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.”

Sixth Sunday After Epiphany Year A

Choose life or death, blessings or curses. Make a choice. Every day we have many opportunities to make the only choice that really maters, which is do we choose to turn toward God and toward love or do we turn away from God and away from love. 

Sixth Sunday After Epiphany Year A

Transcribed from a sermon given on

Feb 13, 2011

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Matthew 5:21-37

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Wasn’t it a beautiful day yesterday? It was the most perfect weather I have ever known. It was so nice that I went down to the beach and everybody, everybody, was on the beach. There must have been a million dogs, all running around having a good time and there was this one poodle, I’ve never seen such a big poodle. It was the size of a horse.

Now, most of you figured that the poodle was maybe this big, certainly not the size of a horse. And everybody knows that there were probably about 65 dogs not a million dogs. And not everybody could possibly have been on the beach because you are part of everybody and you weren’t there. So you knew that. You knew that I was exaggerating. It’s a figure of speech called hyperbola. It is commonly used in rhetoric in order to get people’s attention and interest and to make a point. We all know it. We all use it. Who doesn’t, when they are in the middle of a fight or debate, happen to say, “You never do the dishes!” You don’t say 95 percent of the time you don’t do the dishes; you say you never do the dishes. And of course the response is, “But I always take out the garbage.” It’s not, “I take out the garbage 95% of the time.” We use hyperbola all the time. It makes our speech and our conversations more interesting.

We as Americans and 21^st century people have gotten very much into facts, and getting it precise and correct. But it doesn’t make for an interesting speech. Just think about Al Gore.

We expect some exaggeration, some hyperbola. In the middle east it is even more expected than it is in our society. You always exaggerate. No one would have a meal with a friend and leave and say, “That was one of the better meals that I have had.” You would have to say “That was the best meal that I have ever had.” And if you didn’t exaggerate you could insult the other person.

Jesus was a great speaker. One of the things we can be sure of is that he wasn’t boring to listen to, otherwise he wouldn’t have had crowds coming out to listen. So he used all the various tricks of a rhetorician. He used humor, although the way we read scripture we don’t necessarily recognize the humor that is there. And he used hyperbola, which he certainly used in this particular passage.

We have to think about this Gospel passage in context. It’s a continuation of what we have been reading each Sunday and takes place within the sermon on the mount. He has shared the beatitudes, which are a whole new way of saying who are blessed by God. In the line just before this passage that was left out Jesus says, “And your righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees.” So he has just said that you have to be more righteous than the Pharisees, and then now he is describing what that righteousness would look like.

There are a lot of people who say they take the Bible literally word for word, but they are not all blind. And my guess is that most of them at some point have had their eye lead them astray. But they didn’t follow the bible literally and pluck out their eyes. And we don’t have very many people who are missing a hand that they chopped off because they did something wrong with a hand. Everyone know that Jesus didn’t mean that literally. He was using hyperbola. He was using exaggeration.

He was reacting to the Pharisaic mind set, which was to try to follow all of God’s commandments literally. But there are a lot of commandments in scripture and then there were a lot of other rules and regulations that had accrued over time. Following them became quite a difficult process. The lawyers to tried to interpret exactly what it meant. So, for example, one of the ten commandments is remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. It was generally agreed upon that you should not work on the Sabbath, but what did it mean to not work on the Sabbath? Well you weren’t supposed to cook, but you could take food out and put it on the table. You weren’t supposed to load your donkey down, but what about taking water to your donkey? Well a donkey that would go an entire day without water would not be healthy, so you were allowed to water and feed your animals even though that really is sort of work.

So there was a whole process of trying to figure out exactly what these laws meant and how are you going got follow each and every one of them. Its sort of like today trying to figure out the tax code. It is so complicated, and there are so many different situations, that you have to hire somebody to figure out how to follow it. So the Pharisees claimed that the were superior because they followed all the laws and rules. Jesus is saying if you are going to be prove your righteousness by your own behavior, you must be more righteous than the Pharisees This is what you really need to do. You can’t use an excuse like divorce to say it is okay to be with another woman. You can’t say that just because you didn’t murder someone if you have hate in your heart that you are not sinning. He used this to make the point that God’s law is not about getting the details right, but about getting the heart and essence of it right.

Today we are celebrating a baptism and we will be sharing something called the Baptismal Covenant. The Baptismal Covenant is the essence of what Episcopalians decided was the most important essence of what it means to be a Christian. I’d like us to take a look at that right now.

It is in your bulletin, and it starts on page four. I am going to be talking about the ones that are on the top of page 5. I am going to start with the last two.

