. And believe me, I have practiced it. And I still practice it sometimes (and I hate myself for it—which is, for the record not gracious) UNgrace can poison us.  And it can poison our world.

It is when we hang on to the disappointment we have in another person, another place, an institution (like the church, whatever) we hang on to disappointment or resentment and we won’t let our anger help us level up and learn. When we practice the opposite of grace (ungrace) it can makes other people feel not-needed, even disposable, even a waste of space.  We have this way of seeing people that disagree with us as worthless. Our ungrace cultivates and fosters pain in this world.

Did the older son feel excluded or even ungraced out in the field? Did the younger son feel it when his big brother didn’t show up at the party? Lord have mercy, no one should feel this. When we follow Jesus around the gospels, we see that he brought out the best in people and didn’t look at them as if they were disposable.

Grace is the balm that lets us come together with all of our different opinions and beliefs and convictions. It is the grease that keeps the wheels from grinding.  Kirsten powers writes that grace “is about understanding how to stay grounded in the mist of the tornado; speak your truth without spitting contempt; and coexist with people you don’t even want to share a planet with, let alone a country.” People of God, grace is our superpower, it is our calling and it’s so hard. 

Grace is scandalous. This grace of Jesus is scandalous. It will not let us get away with half-love. At the moment when we have our hand on the door and are ready to slam it, Grace pushes us to reach for, and to offer a love that isn’t earned or won or merited.

What is that!
Who does that?

I’m going to finish with these words of Kate Bowler who offers us a blessing today:

Blessed are we, the graced
We who don’t deserve it
Who’s failures haunt us
The things we said, the things we left unsaid
The decisions and addictions and broken relationships that have ripple affects that we still feel today. 
Somehow we are the recipients of this mysterious gift.
Grace doesn’t erase the pain or harm we’ve caused but 
Grace still [is] for us, the redeemable. 
Despite what we have done and left undone we are graced
So, Blessed are all of us that wrestle with unforgiveness and ungrace
You who make amends
You who are reaching out for forgiveness
You who say you’re sorry even when sorry will never be enough
You who find the bridge to forgive someone the wrong they’ve done 
even when you can’t forget or can’t go back 
or they aren’t nearly sorry enough
Blessed are we who live here in this mystery, in this scandal of grace.

Second Sunday of Lent 2022: Under God's Wing

Luke 13:31-35

In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh’s friend Augustine Roulin sat for a portrait.  She was an ordinary woman, the wife of Vincent’s friend, the postmaster in Arles, France, where they all lived at the time.  In the portrait, Augustine sits in her green dress in front of a colorful wallpaper in a rocking chair.  In her hand, she holds a rope.  These days, parents have all sorts of tricks to help children sleep, but in those times, one well worn trick for a tired baby was to fasten a rope to a baby’s cradle.  Then, the caretaker, or often mother, would sit in the rocking chair and rock.  The rhythm of her own rocking would pull the rope and rock the baby’s cradle back and forth along with her. She likely sang as she rocked and Vincent titled his painting “La Berceuse” or “the Lullaby.”

In 1887, the year before Vincent painted his painting, a French fishing boat had been shipwrecked in the treacherous Islandic waters.  Vincent would have known of this tragic wreck.  He would have also been familiar with the custom of Islandic fishermen to affix a porcelain image of Jesus’ mother, Mary, to the wall of the hull inside the ship.  Although his paintings are worth millions and hang in museums now, Vincent was mostly interested in creating art for the working class and originally, he intended for his painting, “La Berceuse” to be hung in the hull of a fishing boat.  

In a letter to a friend, he wrote that his hope would be “that the sailors, when they looked at the painting, would feel the old sense of being rocked and remember their own lullabies.” While this might have been a reference to the comforting music that a mother may have sung, Vincent might have also been thinking of the motion of a boat rocking out on the open sea, like a cradle. In addition to a reference to Mary (like a portrait of a Madonna) in the hull of a boat, it seems that Vincent had another thing in mind.  

Although he lived in a pretty Roman Catholic corner of France, he was the son of a Dutch Reformed pastor and had considered, at one point, a call to ministry. Vincent knew his bible well.  After finishing the “La Berceuse,” he wrote to his brother, Theo, and explained precisely how he envisioned that the painting should be displayed.  The woman, or mother, he wrote, should be in the middle.  And flanking her on two sides in a triptych--like an altar piece in the front of a church--were to be simple paintings of flowers in vases.  They would be almost like altar flowers.

