Ash Wednesday 2006B Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Did you know that Ash Wednesday is on Wednesday because the Church, probably around the year 1000 AD added the extra four days of the week so that there would be a full forty days of Lent.

The use of ashes as a sign of penitence has a much longer history, however. It comes into the Christian tradition from our Jewish roots in the Old Testament: Both Isaiah – our passage for today -- and Jeremiah speak of sackcloth and ashes. But Daniel (9:3-5) has the clearest indication of the penitential tradition as we understand it on this day:
“Then I turned to the Lord God, to seek an answer by prayer and supplication with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession, saying, “Ah, Lord, great and awesome God, keeping covenant and steadfast love with those who love you and keep your commandments, we have sinned and done wrong, acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and ordinances.””

At some time in the earlier church in Rome, when the discipline of public penitence was in force, penitents sometimes ceremonially sprinkled ashes on their heads or received fro a bishop a rough garment – sackcloth – on which ashes had been sprinkled. This day became known as the Day of Ashes. The current custom of marking foreheads with ashes in the sign of the Cross was probably introduced for the Day of Ashes by Pope Gregory I, who was Bishop of Rome from to 590 A.D. to 604 A.D.

In the Eleventh Century, when this primitive individual penitential discipline had become obsolete, the general penance of the whole congregation took its place. After the Great Schism between the Greek Churches of the East and the Latin Church of the West in 1054, our current custom of Ash Wednesday was enacted in its generally final shape as a universal practice by the Synod of Benevento in 1091 AD.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Even in life, we live with death. We strive to live well, provide for ourselves and others, and love God, but it’s just as hard to focus on the important things now as it was in the day of Jesus.
In the Gospel reading we hear of the hypocrites, seeking to show they are doing the right thing and in actuality accomplishing another. They are engaged in the public penance and yet the public nature of the act removes the focus from God and reunion with God to a "How I am doing?" audience oriented act. Jesus is offended by this type of self consciousness, the focus is on accruing attention to one’s self, and not on awareness of self, awareness of God, and the amendment of life that can emerge from the encounter with God. Jesus is impatient and angry with these public displays. There's no bread, no true food here. A reward yes, but it's fools' gold compared with the real thing. False piety is an enormous Kingdom blocker, and Jesus is painfully aware of this.

Jesus wants the real thing for his disciples, then and now, and so his teaching in Matthew is pointed and direct. Stay away from false piety. It names God wrongly and we’ll never get to God that way. If we want to meet God in the Ash Wednesday and Lenten actions of giving, praying and changing, we have to stay focused on God, for the joy of being with God. Lent is not for dark depression, its for enlightenment and healing.

Lent gives us the opportunity each year, and each day if we dare, to experience God's power over the forces against life. There is a reason sin and death are mentioned together so frequently. Not just because one leads to the other, but also because God knows that belief in the resurrection is a bit of a leap for us and so graciously has provided us a way for us to build our faith. Sin is the little death. The alienation, pain, separation and destruction sin causes in our life is legion. Sin can kill our dreams, our relationships, our health and our hope. The lived experience of true repentance, of placing oneself in the hands of the living God is awesome, scary, loving and liberating. Experiencing God's power and faithfulness in our lives builds our faith that the resurrections and liberations we experience now are a foretaste of what is to come when we face bodily death. We know surely and clearly that pain and death is not the end of the story. Resurrection is.

God doesn't expect faith out of nothing. God became human in Jesus in part to show us how and what humans need to do and focus upon in order to experience union with Divinity. Jesus life and words are a roadmap to encounter the living God. If we give ourselves into God's hands we will experience the power of God. And if we don't do any of this, we won't.

Jesus' instructions to the disciples on how to approach sacrifice, prayer and fasting is to put ourselves into that place where God wants us to go spiritually. Go to health, sanity and gladness. Take neither the way of self-aggrandizement and ego inflation or self-denigrating acts of asceticism. The temptation is to make a big public spiritual show because we're afraid that God won't, that God doesn't act, in our lives. That will take us from the place that God would have us be, a preparation of self for an encounter with Truth. Ash Wednesday is a gateway to the encounter. The Ash Wednesday helps us to get to the interior place where we can be clear, be true, be humble and hear God.

Doing the work of Lent, having the experience of Lent, of repentance and liberation, is what makes Easter Morning real. God has changed the story, death is not the end.

Amen.

Adapted in part from Selected Sermons for Ash Wednesday 1997

Wicomico Parish Church
PO Box 70
Wicomico Church, Virginia 22579