The last one says, Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.” Well if you respect the dignity of every human being you are not liable to murder them. And if you respect the dignity of every human being you are not liable to swear and use nasty language about them. And if you respect the dignity of every human being you are not likely to commit adultery because you are not respecting the person you are with or with their spouse.

The one before that is, “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.” These statements are positive and not negative. They are not “Thou shalt nots.” These are things you are supposed to do, and if you really do them, if you really love your neighbor as yourself, you are not going to hurt other people. You are not going to steal from them. You are not going to lie to them. And if you are striving for justice you are not going to swindle people. You are not going to be concerned primarily for your own good.

So you can look at those last two as the foundation of how do we live a good life - not specifics, not a whole list of laws. The thing I like best about our baptismal covenant is the top one on page 5. And it says, “Will you persevere in resisting evil and and whenever you fall into sin repent and return to the Lord?” It doesn’t say if you fall into sin, it says whenever you fall into sin. We know we can’t follow every law. We know that there will be times when we will be attracted to someone we shouldn’t be attracted to. We know there will be times when we will say or do things that will hurt another person or hurt ourselves. But we have the gift through Christ to know that we will be forgiven if we repent and return to the Lord.

In the first reading today, God says to God’s people, choose life or death, blessings or curses. Make a choice. Every day we have many opportunities to make the only choice that really maters, which is do we choose to turn toward God and toward love or do we turn away from God and away from love. That’s what repentance means. It is to turn around.

In the early centuries of the church, when someone would come for baptism they would quite literally turn around. They would start the service facing to the west which represented that which is not of God and at some point during the service they would physically turn around to face the east which represented God and light and new hope.

Each day, each moment of each day, we make a choice. We choose life, God and love or we choose what leads to death which is that which is not of love and not of God. So one aspect of our baptism is that choice. That choice to turn to God.

Today we are having the privilege of witnessing and participating in the baptism of Savannah Grace. And even though she is too young to choose, she will be growing into that. Her parents and her God parents will be making those vows for her, so I would like to ask the baptismal party to come forward.

Fourth Sunday after Epiphany Year A

What is the source of true happiness? The beatitudes are a radical statement of what it means to be happy.

The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany Year A

Transcribed from a sermon given

On January 30, 2011

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart, Ph.D.

Micah 6:1-8

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Matthew 5:1-12

I’d like you to imagine that you are an alien from another planet and you have discovered that there is life on this blue planet earth. You haven’t come to visit yet, but you have been able to get our TV channels, so you have this whole array of TV shows over the past 60 years. You are working on your Ph.D. dissertation where you are attempting to discern what it is that makes these earthlings happy. What is the source of happiness based, of course, on the TV shows? Well the first thing you might come up with is that the main source of happiness for human beings is money. You look at the TV shows and see that they will do stupid and crazy things on the game shows to make a little money. They hoard it, they steal it, they hurt each other for it. It seems to be their primary motivation, and what brings them joy.

You might also see that another determinant of happiness is to not get too attached to other people, to play it cool, because you see so much unhappiness because of deep relationships. And so the source of happiness is to be detached, cool, calm.

The next thing is that it is very clear that happiness comes from being assertive. You only need to watch a couple of episodes of Oprah to get an idea that you need to be assertive. And if you watch other shows you see you need to be strong, you need to take care of yourself. Clearly that’s an important source of happiness.

For the next one you might want to get a good overall view of human happiness, so you spend some time reviewing the family sitcoms from the fifties. From this you conclude that happiness for those people came from being satisfied with the way things are.

But then one of your advisors says, “But you’ve left out this whole large body of literature called Survivor. And clearly to be happy one has to be ruthless. One has to be treacherous. And clearly the ultimate source of happiness is to be ‘the winner’. Look at how people celebrate when their teams win. Look at the joy on the faces of the winners of the game shows and how miserable the ones who come in second are.”

Then finally it seems to be important to be famous, well liked, because that is how you get on the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. That’s why so many of the shows, especially on cable, are about these people who are famous. It is not always clear what they are famous for, they are just famous.

So the conclusion of your dissertation comes out and says “According to the TV culture of the United States the source of happiness, the one who would be truly happy, is one who is rich, cool, assertive, satisfied, ruthless, unforgiving, who wins and therefore becomes famous.

Now secretly in your heart are any of those things what you really want? Maybe when you were younger you really wanted or thought were important? Do you want to be famous? Do you want to win? Do you want to have that money?

But of course if you remember we just read the beatitudes. And each one of those is the exact opposite of what Jesus says is the source of happiness. The Greek word translated blessed can be translated a number of different ways. In the New Jerusalem Bible it is translated as happy. It also means that you are blessed by God, that you have a special place in God’s heart, that you are joyous.

