Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday

3/5/2003

The Rev. Valerie A. Hart

St. Alban's, Brentwood, CA

I remember the first time I had the opportunity to be the celebrant at the Ash Wednesday service during the first year that I served here at St. Alban's. I remember how incredibly powerful it was to place the ashes on each person’s forehead while repeating “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Over and over I said those words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” With each repetition it moved deeper into my heart and my soul. The old stalwart of the community, whom I had grown to respect and love, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The vital and very alive young mother, who had become my friend, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And hardest of all was when I came to a young child, three or four years old, looking up at me with the eager expectancy of childhood. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Each of these people whom I had come to love and deeply care about I was reminded were but dust and ashes. At this service, with those words, we are all reminded that we are already dust, reminded that this physical body that we hold so dear, and the physical bodies of those we love, came from dust and will become but dust and ashes.

Before this past summer I had never seen gangrene. My father-in-law, who has diabetes and circulation problems, developed an infection on his toe. An innocent beginning, an ingrown toenail that had been trimmed by a podiatrist, but it never fully healed because of the lack of good circulation to his foot. Once it became infected, even with the best of modern medicine, it would not heal. Without blood flowing to the toe there were no resources with which to fight the infection. A black spot developed and began to grow. Soon the entire toe was black. Gangrene is horrible to look at, for the infected part quite literally dies. The toe became shriveled and black. It was like a corpse with a unique odor, and it was excruciatingly painful. The only treatment was amputation. To see what a toe looks like when life-giving blood is no longer flowing through it was for me a vivid reminder that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

This community has known a lot of grief this year. We have watched parents, siblings, and dear friends die. We have lost jobs, financial resources have shriveled, dreams have been crushed, and relationships have been shattered. We have known what it means to feel things turn to dust in our hands. We have been painfully reminded that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

Throughout the Bible images of dust and ashes reoccur. Adam is formed from the dust of the ground, and Abraham refers to himself as but dust and ashes. When Tamar has been raped by her brother she put ashes on her head and tore her robe as a sign of grief. Mordecai, upon learning of plans for the destruction of his people, puts on sackcloth and ashes. Job, that one who knew unbearable grief in the loss of all of his children and all of his material possession and finally his health, sat among the ashes. The psalmist, in psalm 102 writes “For I eat ashes like bread, and mingle tears with my drink.” Jesus uses the image saying  "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.”

And so today, we take ashes and put them on our foreheads and are reminded that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, the first step on our journey to Easter. Why, you might ask, do we remind ourselves of our own mortality on this day? In fact you might wonder why anyone would ever want to remind themselves of their own mortality. What could be the advantage of thinking about our own and our loved ones deaths?

There is something incredibly powerful about confronting death. Human beings have a tendency to live in fear, and the foundation of all the fears in our lives is the fear of death. There are many kinds of death, the death of this mortal body being the most obvious. But there are many little deaths in our lives. Any time we are confronted by the impermanence of the things of this world we experience a little death. When our pride is hurt, when someone we trusted lets us down, when we can’t have what we want, when we lose what we do have, all of these are kinds of death. And we don’t like it. These experiences are painful. We want to shield ourselves from experiencing this pain, and so, over time, we create a cocoon around ourselves. Bit by bit we weave a self-protective coating, a veil that shields us from truly feeling the pain in our lives.

Each person’s is unique, but you can recognize it easily. It is the false pride and bravado that keeps us from feeling the discomfort of not being the best. It is the anger we use to keep love away. It is the disinterest that keeps us from disappointment. It is the addictions that numb the pain through drugs or alcohol. It is the busyness that keeps us from stopping to really feel.

Over the years we create this cocoon, and it helps to keep the pain away, but it also numbs us to the joy and isolates us from love. If we build a shield to keep the pain out, we have also built a shield to keep the joy out. We may feel safe from the pain of experiencing the transitory nature of life on this earth, but it comes at the cost of being kept from experiencing the blessed and transcendent joy of life.

