Ash Wednesday
Transcribed from a
sermon given
At St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
Ash Wednesday 2013
By Rev. Valerie Ann
Hart
Psalm 103
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Today is Ash Wednesday, the
beginning of Lent. Every Spring we acknowledge this season of Lent, this spring
season. But as we are remembering Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent
something else is also starting this week. Do you know what it might be?
Baseball players are gathering for spring training. Some of the spring training
starts today some tomorrow.
And there are other things that happen
every spring. This time of year, every Lent, is also when we spend time
preparing our taxes. They are due on April 15th, so we are forced to
deal with our taxes as part of our Lenten practices.
Another thing that happens at this time of
year is that people begin thinking about their gardens. People start working in
fertilizer and ordering seeds and buying plants. Here in California we may be
planting peas or early lettuce. Spring is a time of thinking about gardening.
The spring is also a time when we
do spring cleaning. That once a year getting a good thorough cleaning of the
house.
So what do all of these spring
activities have to do with Ash Wednesday and Lent? Well when you think about it
they each have a lot in common with Lent and Ash Wednesday.
Think about spring cleaning. Why
do we need to do spring cleaning? Most of us do some kind of cleaning all year
long. For some its every day, some it is once a week, some it is more or less regularly
than that. But we usually tend to keep things orderly and dust periodically.
But every so often, and the spring is the time we usually do it, we engage in a
little deeper cleaning. You know, all the dirt that gets tracked in on the rugs
during the winter and in the rains. We might get the rugs cleaned in the spring
because you don’t notice the dirt collecting each day. And you don’t vacuum
underneath the furniture or clean those little corners that you don’t see very
often. Spring cleaning is that time to take a thorough look; to see the stuff
that gets overlooked every day.
Ash Wednesday is kind of like spring
cleaning. If you come to church on a regular basis you say confession every
week, you acknowledged anything that’s on your mind, you’ve been forgiven on a
regular basis. But once a year it’s really helpful to dig a little deeper. To
lift back the furniture. To look at those things that, like tracking dirt into
the house, you don’t notice the rug getting dirty until you have to clean up a
spot and you realize how dirty the rest of the rug is. Well today we remember
are all those little things that we do and forget about and don’t think about
and don’t feel we have to ask for forgiveness for. But all those little things
kind of add up. Or there might be things that we just haven’t been ready to be
honest about. Or we may be carrying the kind of sins that are not the BIG SINS
that everybody lists, but the little sins of not taking care of ourselves, not
remembering our friends, or not caring about the world. So every now and then,
and we do it once a year, we need to do a spring cleaning of ourselves where we
really look in all those little corners and ask what’s not right. What do I
need to say I’m sorry for? What do I need to change in my life? How do I need
to be renewed? How do I need to be, as Paul puts it, reconciled with God? And
Ash Wednesday is a wonderful opportunity to do that because there is a
wonderful litany of penitence that we will be doing shortly. If you think you
have been living well and have nothing to confess, you will not get to the end
of that without realizing that, yeah you are not living your life as well as
you could be.
And then there is doing our taxes.
One of the things I find about doing my taxes is that you have to go through
everything you did with your money. You are looking for all those deductions,
so you have to see how you spent your money for the last year. And it is a
powerful reflection on who we are. If you want to really know someone look at
their checkbook. Look at where they use their credit card and you can get a
pretty good idea of what’s important to that person. How much of your money
went to the necessities, to housing and clothing and food? How much went to
medical expenses? That will tell you a lot about what’s been going on in your
life the past year. Or perhaps there has been money going to support children
or parents or cousins. Your checkbook shows who is important in your life. How
much money was given away? To whom? When? How much was spent on things that were
just for your own pleasure? Which is fine, we are suppose to enjoy life, but
what’s the balance? Doing our taxes provides an opportunity to do that kind of
reflection -to really look at how we are living our lives. As Jesus says in the
Gospel, where your treasure is there your heart is as well. So during this Lenten
time for self reflection I invite you to see your tax preparation time as an opportunity
for self reflection. I know it helps keep me from being quite so frustrated
when I’m working on my taxes.
