Sermon: Ash Wednesday, 2/14/2024

Grace, Peace and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In the Gospel text we read for Ash Wednesday, Jesus comments on three pillar activities that we Christians do during Lent to get closer to God: good works or almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. This text is a great primer to be mindful of as we seek to deepen our communion with God through diverse means and practices this Lent. But Jesus does not seem content with just the “doing” of these things. In a sense, a God-fearing person is expected to do these things. So Jesus, instead of focusing on what is expected from God-fearing people, He seems to focus more at what is in the heart of the “doing”, what we might call intention. When we go into the realm of intention, we start entering a more ambiguous and uncertain terrain. The human heart, even of those who abide by all the rules externally, can have a multitude of reasons of why they do what they do. Taking advantage of today’s holiday coupling of Ash Wednesday and St. Valentine’s Day, romantic love, for example, can be full of the ambiguity of intention. Why do we love those we love? And from the point of the receiver, what is the other person thinking when they declare love or attraction? Are their motivations pure? Is this mere lust or wholesome attraction? A million thoughts can run through our minds trying to get to an answer but the intention will unmask itself eventually, and the truth of the relationship will inevitably be revealed. The intentionality that Jesus is talking about regarding these devotional acts is no different. You will know intention by its fruits, the truth will be revealed by the life of the people that practice them. Why do we do good works? Is it to be seen as good by others? Is it to gain favor with specific people? Is it to bolster my career or any other personal ambition? When we pray, is it to be seen by others as pious and God-fearing? Is it to incur spiritual authority over others? When I fast, am I running for some kind of spiritual Olympics where I will get the gold medal of asceticism or to show others how much I can sacrifice for God? Even the most pious and common place acts of devotion can become distorted by the human heart and its intentions, they can be bended to make our self-glorification the focus and end-goal of our devotions. And this is what Jesus is warning us about. Let the end-goal of all that you do be a deeper communion with God. That all that we do may reflect God’s Love, which gives all things in Creation their deeper meaning and preciousness.

Ash Wednesday reminds us of our death, and therefore it reminds us of our finiteness and limitedness. It thus concludes that in the face of that reality, so many of the intentions and designs that reign in our hearts are unworthy of the attention and care we give them. Thus Jesus exhorts us: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”. When our intentions and designs are impure, meaning they are focused in many other things other than God, Jesus poses the question: Where is your heart? Where is it? In other words, what are you paying attention to? When you do what you do in your life, where is your attention? What are your plans and expectations? These are hard questions, for we know that our attention is never pure. We are always caught up in some scheme that whisks our gaze away from the Love of God. Always something distracts us from the true source of the Good that we all ultimately seek. In our churches this happens a lot. For example, let us look to ourselves for a second. Here we are blessed with a beautiful sanctuary and building, with great resources and a wonderful community of people. However, no matter how beautiful and bountiful our earthly blessings as church are, if God is not in the center of it all, we are storing treasures on earth and not in Heaven. For the truth is that a lot of this is grass that withers, but there is a sure foundation that will never be consumed, and that is the faith that animates, gathers, serves, and brings life to all these beautiful things, the faith in the God that declares to us an eternal love that liberates us from the powers that oppress and diminish. With or without these beautiful things, if the center of gravity is God, then we are assured the life-giving treasures of God in Christ, we are assured what we proclaim in the liturgy together.

Beloved, in the same breath that we are subject to death, marked by the cross of Christ, grace abounds even more. God does not look at our death-driven condition and keeps silent, in Christ He has eternally spoken to lift us up from the mire. Today you will be reminded that you are dust, but the service will not end there, it ends with the sacrament of Communion, it ends with grace received in Christ’s Body and Blood. The cross of ashes you will bear in your forehead, sits with the cross you were marked with in baptism. In living, and in dying, you are God’s. We will hear this word of grace more clearly, when we truly look at ourselves in all our saintliness and sinfulness, in our mortality and finitude, in the struggle of intention, we bear ourselves as we are, and return to the God that claims us and create us with belovedness.