But there are moments when this cocoon is rent. Times when our best defenses are breached. Such is the grace that can come with grief. Grief sometimes comes upon us with such intensity that we can no longer hold onto the presumption of being in control. Deep loss tears away the levels of protection and leaves us stripped, emotionally naked, and feeling deeply. If we have the courage to be with that grief, to let ourselves experience the pain, we discover that we are more alive. It sounds odd, but many people who experience intense grief also describe moments of intense joy. After a deep and cathartic night of tears, the morning may bring a dawn more beautiful then you ever remembered.

The same is true of experiencing and acknowledging our own mortality. After my brain surgery, where I had consciously confronted the possibility of my own death, on the way home from the hospital the colors of the trees were a multitude of vibrant greens, the blue of the sky was iridescent, and the touch of my children was an unspeakable delight.

When that cocoon we develop to avoid the fear of death is stripped away we come to experience the world more directly. Our hearts are freer to receive the love of God that always surrounds us, and we also more clearly see the ways in which we have not lived our lives in harmony with that love.

Our attempts to protect ourselves from pain often end up inflicting pain upon others. It is impossible to truly love others and remain safe, for love always involves a reckless abandonment of oneself. And so, our fear of death, our attempts to be safe, interfere with our ability to love God and to love others. And that is the foundation of all sin.

Lent is a preparation for Easter, a preparation to receive the gift of the resurrection. One cannot acknowledge resurrection without acknowledging death. We cannot know the light of Easter without walking through the shadows of Good Friday. We cannot know love, without risking everything. We cannot know the freedom of forgiveness without acknowledging our sinfulness. We cannot be free to love and forgive without acknowledging the pain we have experienced.

Paul states in the reading today “We are treated as…..dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

Lent is a time to acknowledge our nothingness so that we may receive everything. Lent is a time to acknowledge our sinfulness so that we may know we are forgiven. Lent is a time to know our dying so that we may live the resurrection.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

First Sunday of Advent Sermon

What are we to do when in feels like the end of the world?

The First Sunday of Advent

Sermon given on

November 30, 2009

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

During his 1960’s presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy often closed his speeches with a story. I know there are some of us here who may actually remember the 1960’s and JFK.  For those of us who do, we may remember this.  He would often close with a story of Colonel Davenport.  Colonel Davenport was the Speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives.  On May 19^th, 1780, the sky in Hartford, Connecticut blackened ominously, and some of the representatives thought the end was at hand, that this was the end of the world.  So, some of them asked Colonel Davenport to adjourn the meeting because the world was ending. And he said to them, “It’s one of two things.  Either the world is not coming to the end and so there’s no reason to adjourn the meeting, or it is coming to an end and I, at the end, want to be found doing my duty.  So I’m not going to adjourn the meeting.”  And he ordered candles be brought in.

We’ve all heard predictions of the end time.  You may have read how the world is going to come to an end in 2012 because the Incan calendar only goes up to 2012 and the ancient Incans must have known when the world was going to end, even though Jesus told us even he didn’t know.  And of course, we all remember Y2K, you know, if the computers crash, that’s going to be the end of the world.  People have been talking about the end of the world for a long time. 

In this reading from the Gospel where Jesus talks about the end, what does he say?  He says that that’s good news.  So if someone comes up to you and says, “It’s the end of the world.”  Your response, as a Christian, is, “Great!  That’s wonderful news!”  Because Jesus says at that time we are to stand up tall and raise up our heads because we know that our redemption is near.  The end of the world means that Christ is coming near.  It’s not something to be afraid of.  So I suggest if someone tells you the world is about to end, you say, “Fine.  I want to be doing my duty.” 

There’s a Buddhist story about an old monk who was well into his 90s.  He was outside his hut planting an apple tree.  It was just a tiny little apple tree and someone walking by said, “Why are you doing that?  After all, you’re not going to live long enough to see any apples from it.”  And he looked at him, and he said, “If I knew I was going to die tonight, what I would be doing today is planting that apple tree.”  We’re doing what we’re doing no matter what, even if it is going to be the end of the world. 

So the next time someone predicts the end of the world, say, “Great.  Now I’m gonna go about doing my duties because when the end of the world comes, I want to be found doing.”  I have a little refrigerator magnet that someone gave me and on it says, “The world is about to end.  Christ is coming.  Look busy.” 

So, that’s what we’re supposed to do if the world is truly coming to an end, but we don’t know when that’s going to be. 