And then there is planting a
garden and preparing the ground. How many of you are gardeners? How many of you
have started thinking about what you are going to plant this year? So you know that
you go out there and the first thing you have to do is prepare the ground. You have
to dig up the dirt so that the ground can nourish whatever gets planted there.
You do all kinds of things to try and nourish the ground. One of the most
important things that we add to the ground to make it fertile is, and you are
nodding your heads, manure, right. And we all know what manure is. It is the
waste of animals that has been processed. You know in some ways I think of our
sins, the mistakes we’ve made, as our waste, and when we’ve processed it, when
we’ve thought about it and we’ve gone to confession and we’ve acknowledged it,
it changes from being something smelly and ugly to being something that can be
nurturing and healing and help in growth. When we acknowledge what we have done
wrong we learn so much about ourselves and how we want to live the rest of our
lives. So when we offer ourselves to God and we open up and we confess our
weaknesses God can come in there and change it - change our weakness into something
that can nourish us. In the Psalm there is a wonderful line, “As far as the
East is from the West, so far has he removed our sins from us.” Our sins can
become our strength. Our sins can nurture us for the time ahead. Lent and
confession is all about preparation so that the seeds that God sows in us can
grow and sprout and be strong and beautiful - so that the garden that is our
being can produce beautiful flowers and rich fruit that feeds us and other
people.
And this is where we get to spring
training. Think about the baseball players going to spring training. Yeah over
the winter they may not have been working out as much as they could have. They
are not in their best shape, and they know that coming up is going to be the
season and they have to be ready. So spring training is a preparation. They
practice, and they exercise, and they practice, and they exercise so that when
it becomes time for the big game, they’ll be ready. Lent is a time for us to
practice and exercise. Many of us choose to either give something up or take
something on during these forty days of Lent. Sometimes we give up something
that we probably should have given up years ago or that is just mildly
unhealthy for us like chocolate or caffeine. Sometimes we take on more reading,
more study or some disciplines. Part of the reason we do this is as practice
and exercise. You see we all will at times be tempted. By taking a spring
training time where we encounter little temptations we prepare ourselves for
the more difficult challenges of life. Suppose you said on Ash Wednesday, “No
chocolate the whole time of Lent.” Then you are at this party, and there is
this chocolate and you don’t want to insult the host and there is this little
temptation. Now if you choose to have chocolate at that point no one gets hurt.
There is no big disaster. It is not a sin. You just have given in to the
temptation. You have an opportunity to see how hard it is to follow through on
your intentions. If you succeed in not having that piece of chocolate you are
going to be a little stronger the next time there is a temptation. It’s like
the batter in batting practice, when he hits the ball he knows he’s doing it
right and he’ll do it again. But if you give in and you have that piece of
chocolate well, you missed. It’s like the batter in batting practice, “Well I
missed, I’ve got to do it better next time.” You learn something. You learn
about your weaknesses; you learn about your strengths. So by taking on these
disciplines during Lent we get to practice for when the big game comes. We all
will have moments in our lives when we are tempted to do something that really
will hurt someone or hurt ourselves. We all find ourselves in situations where
it is easier to do something that would be hurtful. We all will find ourselves
in situations where everybody else is doing it, but you know it is not good. We
will find ourselves in situations where our desires become so strong it is hard
to fight them. But if we have practiced, when we feel that strong desire
perhaps we will remember that piece of chocolate and how we do have the ability
to say no. We do have the ability to resist temptation. So we can see Lent as
spring training, a time to gather our strength, to learn about our weaknesses,
and to practice.
Lent for me is always a rich time.
And always a bit unpredictable. When we offer ourselves to God at the beginning
of Lent we are asking God to take us, use us, transform us, and prepare us for
the world beyond. May this be a good Lent for all of you.
No comments:
Post a Comment