Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Ash Wednesday Sermon by the Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
1 March 2017


A favorite word of teenagers:  hypocrite.  At least that was the case during my teenage years.  As a child my friends and I were under the delusion that parents, teachers, and adults in general were near perfect.  But then due to a mysterious combination of years of experience, brain-development, and stage of life it was around the age of thirteen - wow! - I saw the light!  Those adults weren’t perfect at all.  In fact, they were far from perfect: They were hypocrites!  Saying one thing and doing another, telling a teenager like me to be patient and then becoming frustrated when things didn’t happen quickly enough, expecting me to share things with my brother while demonstrating stinginess towards others in need.  I could go on and go - and I did back then.  Hypocrites, all of them.

But time passes and now those teenagers have grown into adulthood and, lucky us, we now get to be on the receiving end of all of that.  Idealistic teens look at our lives, see what we call inconsistencies, struggles or failures and often judge us harshly - we have become the hypocrites.   Indeed, in this case, what comes around goes around.

And it’s not just teenagers that are concerned about hypocrisy.  Jesus is no fan of it either - especially when it comes to using God and religion as a vehicle for self-promotion.  “Whenever you give alms,” we hear the warning today, “do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others...do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others...whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting.”

Giving, praying, fasting - all good things.  And Jesus is instructing us, his disciples,  to engage in such practices, but to also beware of pride’s perverting power - how we can so easily twist what is supposed to be about God into something that is all about self.  A safeguard?  Secret: Practice giving, praying, fasting out of view of others - pray in private places, fast without making a fuss, and give discretely - to the point, Jesus says, that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.  Which is something to think about. 

It seems that what Jesus is talking about is not just a type of a “secret Santa” strategy of giving, where we can at least be secretly proud of getting just the right gift or giving a generous donation to a worthy cause.  The kind of giving that Jesus is after when he speaks of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing is the kind of giving that is so deeply hidden we don’t even recognize it - only God who sees in secret.  Perhaps you had this happen to you - someone comes up to you, you may not even recognize them and thanks you for something you don’t remember doing?  You may even wonder if you are being confused for someone else.  I helped you how?  That kind of giving goes beyond carefully planned generosity because such Spirit-led and Spirit-blessed offerings are not shaped by self-consciousness.  

For the ultimate aim of giving, fasting, and praying is to take our eyes off of ourselves - to lose ourselves so that we can find God’s own self.  The God of Love who often is found in secret and certainly sees in secret - sees our poverty and gives us alms, hears our prayers and holds the secrets of our hearts, knows our hunger and feeds us with his very self.  That is our reward.  In losing the consuming occupation with ourselves we are freed to develop a richer, more satisfying relationship with God. 

And thank goodness our God is not of the same ilk as a developing teenager - prone to judgement and criticism - because there are times, more than we’d like to admit, when we act in ways that are at best hypocritical, but more often just plain self-centered and sinful.  Ash Wednesday and all of Lent serves to remind us that, yes, we are broken, yet even so, we are forgiven and loved. 


So with all this talk about practicing our faith in secret isn’t it rather ironic that in a few moments from now we will be receiving ashes on our foreheads for all the world to see?  What’s up with that?  Well, first let me point out that the ashen crosses are neither prayer nor fasting nor almsgiving.  And that these ashes are not something you do, but something that is imposed upon you by another person, but granted that’s a bit of hair splitting.  One of the best ways I know to think about what we are about to do was taught by a six year old boy of a seminary student.  The student was planning on taking his son to an Ash Wednesday service and he wanted to make sure that his child understood that ashes would be put on his forehead.  “I know,” the boy replied, “and I can hardly wait.”  “Really?” the surprised dad questioned, “Why’s that?”  And then out of the mouths of babes came this remarkable insight: “That’s the one day of the year that we get to see the cross traced on our foreheads in baptism.”   The ashen crosses we are about to receive are not about our working for the recognition and praise of people, rather they are a silent, but bold proclamation of the great goodness of God who gives even us hypocrites and the world at large the undeserved reward of grace, mercy, and love.  

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