We can conclude from all this, that God favors a certain kind of intimacy with the heart of humanity. He likes to appear in hiddenness, in the secret prayers that so many of us do in our times of quiet. Many of the things He asks of us, are meant to be like a secret gift, like an intimate love declaration to the beloved. Most God-inspired goodness that has poured out in the world, only God knows and has seen. This is not take away from God’s work of justice, which like Dr. Cornel West rightly remarks, is what love looks like in public. But in daily living, across the world, the general good depends on hidden acts which only God sees and delights in. This is a sobering thought, for in an age where we seek to uphold our relevance through constant exposure to the public, Jesus advocates that plenty of godly goodness shines more brightly in humble secrecy. So in Lent, we actually begin this time where Jesus asks us not to be concerned with exterior praise and self-aggrandizement, but to do right in God’s sight for the sake of God, to pray for the Love of God. There is a great 16th century Spanish sonnet that beautifully speaks to this Lenten theme:

I am not moved, my God, to love you
By the heaven which you’ve promised
Nor am I moved by the Hell I fear
And for that reason not to offend you
You move me Lord!
It moves me to see you
Humiliated and nailed to a cross;
It moves me to see your body wounded so;
It moves me to behold your suffering and death.

Ultimately, I am moved by your love
And in such a manner that
Even if there were not heaven, I would love you,
And even if there were not hell, I would fear you.

You need give me nothing for me to love you,
For even if I had no hope for things hoped for
I would love you the same as I love you.

Like expressed in this sonnet, Jesus invites us to pure loving intention, that everything we do is transmitted not for the reward or the adulation, but purely for love of God and neighbor. There once walked upon the earth a French sinner and saint by the name of Charles de Foucald. And this man stored many treasures here on earth, seeking all kinds of pleasures and recognition in his military career. But he realized at some point, how empty all those things are, how they could never satisfy, and inspired by the devotion of Muslims in North Africa during his travels, he ardently sought God, knowing that if God encountered him on the way, his whole life would have to completely reorient itself towards Him. And thus he began to store treasures in Heaven. He left for the Holy Land, to the town of Nazareth, where he felt the call to live like Jesus lived, not in the form of Jesus’ public ministry, but in His hiddenness. It is true, we barely get a glimpse of that part of Jesus’ life, when He simply worked, and prayed, and lived like any other person in community. Most of Jesus’ earthly life was spent in that perfect anonymity. So brother Charles desired to store treasures in Heaven by living in what he called a universal brotherhood with the community, a life that would shout the Gospel by its example and love. He wanted his life to reflect the love of God found in the hidden life of Jesus Christ in Nazareth. So he worked as a gardener and handyman, and sought to serve everybody no matter where they came from. Everything he did, he sought to reflect the humility of Jesus. He prompted others to live a life of Nazareth wherever they were. To live humbly in the community for the Love of God, not necessarily to perform a great work, but to magnify God by being with and alongside the life of the people with perfect attention and love. And thus brother Charles gifts us with his life something to carry forward this Lenten season. Inhabit your Nazareth, cultivate the life of Nazareth in and around you, fill your life with the treasure that is never consumed, which is Jesus’ love and mercy present in us and for others. In knowing your finitude, let your life and this Lenten season be filled with a pure loving intention brought about by love for God. Nobody might see the love you bring to the table, but God does, and He greatly rejoices at the sight. May the Lord bless you and keep you as we begin the Lenten journey.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus, allow us to live out the gifts of your hidden life. That knowing that we are dust, we might put our attention and priority on the things that are life-giving and fruitful according to Your Word. Bring out of us a loving disposition, a loving disposition to praise you with a love that blesses others, not for our own gain, but to magnify the Goodness that keeps all things in existence. In your name we pray, Amen.