Like everything in Scripture, talking about the end times also has more subtle meanings for our spiritual journey, for our own growth.  We’ve all had moments in our lives when it felt like our world was coming to an end.  It might have been when you walked into that doctor’s office, and you got the diagnosis of a dreaded disease.  It might be when you got the phone call of someone you love, a spouse, a parent, a child, who is dead.  It might be when someone you cared about hurt you deeply.  It might be when you lost your job.  It might be when you found yourself in the middle of a divorce. It feels like the world is coming to an end because the world, as you knew it, is coming to an end. 

When you walk out of that doctor’s office, everything is different. When the one you love has died nothing is the same.  Your world has come tumbling down.  The question is, “How are you going to respond to the things that happen in your life?”  We all have circumstances, things that happen to us because none of us gets through life without struggles.  We all have people we love die.  We all have people we trusted to betray us.  We all have to deal with physical illness.  It’s the way the world is. 

The question for us is, “How do we respond to that?”  Rick Warren says we have a choice.  When things happen, we can either become bitter or we can become better.  We can be bitter or better.  We can take the things that happen to us and feel sorry for ourselves and blame other people or we can see it as an opportunity to grow, as a time to grow closer to Christ. 

It’s like at that “End of the World” time. We can say, “The world is ending,” and cover our heads and moan and groan and scream, or we can stand up tall and raise up our heads and reach out our hands to God because we know that our redemption is near.  When we go through these times of difficulty, we stand up and we reach out to Christ because Christ is with us, is walking with us.  They are an opportunity to deepen our faith, to deepen our compassion, to understand ourselves and the world a little better. 

One of the exercises that is sometimes done in personal development workshops is to make a timeline.  You have your life journey, and in that life journey, you mark significant events:  births, deaths, illnesses.  Then you take and you make a line showing your spiritual life, how close you felt to God.  When I do that, what I find is that the times that I felt closest to God were the ones where I was dealing with a crisis.  Ones where illness had come upon me and the only way I was going to deal with it was to reach out and grab God’s hand because I knew I wasn’t going to get through it alone.

At the times when someone I loved died, my heart was broken, and it was broken open, and I knew my need for God.  And now, going through a divorce, there’s no question that I have no option but to pray and to be with God because that’s the only way I’m going to get through it.  When our world falls apart, when it seems like the end of everything, that’s the time we realize we can’t do it ourselves.  That’s the time when we have to reach out to God and ask for help.  That’s when we know our need for God and our need to pray. 

The Psalm says to trust, “I put my trust in God and He will teach me,” We are to put our trust in God at the times when the whole foundation of our lives is trembling, because Christ is there.  When it feels like our world is coming to an end, stand up, raise up your head and know that that is when your redemption is near.  Amen. 

All Saints Day Sermon

Sunday after All Saints Day

Transcribed from a sermon given

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

November 6, 2011

Matthew 5:1-12

I was exploring the Internet on my IPad this week and came across an interesting advertisement. I wasn’t sure whether it was on Craig’s list or somewhere else, and it wasn’t clear whether it was a help wanted ad or personal ad, but it read something like this:

Wanted - merciful, meek, naïve person, preferably slightly depressed, who wants to change the world. Must be comfortable living in poverty. Persecution to be expected. Rewards heavenly.

Anybody want the job? Or whatever it is? Can you imagine going in for a job interview and saying, “I think that one of my greatest strengths is that I am very meek.” In the world of assertiveness training?  Jesus says the meek will inherit the earth. Or would you say, “Well, yes, I am in deep grief right now and tend to sort of cry at random times, but I am just the person you want to hire.”

What Jesus says is very countercultural. It is countercultural today, and it was countercultural when he said the beatitudes 2000 years ago.

But wait, there was more in this advertisement. It did have the duties if you chose to accept the position.  The duties include trusting and praising God, going to church, proclaiming the good news, serving everyone, loving everyone, and working for justice - and when you fail at any, or all of these, asking to be forgiven. Those are our baptismal covenant - it is what we agree to do when we are baptized.

For me the beatitudes and baptismal covenant are a job description for a Christian, or as Paul put it in the reading today, a child of God, for once we make the commitment to be Christians, we become children of God.

