Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
I met someone in the grounds yesterday, who was looking for a venue for a contemplative event he is planning. Quite incidentally, as we chatted, he mentioned, in an off-hand kind of way, ‘relationships are everything. At the end of the day, relationships are all we have’, he said. And the greatest gift we have in our faith journey is those people who walk it alongside us, regardless of how long they stay. One such gift is my dear friend Anna, an episcopal priest in the states. Earlier this week she sent me her sermon for today – something we do, often. Parts of it made me catch my breath, because I found it so beautiful and, with her permission, I am sharing some of her thoughts this evening.
Every year, on Ash Wednesday, churches gather around the world and hear the same scripture from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus starts with this warning: “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.” And then it says, don’t sound trumpets and don’t stand and pray on street corners. In fact, the gospel writer goes on to say, “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray in secret.”
So, it is a strange juxtaposition on the day, kind of the only day really, where we collectively mark ourselves with the symbol of Christianity, the cross, and then go out onto the rest of our days literally marked as a religious person.
Often, I just ignore this complication in the passage and move onto the ashes, and the dust we come from, and the dust we will return to. But for some reason this year I heard it anew and I heard gospel, good news, in this reading from Matthew. And it made sense to me in a new way, why we would read this passage right before smearing ashes on our forehead in this most visible way.
Let’s go back to that passage for a moment again.
Jesus said, “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…. And do not sound a trumpet before you, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Rewards, rewards, rewards…. And suddenly it struck me. This isn’t about public displays of religion or not, this is about what we think we need to do to make God happy.
Jesus is setting us straight and reminding us that God is a God who loves us because of who we are, not because of what we have. God is a god who wants to be in relationship with us, in communication with us, not one who requires we pray in a way that proves our piety. God is not a god who only loves us when we do things a certain way, think, act, believe, within a particular box. God doesn’t need us to prove our worth, either spiritually or to one another. And God certainly isn’t a god who holds the values of consumerism, capitalism, consumption and power.
Jesus goes on to urge us not to store up our treasures on earth, because that’s not what’s important. Instead, store up our treasures in heaven, put our attention to a heavenly, loving way of being, because where our treasure is, our heart will be also.
So on this Ash Wednesday, we come together to remember that we are dust and from dust we come and to dust we shall return. We can hear the good news in that.
Our lovability, our worth, does not come from the religious acts we participate in or from the earthly things we amass.
Our worth is not based on the grades we get or how much money we earn.
Our worth is not grounded in how we appear to others or how many likes you get on social media.
Our worth is not even dependent on how many good things we do or how we recycle.
Our worth, our belovedness, comes from the very fact that we were created out of the dust, the soil, the very particles of earth, and that our loving God is holding us in and amongst all these things of life and will hold us throughout eternity, even after our bodies go back to the dust, to the earth from which we came.
Maybe it is no mistake that Christians press ash, and dust, and dirt, into our foreheads as we enter Lent. We long for this symbol of death, and mortality, endings and crumbling… because we know that within it, there is something so deep and comforting. As we acknowledge that the endings are the stuff of which the new beginnings are made, we see that our dust is what makes soil for growth.
The God that created us is the same God that is blowing into our dust, like God did of primordial Adam, creating us anew. That God is the same God who is holding the breadth of the cycles and assuring us that even what is crumbling is being cared for, and that love is being infused at every stage.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, dirt to dirt, remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.
Seeing those ashes on each other’s foreheads reminds us how we’re all in it together, in this messy, dirty, beautiful, interconnected web of life. And it’s as if in that moment, the dust dissolves that which separates us, as if the ash burns through the illusion that we are anything but fellow humanity, and part of creation. In that moment, we’re all in it together, mortal, human, non-human; creation, created, creator; lover and beloved; dust, dirt, heart, and spirit; all mixed together on this sacred day.
Amen.