So while “La Berceuse” or “the Lullaby” framed by these flowers would have certainly conjured up ideas of a Madonna or a picture of Mary, it also would have called up an image of the divine mother, God, Herself.  It was a triptych of God’s maternal love, ever present and keeping watch by night, singing us to sleep. 

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus laments and cries out, “Oh, Jerusalem, how I’ve longed to gather you together under my wings,” like a mother hen would. Jesus chooses a most tender image of a mother pulling her chicks close to her in a warm embrace of protection and care.

Many of us here know mothers who embody this kind of tenderness. Maybe they were our own mothers. One of you who had a beloved relationship with her mother, mentioned this week that if you were under this motherly wing, you would have been the chick huddled up close to her warm body, another of you said  you would have been the one peeking out from under the wing.   Others of us might not have had mothers exactly like this but we have friends who mother in this way or we’re married to mothers who care for our children like this.  It is an image of warmth and protection, and specifically, of God’s care and love for us that we don’t often pause on.

Back to Vincent’s painting of La Berceuse for a moment and that three piece triptych that he envisioned. Not surprisingly, Vincent had opinions on the kind of flowers that would flank the portrait in the middle.  As I mentioned, a triptych piece was typically located in a place of prayer or as an altar piece in the front of a church.  It was a place to ask for God’s intercession. A place to give thanks.  For Vincent, the flowers that symbolized thanksgiving were sunflowers.  Two simple vases filled with ordinary sunflowers were to sit on either side of the mother.

In the last few weeks, we have seen many images in our news of mothers giving comfort to their children, particularly in Ukraine, and even rocking them and singing lullabies.  We have also seen images of mothers (and fathers), both there and in other places calling us to imagine a different way of existing in this pain-filled world.

The image of a middle aged matronly woman in a rocking chair is not the first thing that comes to me when I imagine God.  But then, a fluffy cuddly chicken isn’t either.

Most of our world worships The Almighty.  And whether or not I mean an all powerful, mighty God with this point is perhaps irrelevant because power, itself, rules.  “what else,” writes Debbie Blue, “would make God, ‘God’ but power? “Isn’t that practically what ‘God’ means?—some magisterial, omnipotent, almighty protector?”  That was certainly the kind of power that existed in the time of Jesus.  That was most definitely the kind of power that Jesus’ disciples may have imagined when they thought of a messiah.  Warhorse power. The monied power of Herod, the efficiency of his management, and all the benefits that went along with it as a society that produced. Thunder and lightening power. The cavalry and boots on the ground and threats that folks get in line kind of power.  A way of ranking people, and making sure it’s clear which people are the most important. And which ones aren’t.  

A mother, in this traditional arrangement, will never be that powerful—other than maybe a joke or two about her power regarding her dominion over the house or something like that. Her power would always been seen as less.

So what is Jesus doing calling himself a mother Hen? Or what are we to do with Van Gogh’s motherly God in a rocking chair?

God is never going to be about showing us how great and flashy and mighty they are.  God’s thing is not really power.  This is pretty clear from the beginning when God comes to us as a powerless baby.  God is never going to play Herod’s power game and ride in on a warhorse. It’s just not going to happen. God’s power isn’t really anything like what we think of as power—it’s not the kind of power we crave. It’s fragile. It’s tender.  It’s not the kind of power we have faith in. It just isn’t. 

And maybe that is quite the point with this mother hen.

Jesus chooses a mother hen. She is not the stealth, muscular Lion of Judah with strong claws and sharp teeth.  She eats bugs and grains. She is soft. She is vulnerable.  If there is danger, she will gather her brood under her wings.  If there is great danger, she will scatter them and puff up her feathers and create a distraction for whatever dangerous predator is coming at them. She has nothing but her body to defend her young.  She has no sleek, strong muscles of a lion, no sharp teeth of a mother bear, no strong claws of a bird of prey, like an eagle.  She will do anything to protect her chicks, even sacrifice herself in the face of danger. 

And Vincent paints a middle aged woman in a rocking chair. Perhaps a grand-mother.  Flanked by two vases of sun flowers.  And there they rock, in the dark, dusty hull of the boat, back and forth. When Vincent saw sunflowers, he saw a symbol of gratitude. When I see them today, I think of peace. But not the false peace that Caesar put into place with his Pax Romana, where everything was allegedly hunky dory, except for the people crushed at the bottom. 

