Ash Wednesday, 2020
Ash Wednesday reminds us that we are made of dust. God knows. And God knows that our days like grass, like daffodils in Nashville, sprung up already in February, gone by April. It all passes faster than we ever could imagine. Which is all to say that we are mortals, fragile, too easily broken, too great our weakness and finitude. The ashes remind us all of this.
The lectionary texts and the liturgy of Ash Wednesday are also bound up with a call to repentance, to change, to turn. And it makes sense that these things would be held together. It’s rather simple, really: life is short; don’t waste it; don’t be stupid; don’t screw around. If there are things you know you need to change, get on with it. Change, and change now. Behold, today is the day, says Paul in the text from 2 Corinthians. For some of you, that may be all you need to hear tonight, and if that is indeed you, then get to it.
However: any talk of change necessarily raises the question of what sort of change. Change what? And turn in what direction? And more, it raises the question of guilt: the necessity of change presumes some sort of guilt. Where is my guilt to be located? Because where I locate my guilt will likely inform the direction of the new path I choose.
Years ago I was rookie theology professor, I think it was 20 years ago this coming summer. I went to a conference in Chicago. We were staying at a nunnery. Exciting. Early one morning I went for a walk in the graveyard, and saw there across the cemetery a theologian whom I had long admired. I had probably read thousands of pages of his work. I calculated my path, so that it would cross his. My calculations worked, and soon I was able to casually say “good morning.” He replied in kind, and soon we were walking and talking. At some point I shared that, at that point in my life, I still felt a great weight in my life of guilt and shame. He replied in an unexpected way, and simply said: “I don’t think we know what we ought to feel guilty about.”
I have carried those words with me all these years, and discovered that oftentimes the matters around which I felt a great deal of shame and guilt were, in fact, a sort of diversion from more important matters. I discovered I would sometimes need to take a fast from my inner voice of condemnation, so I could actually repent, change in more constructive ways.
I think some of these more constructive ways are indicated in the lectionary texts. The first is this: That God works vindication for the oppressed (Psa 103:6). The Psalmists and the Hebrew prophets repeatedly insisted upon the prioritization of justice. Justice is not, must not be, a hobby horse of the few. It is a central aspect to what it means to be a person of faith. And, more, it is a justice that carried a sort of bias, frankly: bias on behalf of the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the refugee; the mother fleeing war, with her children in tow; the father seeking employment, his wife and baby in tow; the foreigner, the stranger. Indeed, the New Testament Greek word for hospitality is literally “love of strangers,” philoxenia. And yet here we are, finding ourselves in a historical moment of xenophobia, the sharp and threatening rise of nativism, of nationalisms, of hostility to the stranger, of hardness toward the immigrant.
If it is possible that we don’t really know what we ought to feel guilty about, then maybe God doesn’t need the church in America to fast from coffee or beer, as much as God might need us to fast toward the oppressed, to be busy doing the slow work of justice, administering, teaching, writing, proclaiming, tending—against and in the face of the powers that be—for the weak, the marginalized.
And yet: there is a beware here, a danger here, indicated in the texts: Joel 2:12, that in your work of returning, repenting, rend your hearts and not your clothing. It’s not the outward show with which God is concerned. It is the inner self which is of utmost concern, the real self.
There is, in these troubling days in which we find ourselves, a great temptation to jump into the outward show, to speak our words of justice, to speak our words of judgment, for the show of it all, to be approved by others. And indeed, there is so much idiocy; so much meanness; there’s so little media literacy. It’s exasperating that it seems as if so much of the adult population never darkened the door of a school-house with the sorts of lazy, lazy social media reposting, so much casual dis-regard for the truth, or fairness, or kindness, or even basic, common decency and civility. And when we know that God will vindicate the oppressed, and that God through the prophets has called us to take such social and systemic realities seriously, it becomes a great temptation to show my virtue, exhibit that I am on the right side of history, that I am on the right side of justice, by my social media memes, by my Facebook rants, by my microphone drop moments.
And yet against what contemporary commentators call “virtue-signaling,” we hear the text from tonight from Matthew 6. There Jesus teaches us not to practice our piety before others, our giving of alms, our prayers, our fasting, not for show, but in secret. Not to get the reward of others, but to be approved by God. It seems terribly important to me for us to remember that the Pharisees were not social conservatives; the Pharisees were social progressives, and Jesus had harsh words for them, not because they cared about justice, but because they were just so dripping self-righteous, so good at justifying themselves, and so heavy in the demands they placed on everyone around them.
There is one more thing to note: the whole of Lent leads up to Holy Week: and Holy Week is one of the most dramatic moments in human history, more dramatic than the American Revolution, more dramatic than the landing on the beaches of Normandy, more dramatic than the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Holy Week makes this most outlandish claim: that God enfleshed comes as a Messiah without a Messianic-complex: that the Son of God did not have to make things turn out right. That this Messiah suffers unjustly under the pretentious, preening, profane power; is oppressed, while trusting that God will, in fact, vindicate the oppressed, without returning evil for evil.
Perhaps then we need not only to fast toward justice, and not only to fast from our virtue-signaling and self-justification, but also to fast from the seduction of power.
These days can be hard days. If we are paying attention, then we must know that these are hard days. And these days are especially hard when we think we must make things turn out right; especially when we arrogantly presume to let the whole weight of history ride on our shoulders. So, perhaps we need to fast from thinking that we are in control. Let us trust that God is. And that even should we ever have to suffer, as Paul describes in tonight’s text from 2 Corinthians—even should we have to go through great endurance, afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, or hunger, that we may know that we, along with Paul, thereby commend ourselves to the degree that we suffer as did our Lord, to the degree that we do not seek to vindicate ourselves, but trust the vindication of God.
So, on this Ash Wednesday, and in this Lenten Season, let us do works of justice; without virtue-signaling and self-justification; trusting not in the power of power, but in the God who vindicates the oppressed. Death will come for us all, soon enough. So, remembering that we are dust, and to dust we will return, and trusting thus our Lord, let us give thanks, change as we are called, and receive the gifts of joy granted us on this Lenten journey
Amen.