Ash Wednesday

A letter from our Regional Minister

Ash Wednesday is my favorite day of the church year and Lent is my favorite season. Our culture has quite ruined Christmas and Easter with Santa and the Easter bunny and all the grotesque consumerism and made for TV specials behind all of it. But oddly nobody waits every year to watch the Ash Wednesday Peanuts Special. There are no Doorbuster sales at 4am on the first day of Lent. There are no big garish displays in the middle of the mall with mechanical Children in sack cloth and ashes. Nope. We get this one all to ourselves. Our culture has no idea what to do with a day that celebrates the fact that we all sin and are going to die. 

I think perhaps liberals equate admitting we are sinful with having low self esteem. And then the conservatives equate sin with immorality. So one end of the church tells us that sin is an antiquated notion that only makes us feel bad about ourselves so we should avoid mentioning it at all. While the other end of the church tells us that sin is the same as immorality and totally avoidable if you are just a good squeaky clean Christian.

But when sin is boiled down to low self esteem and immorality then it becomes something we can control or limit in some way rather than something we are in bondage to. The reality is that I cannot free myself from the bondage of self. I cannot keep from being turned in on self. I cannot by my own understanding or effort disentangle myself from my self interest and when I think that I can …I am trying to do what is only God’s to do.

To me, there is actually great hope in admitting my mortality and brokenness because then I finally lay aside my sin management program and allow God to be God for me. Which is all any of us really need when it comes down to it. In the rest of our lives it seems that we are consumed by the hopeless project of ensuring our own immortality. As though we can live forever or fend off the insult of aging with the right combination of exercise, diet, self-care and if we can afford it, elective surgery--face creams, hair dye, yoga. The offers of false promise are all around us. Luring us into the delusion of endless youth as though we can buy our way out of the foundational truth of who we are. Mortal.

But while we are denying the truth, God is delighting in it. This is what we hear in Psalm 51: Indeed, you delight in truth deep within me and would have me know wisdom. That’s the desert we journey through in these 40 days of Lent.  The wilderness of the truth deep within us. A wisdom which is not of this world. We journey with Jesus through the desert of Lent but it’s almost as though we have to clear through a whole lot of brush to even get to desert. Lent is about hacking through self-delusion and false promises. Lent is about looking at our lives in as bright a light as possible--the light of Christ--to illumine that which moth and rust can consume and which thieves can steal. It is during this time of self-reflection and sacrificial giving and prayer that we make our way through the over grown and tangled mess of our lives. We trudge through the lies of our death-denying culture to seek the simple weighty truth of who we really are. This is not a season of taking up self-denial, it’s a season of relinquishment. We let go of all the pretenses and destructive independence from God. We let go of defending ourselves. We let go of our indulgent self-loathing. Like the prodigal son we then begin to see a loving God running with abandon to welcome us home. But we can’t begin to see this God until we turn from our arrogance and certainty and cynicism and ambivalence. The Psalmist says that God delights in the truth that is deep in us.  The truth. God doesn’t delight in the purity of our doctrine or the perfection of our piety. God delights in the truth and wisdom underneath all the overgrowth of despair and false pride. There’s no shame in the truth of who we are: the broken and blessed beloved of God.

Journeying with you,

Rev. Ron Routledge