No, I think of the kind of peace that kneels down and washes the feet of the person in front of them. I think of the kind of peace that flips the productivity switch off and lifts a face to the warm sun above or looks clear eyed into the eyes human being. I think of the kind of Jesus-peace that journeys off the beaten path hoping to run into that woman at the well or determined to find that sheep that no one wanted. This kind of peace points to a different kind of way.  It leaves that way of power and grasping and violence off in left field. It calls us to a new way of being where care, shelter, tenderness, service and compassion are the very definition of strength.  

Jesus, our mother hen. Of course she longs to gather all of us under her wings us here in Chicago and across the oceans in Kiev, and Moscow and also Mogadishu, and Koala Lumpur, and Chiapas. 

This week, may you hold that truth of God’s tender and passionate love that draws you close under her wing.  And Jesus, our mother hen, also calls us to step out of our patterns and familiar ways of looking at the world. To soften our interactions. To flip our expectations and imagine a new world. 

May you challenge some of your own patterns and assumptions this week. May you consider what is powerful and may you flip some of your own expectations this week. For this world that Jesus tells us of, is on its’ way.

First Sunday in Lent: How do we trust in God when the world is a mess?

A sermon based on Luke 4:1-13 and Psalm 91

Today is the first Sunday of Lent.  Lent is the 40 day period (or 46 day period if you count the Sundays) that leads up to Holy Week.  Holy Week is the week where we tell the story of Jesus’, suffering crucifixion and resurrection.  

In mostly long ago times, new Christians prepared themselves to be baptized during Holy Week  and they would use these 40 days of Lent to reflect on their walk with God and prepare for Holy Baptism.  Today, we build on that tradition of using this time of Lent as a time to draw near to God and dig down into our souls, to think about the kind of people God calls us to be.

The first Sunday of Lent, we always hear this story of Jesus in the wilderness.  There are three slightly different versions of this wilderness story that we rotate through each year, but in today’s version, Jesus and Satan have a conversation out there in the desert and in that conversation, a much beloved Psalm gets quoted.  That Psalm shows up in our assigned readings for today. 
 
Over the course of history, a lot of people thought that Psalm 91 was a magical formula that would protect them from danger. Clearly, Jesus was experiencing some danger out there in the wilderness when the devil came and tempted him, so it makes sense that one of them would bring this Psalm up.  The psalm talks about how God is our protector in times of trouble and danger. God keeps us safe. These well worn verses show up in a song some of us might recognize called “On Eagle’s Wings,”

You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord
Who abide in His shadow for life
Say to the Lord, "My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!"

The person who wrote the psalm writes that God will deliver you from the snare…and sickness, that God will cover you with her pinions, and under her wings you will find refuge.  God’s faithfulness, the composer of the psalm writes, is a shield. 

And in fact, the writer of this psalm says,
 

Because, you have made the LORD your refuge,[b]
    the Most High your dwelling place,
no evil shall befall you,
    no scourge come near your tent.

Moreover, if you ever even come close to tripping, the angles rescue you--you won’t even stub your toe on the rock!  Folks would write portions of the psalm on slips of paper and enclose them in amulets to be worn as protection from any and all evil. They are powerful words: Of how God protects us. The tell us that when we trust in God, no evil will befall us. Nothing bad will ever happen to us. At least, that’s is exactly the devil describes the psalm to Jesus. 

“Look,” the devil says, “God’s not going to let anything bad happen to you, so throw yourself off the roof of the temple here and let the angels catch you.  Just trust God.”

The problem is, even when we are trusting God at what feels like full capacity, even when we are on our knees in prayer sometimes, terrible things happen in our world.  
Sometimes, there are violent wars. 
Sometimes loved ones tragically die.  
Sometimes sickness strikes.  
Sometimes people are unbearably cruel.

Sometimes…we take in the state of the world and we want to speak to whoever’s in charge around here, we want to speak to the manager…of the universe!  Where is God’s protection? Have you seen the strain and anxiety around here lately? Did you notice that nation is rising against nation? Have you seen the cruelty and indifference running rampant, who is running this world, anyway!?

Sometimes terrible things happen. 
And people fall...and the angels don’t catch them.
Sometimes, it seems that God fails us.

When the devil tosses this psalm at Jesus and urges him to test God’s protection, Jesus doesn’t say, “Okay, challenge accepted! Take me to the pinnacle of the temple roof and let’s see what happens!”  Instead, he quotes different scripture back at him and says “don’t put God to the test.” Does that mean that Jesus doesn’t trust God to actually catch him?

