There are some sermons that flow out of my brain and into my fingers on the computer keyboard pretty easily. This was not one of them. Between mourning the deaths of my godmother and a good friend from the Mickee Faust Club, a war raging in Europe because of a tinpot dictator such as Vladimir Putin, and the ongoing efforts to marginalize people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community in this country...I was having a hard time getting 'excited' to write a sermon for a day that is all about our mortality. As my spouse noted, I had a little bit of the late Fr. Lee Graham sitting on my shoulder exclaiming loudly, "I ain't dust!!"
I understand his point, and I don't fully agree. I am dust. We all are dust. But we aren't dust yet, and we have work to do while we're still here in these bodies on this planet. And, in the end, it begins with getting right in our hearts.
Texts: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21; Joel 2:12; Ps.51:18
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As I stand here tonight…I am aware that so many people have been
experiencing loss because of death. We have been burying family, friends,
parishioners, colleagues and neighbors. Beloved celebrities have passed away
and with each of those deaths goes a little piece of ourselves…a remembrance of
our childhood or some other part of our past that we thought we’d have forever.
And so at this service, where we remember our mortality, with those
words that “we are dust and to dust we shall return,” there’s a part of me that
is reminded of the old song refrain: How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?
How much more “reminding” do we really need that our time on earth is limited
and fragile?
Then…on a night when our baptismal cross is re-traced on our forehead
in black ash… we have the reading from Matthew’s Gospel, which seems to counter
Jesus’ instructions to not make much ado about our piety and our prayers. I don’t think you can get more obvious that
you are a follower of Jesus than to walk around with a black cross smudged in
the middle of your head.
But these ashes aren’t about showing off our piety and our Christianity,
at least I hope that isn’t the motivation.
The Matthew passage highlights three practices that Jesus’ Jewish
audience would have known…and we get the sense people are praying, fasting, and
doing acts of charity and social justice. And since we’re here, I would be
willing to guess we probably do some if not all those same things in our own
lives.
But the actions themselves isn’t what is at the center of this
Gospel. It’s about the intentions of the acts rather than the attention the
acts receive.
The more I looked at it, the more I wrestled with this, I realized
that a key line in the text comes at the end of the passage: “where your treasure
is, there your heart will be also.”
The heart is a powerful and vital organ. It works to take in
deoxygenated blood and pumps back out blood filled with oxygen into the body.
This anatomical lesson became a point of mystical meditation for me some years
ago when I was walking the labyrinth at my massage school. As I moved slowly
through the cut grass, I had a vision of God as Love. And Love being represented
by the heart symbol. I thought about how the heart and the lung work together in
this kind of cleaning up and sending out blood into the body. And I thought
about how the heart has four chambers…in the same way we hear that God’s house
has many rooms. I remember that feeling I had that if God is Love, and Love is
a heart, then what an amazing thing this is that Love takes in all the
imperfection, cleans it up, and gives it new life to be sent out?
Our biblical ancestors saw the heart as the center of thought, intention,
and moral disposition. What happens in the heart becomes the way in which a
person lives and moves and has their being in the world. If we think about the
acts we do…such as if we make a charitable contribution…it can have the affect
of helping another person or entity. It might also make us feel good or useful
to have helped another. It can also be a means to draw attention to ourselves.
That’s more of an ego trip and isn’t so much about relieving another person
from suffering as it is about us feeling good for having performed goodness. It
can also keep us separated from the other rather than entering their experience
in a true sense of solidarity. We continue that siloed existence of “us” and “them”
instead of seeing that we…every one of us…are in this life together…and have a
responsibility to each other.
What Jesus is calling us to do in this excerpt from Matthew is to
do an examination of ourselves, our motives, and be less about the performance
of doing what is right, and actually fixing our hearts on God so that we live
in right relationship with others. Jesus wants more than status updates on
social media or checks in the mail. We
are called to have our hearts broken by being in relationship with the person
who is hurting. As Mother Teresa was quoted as saying “May God break my heart
so completely that the whole world falls in.”
That crazy, counter-cultural Jesus who wants us to break our hearts!
But he’s no crazier than the prophet Joel. The prophet calls upon people
to “return” to God… with all our heart…rending our hearts and not
our clothing.
God doesn’t need us to rip up our outerwear; God is looking for us
to do a self-check and pull apart our hearts…figuratively speaking… and examine
our thoughts, our intentions and how we go about living in the world.
Soon…we will hear the psalmist remind us that God doesn’t despise
the broken and contrite heart. In fact, that’s exactly what God is looking for
so God can get to work on us…just like the heart and lungs work to clean up the
blood.
When we acknowledge our imperfections and mistakes, our anger and frustration
at loss of control over events in our lives or the world around us, and even acknowledging
the weight of our grief, that’s the moment when God comes to meet us. So if you
have come here tonight with troubles…or a sense that things aren’t quite right
in your world…this is your night…your season…to give space…and allow your heart
to crack open. Begin the practice of fasting on the fears of falling short and
feasting on the faith that we are loved by God as the Holy One’s human
creatures.
May the cross of ashes on our foreheads serve as a visible reminder
of that.
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