Ashes III - Sermon

Turn to the Living God

There is but one way to turn to God on Ash Wednesday, and that way is to allow your heart to be broken open. 

Stand still, and silent, and watch as your heart breaks open into a thousand glistening pieces, the pieces marking a person who has turned entirely in the direction of God.

There are other ways, on other days, to encounter God.  There are paths of calm and repose, there are mountaintops of joy, there are rivers of energy.

But on Ash Wednesday, on this day on which we recognize and reverence the fragmentation of human life, there is but one way to approach God, and that is with a broken heart. 

For what is your heart broken tonight? 

For the world, God’s world?
in which warfare does not cease?
in which water and air fill with the oil and smoke of polluted waste?
in which animals go extinct every day as a consequence of human greed and destruction?

For what is your heart broken tonight?
For human society?
in which poverty and disease claim thousands of lives every day?
in which hunger and illness limit human potential
in which bright-eyed children are denied their basic educational and health needs?

For what is your heart broken tonight? 
For the human family?
n which divorce and conflict run rampant
in which strife and envy are more prevalent than love and compassion?
in which people repeatedly choose themselves over those they love? 

For what is your heart broken tonight? 
For yourself?
for relationships ground to dust?
for deep desires abandoned by the wayside?
for losses and heartaches for which it seems no remedies exist

We don’t want to recognize, let alone reverence, these broken, fragmented slivers of heart. 

We don’t even want to look at them, strewn in the paths we hope we have left behind.

And yet, in order to receive the blessing of Ash Wednesday, as the pastor-poet Jan Richardson tells us,

all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so that you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go. 

all you have to do
is let your heart break.

“All” you have to do? 

I have had times in my life – long, long times – when I have wondered how one would ever, could possibly, return to God with all of one’s heart.  Times when the broken pieces are so many, they would fill an entire desert.  Times when those pieces are so scattered that no one could gather them into a basket and they could not possibly be pieced together, not even by God.

So what could it mean, to return with your whole heart to God? 

To repent, to change your entire orientation,
 to spin in a complete circle and then to keep going,
until you were face to face with the living God? 

Isaiah tells us.  The prophet Isaiah tells us that it is when we are most broken, when we are a people in exile, when God seems far, far away: 

We are to share our bread with the hungry. 
We are not the only people starving for hope, for comfort, for peace. 
We are not the only people longing for shelter from the cold, from loneliness, from grief, from oppression. 
We are not the only people who feel that life is unfair, that we are unappreciated, that our gifts go to waste and our desires remain unnoticed.

We are to look toward others who share our brokenness, and to share our bread with them, 
 and then, as Isaiah says,

“God will satisfy [our] needs in parched places, and make [our] bones strong; and [we] shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.

When we, each of us, return with all of our heart toward God, we do so by turning not solely to God, but to all in need of God’s justice, for God’s justice means food for the hungry, freedom for the enslaved, comfort for the hurting. 

We cannot sweep up our millions of broken pieces, we cannot paste and glue them back together, we cannot save the world from sin, or creation from destruction.

But God can.  And Ash Wednesday serves to remind us that,
into the ashes of human death,
Jesus Christ comes to restore a universe and a humanity
to the beauty of shining, beloved wholeness
which our God has always intended and toward which God continues to labor.

There is a beautiful song, the words of which go like this:
Turn, turn to the living God,
The God of healing and comfort,
And in delight, God will turn to you,
In delight God will turn to you.

Tonight, with the imposition of ashes and the reception into our bodies of the bread of life and the cup of salvation, we turn to the living God. 
 
We allow the pieces of our broken hearts to be gathered by the one who will mold and meld and solder them into new life. 

We allow ourselves to be reminded that the bread offered to us is given us for sharing. 

We affirm, gently but without reservation,
that in delight God turns to us
and that, with healing and comfort
Jesus brings resurrection life. 

Ashes - II

From 2009, written six months after Josh died.

*****

Return to me with your whole heart. That was the line from Joel 2:12 that I heard early Wednesday morning.

Your whole heart, I thought? What can that mean, when your heart is not whole?

My heart is shattered.

It lies in tiny shards all over the ground.

Its jagged pieces spin into space, floating past Jupiter like lost little pilgrims.

Its dusty bits float on the oceans, bits of ash, sparkling grimly in the sunlight and filtering slowly downward, into the darkness where oddly luminescent sea creatures chart paths we can barely imagine.

One might want to turn to God again. The word metanoia slides off the tongue. It sounds graceful, and hopeful. But if God's desire is for a whole heart, if one can turn toward God only with an intact heart, then one is surely lost.

Late last night I turned to the passage in another version. Return to me with all your heart. Of course, I had known, in some small and isolated portion of my mind, that "whole" meant "all." I had known that in my own broken heart the response to what seemed a play on words but was really a conundrum of translation reflected my own longing for wholeness.

Your heart. In Biblical Judaism, the seat of your being. The essence of who you are.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. So end the readings for the day, with the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:21.

Barbara Brown Taylor has a wonderful sermon about the treasure in the field. (The Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew has a lot to say.) The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Why does he purchase the entire field; why doesn't he just dig up the one section? The treasure, she concludes, is scattered in plain sight, glittering all over the field.