If you find yourself balking at the theology, consider your instincts a good thing.  There is a lot of scripture in our bible that shows us that God is a lot more than a lucky coin in our pocket.  A lot of people (including us) have a long history in the world of invoking God’s name in moments of victory (on the football field,  on the battlefield, when we’ve A’ced the test, when we’ve landed the job) and we continue to speak this way because it feels good to have God on our winning side. 

Some years ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams wrote about a Jewish woman, Etty Hillesum.  Etty was a young woman in her 20s when the Germans occupied Holland and she watched with horror as the world turned upside down around her.  Before the war, she wasn’t a particularly pious or religious young adult.  In her early diaries and letters from 1941-1943, which were published decades after her tragic death, she mused about her life as a young woman: she wrote of spending time with friends, the different people she dated, tutoring and odd jobs where she made some spending money, and her time as a young law student.  I looked up and read some of her diaries and letters. She seemed to have a bright, warm and slightly irreverent style—which I liked.  But later on, as the war continued, she was pretty clear-eyed about the unstoppable horror descending on Amsterdam around her.  A horror where some might say, God’s protection had dissolved. When she was eventually imprisoned in Westerbork before being sent to Auschwitz, she wrote, “there must be someone to live through it all and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times.  And why should I not be that witness?” 

This young twenty-something woman trusted deeply that God’s hand was alive in her life and there with her in the suffering.  In her words, in the face of unspeakable horrors, “she took responsibility for God’s believability” and lived her life in a way that illustrated her trust.

The word “rescue” is in our psalm today.  In the psalm God says, 

when you call to me,

I will answer, 
I will be with you in trouble, 
I will rescue you and honor you. 

That word “rescue” can mean a couple of different things. Yes, it can mean to extract someone from suffering: to pull them out of a tough situation, to dissolve their pain. And, it can also mean equipping someone to endure hardship.  In this sense, it means something like suiting someone up with protective armor.  In today’s parlance, we might say something like, “giving someone the tools to endure hard things.”

In this sense, trust in God is about trying to loosen our grip on the fear that awful, catastrophic things are going to annihilate and dissolve us and instead cultivate the knowledge that even in the desert, even in the wilderness, God is with us. This was at the heart of Jesus’ response to Satan in their encounter in the desert.

God knows that suffering is indiscriminate. It doesn’t care if you eat a low carb diet or have a million dollars in the bank.  Suffering doesn’t care if you have the perfect job or family and can happen to any of us at any moment.  But, like Etty Hillesum put it in the way she lived her life, even in the valley of pain and despair, there is nothing in this world that can cause God to abandon us, and even in the desert, we are beloved to God.

Her witness, gives me strength.  

Our world is a mess right now.  Archbishop Williams wrote that when we look at the faith of people like Etty, We see them and we say, “I want to live like that. I want to be a part of a world like her world.”

Her letters told of how she keep a spring in her step while walking by the fence at evening in the camps. How she had a kind word for those she interacted with. How, with God at her side, she refused to let anyone break her spirit.  As she put it, in the face of unthinkable suffering, she “took responsibility for God’s believability.”

Her legacy calls us to do the same, even when we feel like our faith or trust aren't rock solid.

So, how do we make God believable in our tortured world? 

How do we live our lives that demonstrates our trust in God? 

How do we interact with people in our families in our work places out in the world in a way that shows that God is alive? 

How do we look on people with generosity instead of contempt, 

with a passion for what is just and right instead of apathy?  

How--even in times of suffering and stress and strain--does the way we live our lives bear witness to the truth that God lives?

God is an abiding presence.  
Ever with us.
Our still waters.
Our mother hen.
Our light in the night.
And holding that truth close, we do our best to quiet our terror in the face of the world’s pain and suffering around us.  For god is here.

Like Etty Hillesum, someone must bear witness to the truth that God lived during these times.  

Will that person be you?

Ash Wednesday: With all that you are

A sermon based on 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10

This morning, I distributed “ashes to go” outside the church during the Waters school morning drop off.  I mixed the ashes just as I always had before, but after marking the first sign of the cross with a q-tip on someone’s head, it dawned on me that, without the oil of my skin and the flat surface of my finger, the ashes were too crumbly and dry for the q-tip. They were not sticking to the forehead of the person before me.  Fortunately, the first person that I distributed ashes to was a church member here and he was pretty understanding and as I gripped the q-tip and kind of aggressively smudged his head with it.  I quickly realized what I needed to do to make the ashes stick: I needed to add more holy oil to the mixture.  Then, they started sticking.

