Ash Wednesday Meditation
Christopher H. Edmonston, HMPC
February 6, 2008
I.
NRSV Matthew 6:1 "Beware of practicing your
piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward
from your Father in heaven.
2 "So whenever you give alms, 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. Truly I tell you, they have received
their reward.
3 But when you give alms, do not let your left
hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your alms may be done in secret; and
your Father who sees in secret will reward you. 5 "And whenever you pray,
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. Truly
I tell you, they have received their reward.
6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and
shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who
sees in secret will reward you.
II.
Ash Wednesday, though an ancient Christian practice, is relatively new to we Presbyterians. It is a modern commitment that we have made as we have tried to be more liturgical. In ancient Christian practice the word liturgia represented one of the essential tenants of the faith. From liturgia we derive the word liturgy and its adjective-partner, liturgical. Strictly speaking – liturgy means the way the worship; the words we use during worship; the times of year during which we worship – like Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost; the symbols we share and promote during worship; the colors of the vestments; the songs we sing, the hymns we choose, the unison prayers of confession and adoration – all that we do in worship, is our liturgical expression of devotion to God.
Now, don’t get me wrong. We Presbyterians have always understood something deep and important about sin and sinfulness – about human finitude, about human mortality, about human temptation, and about human depravity. It is just that we didn’t dedicate a worship service to it. We didn’t talk much about the season of Lent. Now we do. And I would argue, for good measure.
There is a quotation that is become popular with 20-something, emergent, next-generation Christians. It is from David Crowder, a cutting-edge Christian Rock singer, and I think his quotation captures perfectly what Lent, and Ash Wednesday, are most completely and assuredly about. Crowder and his band say, “When God’s divinity meets our depravity it is a beautiful collision.”
III.
The ancients understood, and rightly so, that to best understand something one had to examine and exhume two essential qualities about it: you had to understand what it was, and to understand what it was not. You know what day is by knowing the characteristics of daytime and by knowing what night is. And you know what night by knowing the characteristics of the nighttime and through knowing what day is. A dog is a dog because it is a dog, and because it is not a cat. And so on we could go.
Part of the way, then that we know the divinity of God is in understanding who God is – “O Lord you set your glory above the heavens – there is none like you – O Lord Our Sovereign how majestic is you name above the earth! O Lord Our Sovereign how majestic is you name above the earth!” – so says Psalm 8, with refrains. If creation is, in fact, a very good reflection of the power, genius, and grace of God, then God indeed is great and good and has the whole world right in his hands! Can we talk about divine?
Then too it is true that we know who God is, we understand God’s divinity by understanding our depravity, our propensity to sin, our attraction to darkness instead of to light.
Lent places these two concomitant notions side by side – Lent is the intersection of depravity and divinity. Forty days we are called to examine ourselves, question our motives, and dedicate practice and time to seeking out the will of a God made known in man who himself, our Jesus, underwent periods of trial and introspection, torture, and pain. Lent says to yes – “Yes you are mortal; yes you are sinful; yes you are imperfect in and of yourselves; yes, you need God and you need God more than you might have ever imagined.”
It is Hymn number 280 in our hymnbook that begins, “Amazing grace how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me, I once was lost but now am found was blind but now I see.” The experience of grace is dependent upon the admission of wretchedness – it is a beautiful collision when our depravity meets God’s divinity.
Or, it is hard to be saved if we do not know that we are drowning. The tragedy of American culture in 2008 is that we are inhaling water and so few seem to know it. Even in our town there seems to be evidence that we are drowning as a pornographer, peddling a trade that disgraces God’s purposes for human sexuality, objectifies women in the worst way, and sells images reflective of the divine for profit, has opened a shop for his wares only 1000 or so paces from this very pulpit. “Things fall apart,” wrote the poet, “the center cannot hold.”[1]
Lent, in this light is like a life ring, an escape pod, a safety net. It is a corrective to the myopia of self-indulgence and self-affliction that bombards our sensibilities every time we consume our precious morsels of media. Lent calls us to be honest about ourselves, to stop worshipping at the church of self-esteem and begin the long and difficult discipline of humility before the throne of grace, of learning to ask for forgiveness, and believing more in the power of a second-chance for redemption than we do in the rationalizations and self-justifications that so easily populate our speech.
IV.
Erskine Clarke perhaps the quietest and most brilliant Presbyterian historian writing today, recently asked, “What does it mean to observe Lent in a culture that is increasingly marked by deep deceptions? What are the disciplines of Lent in a culture that thrives on advertising-induced illusions? How are we to celebrate Lent when our hearing is shaped by talk radio and our seeing is blurred by the banalities of television? How in the world are we to preach Lent when we know how readily we [we preachers] have ourselves participated in these deep deceptions?”[2]
Lent asks tough questions, like these. It tests our motives. It questions our intentions. Why? Because we are prone to sin and to self-delusions. And, because God is ever aware of our failings and flailings, our fissures and falters as we breathe the air of this good creation. Lent is a chance to restore our hearts in their longing for God, “Surely,” writes Erskine Clarke, “we must turn to the texts of Lent and to the ancient traditions of Lent, not as sources of some magic to extract us from the morass of our culture, but as gifts of the One who is Truth and Grace.”[3]
V.
One of my favorite bits of country wisdom is an old saying that I have tried to remember and to live by. The saying goes, “You can put a five dollar tree in a ten dollar hole, but you can’t put a ten dollar tree in a five dollar hole.”
The word of God is likened to that ten dollar tree. God’s grace, God’s truth are offered to us, if only we will allow them to be rooted deep within us. Sanctification occurs – our becoming more mature, more disciplined, more Spirit-led happens – when we allow the five dollar hole that too often we have settled to become, to be expanded to the point where room for God is made and our discipleship fills the hole. That is what Jesus is talking about – he is calling us to be a ten dollar hole, a place where the divine Word of God would enter in and fill us completely. Jesus is giving us evidence and advice about how to widen the hole, a hole waiting to be in-filled by grace through sacrificial giving and through the proper way to pray.
The writer of Psalm 51 knows that he has a hole to fill – he begs to be cleaned for goodness’ sake! He turns to God to fill it. We would do well to do the same.
In the intersection of divinity and depravity that is the season of Lent, in the liturgical, the worshipping life of the church, and the individual piety that Jesus is calling us to note and practice, we have formula for a forty day prescription, a forty day regimen for spiritual renewal that just might cure what ails us.
Our prayer is not that days would be merry and bright – but even more importantly – that days would be repentant and contrite until the joy of Easter morning when we might know both the divinity of God and God’s divine love for all of us.
Amen.