Your heart accompanies your treasure and so there it is,

strewn across the field, scattered across the universe, mixed with the salt of the sea.

Return to me with your whole heart.

Return to me with the gift of a heart so cracked open that that in its wholeness it encounters brokenness everywhere.

Return to me with all of your heart.

You will find its pieces in places to which you would never have sought to journey on your own.

It is, indeed, an appalling thing, the strange mercy of God.

Ashes - I

I think I'll post three reflections today. 

 

This year's perspective.

 

One from four years ago.

 

Tonight's sermon.

 

**********

 

Ash Wednesday presents a particular dilemma of dissociation for me. 

 

There is the public me, who will preside over an Ash Wednesday service tonight.  I have burned last year's palm branches in my fireplace and crushed what was left into fine ash, which now sits in a plastic bag on a kitchen shelf.  This doesn't sound very holy, does it?  But the ordinary and the sacred always blend in a life of faith.

 

I think of Forrest Church, preaching at Chautauqua many, many years ago, and proclaiming that "We have religion because we live, and then we die, and we need to make sense of that."  I didn't ponder that while I was burning the ashes last week, but today I do.

 

There is the pubic/private me, who will preach a short sermon tonight, a sermon which emerged from searing experience.  As time passes, you are indeed able to take that experience and give words to it that are more universal in scope. 

 

I don't consider that to be a particularly good thing.  I would prefer to have foregone the experience.

 

There's the private me.  The one who has an urn half-filled with ashes in her bedroom closet.  Jan Edmiston says today that most of us hide our ashes in the closet.  She is speaking metaphorically.  Those of us with tangible ones keep them in all sorts of places.  I keep some in the Pacific Ocean, some in the Atlantic, some in Lake Chautauqua, and some in the mountains of North Carolina.  Some in a locket. And some in the closet, because it takes a long time to scatter ashes across the globe.  Or at least across our small parts of it.

 

I don't much care for Ash Wednesday.  I used to love it, but now it's not exactly as if I need a reminder.

 

Lenten Practice: The Desert

 

 

Last year during Lent I preached a series of sermons on spiritual practices.  I think that they were well-received, but then: THUNK.

 

It wasn't for some weeks, maybe months, that I realized that I had introduced the unfamiliar concept of spiritual practice to my congregation without offering them any concrete, practical advice on how to implement any such thing in their own lives.

 

(I often find that matters that seem clear to me are . . . not so much to others.  This applies to all kinds of things, including where one should store the vacuum cleaner.)

 

So, this year: a reprise, with practical suggestions and a handout each week.

 

My first thought was to send them off with an idea for an hour's attentive solitude to try once during the week, but a pastor friend told me, No.  Too much. 

 

And then I remembered how often I suggest to people who are just embarking on a new life of contemplative prayer that they give it three minutes a day, while they're brushing their teeth in the morning.  Most of us complain, when we try to get serious about contemplation, that we don't have time, that we can't catch a break, that we are endlessly distracted ~ but we all have to brush our teeth, right?  So choose a topic ~ gratitude, say ~ and ponder that while you brush.  It's a start.

 

I'm trying something of the same approach with my congregation.  Every week, a handout inserted in the bulletin, with images and quotes and suggestions for three ten-minute periods of prayer, to do whenever they want during the following week.

 

This week's topic is Practicing the Desert.  The handout's finished; I'll include it here in bits and pieces over the next few days.

 

 

 

 

Image: Sossusvlei Dune, Namib Desert  ~ Wikipedia.

An Ignatian Lent

If you've wondered about the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, or perhaps made them in some form and seek a similar prayer experience for Lent, here's an opportunity from Loyola Press:

"Last year we launched An Ignatian Prayer Adventure, an eight-week online adaptation of the Spiritual Exercises. As we draw close to Lent 2013, I invite you to participate again or for the first time.

Guest bloggers Michelle Francl-Donnay and Greg Herrle will share their experiences with the retreat this year through posts here on dotMagis.
Michelle Francl-Donnay is the mother of two teenage boys, a professor of chemistry, and a regular contributor to Philadelphia Archdiocese’s  CatholicPhilly.com, where she writes about the joys and struggles of trying to live a contemplative life in the midst of everyday chaos. Michelle blogs about life, laundry, prayer, and God at Quantum Theology.
Look for Michelle’s posts on Tuesdays.
Greg Herrle we met here on this blog last summer, when he and his wife Ruth set out on the Camino Ignaciano and shared some of their story with us.
Greg’s posts will appear on Thursdays.

Here’s what one of last year’s participants, Patrick Nugent, said about the experience:

I had the most powerful, enjoyable, challenging, uplifting Lent of my life. I owe it to following your Lenten retreat, “An Ignatian Prayer Adventure.” I followed it more or less faithfully daily and to the letter. And as a consequence, I’ve had an equally joyful Easter.

The retreat begins on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, February 10, and concludes the week after Easter."

*****
 

I'm not familiar with Greg, but Michelle is a good friend, an elegant writer ~ and a contemplative chemist!  I am sure that the two of them will invite us into a deeply thoughtful Lenten journey.