So in the beatitudes Jesus says the one who is happy, the one who has the true deep joy, is the one who is poor in spirit, meek (that’s the opposite of being assertive), those who morn, and of course if we open our hearts to care about other people there will be times when we will grieve at the loss of another. To hunger and thirst for righteousness means you are not satisfied with the way things are. To be merciful is the exact opposite of being ruthless. To be pure in heart is to be honest, the exact opposite of the treacherous things you see on Survivor. To be a peace maker means that there is something more important than winning and losing. And of course if you are being persecuted you are not necessarily being liked.

So these are what Jesus says are our true sources of happiness. It is completely counter cultural. It goes against everything we hear about in our culture. And of course it was completely counter cultural in Jesus’ time too. The Beatitudes are radical. But there is also so many of them that you can kind of put them aside. Oh aren’t they sweet, I don’t really remember them and live them out but they are really nice.

One of the frustrations as a preacher when the reading is the beatitudes is there is not enough time to do all of them justice. In fact, I could easily preach for a long time on any one of those beatitudes. So here’s what I am going to suggest. I put on pieces of paper a beatitude and I am going to pass these around and let the Holy Spirit have you pick one, and then pass it on to the next person. Pass these around as I talk. Pick one and take it home with you and hang out with it. If you are a scholar, you will go on your computer and you will look up the translations of it. You might look up some people’s commentaries on it. You could study it that way, even go back to the original Greek. If you are a contemplative type you could sit and meditate on it. If you are a procrastinator you can go and put it on your pile and you will get around to it sometime. If you are a little obsessive compulsive you can decide how many minutes you are going to spend each day looking at it and contemplating it. If you are an artist you could draw it. If you are a dancer, you could see how you would dance this beatitude. If you are a singer maybe you can come up with a song. But be with it. And of course if you are one of those people who is a doer figure out how you can do this in your life.

The beatitudes, each one of them is so rich that you can spend months thinking about it, reflecting on it, living with it and letting it change you from the inside out. You can’t do all of them at once but spend some time with whichever one you pulled out.

The beatitudes are a little long, in our limited attention span culture, to memorize. We like little pithy statements. I was at the board of trustees and the standing committee for the diocese retreat and we were talking about strategic planning. We were talking about the importance of having a motto, a logo, something that is short and clear and that can appear everywhere and sets up your mission statement in just a few words that everyone can remember.

The beatitudes would be a great mission statement but no one would remember them. But the first reading today from Micah gives us from the prophet a sort of shorter version of the beatitudes. Very simple. Very clear. “What does the Lord require. Three things, do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.” You can remember that one. Do justice, love kindness (and sometimes it is translated as love mercy) and walk humbly with your God.

To do justice means that God wants us to be active. Jesus put it in terms of bringing in the kingdom of God on Earth. Thy kingdom come, here on earth. A just world. A carrying for those who are weak, for the widows and orphan, for the poor and the sick, of seeing that there is justice done on earth.

The second one is love kindness, love mercy. Jesus put it, “Love one another as I have loved you.” To treat every human being as a child of God. To be and live in kindness.

And to walk humbly with God. Humility is one of those words that is often misunderstood. Humility is not a bad self concept. In fact, a person with a bad self concept is often very egotistical because “I’m no good,” “I’m overweight,” “I’m so uncoordinated,” “I’m not smart,” “I just can’t do anything right.” I, I, I, every sentence starts with I. It is all about what is wrong with them. That’s not humility. Humility is being honest about who we are. Acknowledging the gifts we have from God and giving glory to God. That it is not about us.

It is interesting that walk humbly with God is translated by Peterson in the Message (he has some very interesting translations sometimes) as, “Don’t take yourself too seriously, take God seriously.” In other word, being humble is acknowledging the gifts you have and using them to help other people but not taking it too serious. Not thinking too much of yourself, or too little of yourself, and giving all the glory to God. Or as Paul said in the reading today, “if you are to boast, boast in the Lord” because that is where all our gifts come from. It keeps us in the right perspective.

So remember and try to live out “to do justice”. That a wonderful mission statement, vision for your own life, to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.

Today we are having our annual meeting and we probably as a vestry will look at a vision statement. But what a wonderful mission statement for a church. A church that does justice. And we do a lot of caring about other people and outreach. That loves kindness, that loves mercy. That knows how to forgive and that teaches people about reconciliation and love. And that walks humbly with God. That acknowledges who we are and what our gifts are. And always remembers that God is the source of all that we have and all that we are. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God, that is the source of true happiness.