We bring out the ashes once a year on Ash Wednesday.  But the Holy Oil… that comes out a bit more often.  We pull it out to anoint people, sometimes we anoint folks during a time of prayer or during a time of foot-washing.  Sometimes, we anoint someone when they’re near death like Mary did when she poured that costly nard on Jesus’ feet. Almost always, we bring it out when we baptize someone. In all these moments, we make a sign with oil usually on a person’s forehead and we tell them, you are a beloved, precious child of God.  

That’s the oil part. The ash part of the mixture, however, always downshifts my pace and makes me catch my breath. “Remember you are dust,” we will say, “and to dust you shall return.” It makes me look square in the face of mortality.   It’s like receiving that phone call:  That the doctor has to do a biopsy, or a loved one is sick. Or, it’s like seeing the smoldering ashes of a forest--a great lung of the earth that has been burned. Or getting a text about a shooting.  Or seeing footage of a Ukrainian family taking refuge in a bomb shelter halfway around the world.   Reckoning with these ashes reminds us that we’re mortal and all we have is this moment right here, right now. We do not have an infinite number of moments to love and be loved.
 
*****
In the 1st Corinthians reading, Paul’s ashes are showing.  He talks about imprisonment, beatings, sleepless nights and hunger. Paul’s suffering is deep.  He wears his ashes out loud.  The fragility and brokenness of what it means to be human is on honest display.  

Ash Wednesday is like real talk.  We sit in this space today as our most authentic selves. Here, we are honest about the cinders and ash blowing through in our tortured world. There’s the ash of daily pressure, anxiety and stress that we feel. The ash of climate change, The ash of hurting family members. The ash a nation that feels deep pain and even hatred for itself. The ash of all the mess of covid. The ash of legislation that denies people their full humanity. Ash of war. The ash of greed.

We come to this place by being willing to be honest with ourselves about who we are, our relationship with ourselves, and our relationship with God. But the honesty can be really hard to sit with. In fact, to stare it in the face can be frightening.  I don’t know about you, but when I stare the ash of this world in the face there are fears I cannot totally shake at the moment, fear for our kids, for our nation, for the planet.

And this is where the holy oil comes in.  

It was not lost on me this year, that I needed to mix a little extra holy oil with the ashes.  Yes, this was initially for practical reasons, but it is also important because, just as we trace that ashen cross on our foreheads, we trace it together with the oil of our belovedness.  And this year, I think we could use a reminder of our belovedness. Last Sunday, we heard the story of Jesus at the transfiguration where he was transformed into brilliant glory on that mountain top.  As he descended from the mountain with the disciples, he knew the troubles that lay before him, he knew the dry cinders of Ash Wednesday that would mark the heartbreaking path of the via dolorosa (the way of sorrow) that lay ahead.  He barely made it to the bottom of that mountain when an ashen father, frightened for his sick child, fell at his feet beseeching him for help.  And Jesus helped him. As Jesus walked down that mountain into the ashen valley, he held that fundamental knowledge that he is God’s beloved child. 

Today, we intentionally acknowledge the ash of our tortured world and the ash of the pain of life that is smudged on us.  And as that the oil mixed into that cross that glistens on our forehead, we remember that all is not lost in this deeply troubled world.

If you’ve ever gone through a 12 step program or an IOP program, or even good old fashioned therapy for any old issue, you know that we all have to start with some version of “things are not okay” in order to be able to grow.  

James Baldwin taught us that, “not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  

We sit here tonight and we face it, together. And as we face it, We acknowledge that honesty can heal wounds when we open our hearts. We remember that the preferred building blocks of the holy spirit are ash and dust. And, marked with our belovedness, the holy spirit promises to make a new thing in us. Below the surface, seeds are stirring and stretching out. God builds beauty from ashes. when the wind blows fiercely, God strengthens our muscles to be able to walk into it.

Story after story in our biblical history show us how people grow into a new creation. During Lent, we take on spiritual practices, in order to help us dig into new ground. Our brokenness is the beginning And, in fact, our faith has to break open in order for us to dig into new ground.

Dear ones, you are God’s beloved.  Marked with the cross of Christ forever.
Thanks be to God.