Today we gather together to begin the season of
Lent. Soon we will be receiving ashes on
our foreheads. The ashes are a visible
recognition of our own mortality and our own need for repentance. Lent is a journey, hopefully a journey of spiritual
reflection and change. But repentance is
not the same as guilt or shame. It is
easy to feel shameful or guilty, they require nothing new from us. Repentance is a change of heart and mind. As we move into the season of Lent we are
looking for that change within ourselves.
Today we are offered the space to admit our own vulnerability without
shame.
On the surface the imposition of ashes can seem to
be in contradiction to today’s Gospel message.
Jesus warns against public displays of piety and charity. He even says, “When you fast, put oil on your
head and wash your face.” Three times
Jesus warns against being like the hypocrites, he warns his listeners against
praying and fasting and giving alms for the wrong reasons. And it is for that very reason that we have
this particular Gospel every Ash Wednesday.
How we spend Lent can easily become a point of pride for us. It is easy for our Lenten disciplines to
become a sort of competition, or 40 day endurance race. The ashes can quickly become a point of pride
or even embarrassment. I used to tell
people what I was giving up for Lent and then spend 40 days complaining about
how hard it was. But I was missing the
point, and I had failed to listen to Jesus’ warnings.
All of what Jesus says in today’s Gospel can be
summed up in his final statement “Where your treasure is there your heart will
be also.” What exactly do we
treasure? I believe this is a harder
question than we like to admit. We know
what we are supposed to treasure, we know that we are supposed to say that things
like money, recognition and power are all things that we don’t want. Even if they are the very things that we
choose to pursue, we know we are never supposed to admit that those are the
things that we truly treasure. We can
even fool ourselves about our desires and priorities. The truth is, to really admit, even to
ourselves, where our heart is would be to expose it, make it vulnerable to
criticism and pain. So maybe one of the best things we can do
during this season of lent is determine exactly what are treasures really
are. Where do we keep our hearts?
And why does it matter? We give our hearts away to so many things
that by the time we get to God, what is left?
We seem to rely on everything but God to love us. In our constant search for wholeness we give
our love away to things like our careers, our wealth, our possessions, our
hobbies. We look to fulfillment through
food, or diets, through self-improvement programs or spiritual fads. We distract ourselves with Facebook or
television. None of these things are, in
themselves bad, but bit by bit we give our hearts to all of these meaningless and
temporary things that we wind up having almost nothing left to give to God or
to each other.
And so, thank God once a year we gather to speak the
truth of how we piece out our hearts, how we sin and fall short, how we rely on
every single other thing to love us – everything but God. We gather here today to be reminded that we
are dust and to dust we shall return. We
have broken our hearts into a million little pieces, and now we gather here to
begin the journey of gathering those pieces up again so that we can return them
to their maker. We are created and given
life by God’s divine love. And it is
that divine love that will restore our broken hearts to wholeness if we let
it. Of course, we do not need the season
of Lent to do this, but it helps.
Whenever we gather up the pieces of our hearts and offer them to God for
healing - that is repentance. That is
what Lent is about – returning to the only place where we can find wholeness,
the divine Love of God.
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