Now I wonder who would possibly accept such a position. Well today we’ve got three people who said yes to that. We have Ethan, and Audrey and Dylan. They have all decided that they want to be baptized. They want to make that commitment. They find themselves at a place where they want to know Christ better. They want to walk with Christ.

We always read the beatitudes when we celebrate All Saints Day. All Saints, to remind you who don’t know, All Saints Day is celebrating everyone who has died. All the saints who have died. Not just people who lived what we might call saintly lives. In scripture, the Greek word that is translated as saints comes from the root word for holy. So a saint is a holy person and a holy person is one that is close to God, or like God. It is not a group of people who had miracles. There was no special kind of decision that they were a saint. It is rather everyone who said yes to God. Everyone who did their best to try and serve God. Or even did a mediocre job to try and serve God, but who wanted to. The saints are all of us, and the saints that we remember on All Saints Day are the ones, the faithful in Christ, who have died and are part of what is called the fellowship of saints, or the communion of saints.  All the people being baptized are joining this great communion of saints. All the Christians alive today, all the Christians who ever lived, and all the Christians who ever will live. When we are baptized we become part of a huge community, and they are here with us today - that fellowship which we celebrate. 

Now the beatitudes are kind of interesting. They say blessed are…. And we can sort of get around blessed are ones who morn or blessed are whatever, because blessed means to us that they are saintly. But there are other translations, English translations like the Jerusalem Bible, that instead of using blessed they use the world “happy”. And they say happy are those who mourn. Happy are those who are meek. Happy are those who are persecuted. Happy are those who are poor. Well that’s really countercultural. Because in our culture we think that you are going to be happy because you’ve got money, and you don’t have any problems, and all that. But happy to me is not quite the right word to translate it, because I usually think of happy as something I feel from something outside. Like happy is how I felt when my daughter called me up and said that her work gave her a new IPad, do you want my old one? I was happy then. Happy is when everything is going great in the external world.

So I think a better word, instead of blessed or happy is the word “joyous” because when we are joyous it is not dependent on the outside world. Joyousness is something that comes up from inside of us. Something that over takes us and wells up from within. And we can be in grief and yet also know that there is that inner joy, in the grief and beyond the grief. That is a joyousness that can’t be taken away and isn’t affected by getting good things or bad things. It is a state of being.

The beatitudes - if Jesus lived today I am sure he would have used Twitter because the beatitudes are just the right length to tweet. You can imagine that, right? If you got a tweet that said, “blessed are the poor.” And you go “Hmmm, I could think about that for a couple of days.” They are easy short summaries.

I encourage you to pick one to spend a year with because the beatitudes are something that you can meditate on for a long time. Each one of them takes you to different places. For example, the one “Blessed are those who mourn.” Joyous are those who mourn. Happy are those who mourn. What in the world could that mean? Because to mourn, doesn’t that mean sadness. That’s just the opposite of being happy. And yet it is honoring that grief is real. And there is a blessing in those who are able to feel their grief, to know their sorrow, because it is only by knowing our sorrow that we can go through it and find the joyousness that lies beyond it. And those who mourn are not just those who grieve for someone they know who has died. There are those who mourn form the world, those who mourn for the people one the other side of the earth who have died in an earthquake, those who mourn for the poor and the children who don’t have a home, those who grieve for the imperfections of the world. Blessed are those who can really feel and acknowledge their grief, and know their grief.

It is interesting that the first reading that we read today is one that is often used at funerals. And it ends with “He will dry all their tears, wipe away all their tears.” So when we grieve, we grieve with Christ and there is a way in which when we are honest with how we feel and with our lose and our grief that we are close to God. God is there with us, walking through it, helping us through it. And so on those nights when we grieve, and we stay at home, and we curl up on our bed and we cry Jesus is there, his arms around us, helping us and promising us that we will make it through. Promising that we will begin to be able to experience that joy again. Not the happy, happy joy, but the deep satisfaction of knowing God.

One can do that kind of meditation on any one of the beatitudes.

(At this point the recording ended. I am not certain of the words I used to end this sermon. I am pretty sure that I reviewed again that the beatitudes and baptismal covenant make up the job description of Christians and then went into the service of baptism.)