February 21, 2007

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is a terrible day. It's about sin and death. The only way to make such topics bearable is to talk about someone else's sin and someone else's death. This evening we need to stand face to face with our sin and our death. Hear the words: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. We rub, if not our noses, our foreheads in the fact.

In some ways, I think we'd rather hide from these words. And I daresay that we spend a lot of time hiding from these words. But not this evening. This evening we come out of hiding.

Hiding, sin, and death are closely related in scripture. They are introduced together. Maybe you remember. After Adam + Eve ate forbidden fruit, they heard God walking in the garden and they hid themselves from God's presence. God calls out, "Where are you?"

Adam confesses: "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked and I hid myself." Adam tries to hide from God. He can no longer bear to be uncovered before God. He has become afraid of God.

As one writer puts it: "The whole mad story of alienation and sin begins with the effort to escape the presence of God. Flight, of course, is impossible, because God refuses to surrender Adam and Eve to the dominion of fear. They should not be afraid; they should not be in hiding. So the Lord God seeks out the creature, and the story of salvation is nothing less than the divine effort to uncover the creature, to unclothe it of all the pretense and deceit with which, in its fear, it has dressed itself in order to lie concealed from the eyes of God." William E Reiser, Drawn to the Divine p. 18.

In our uncertainty and fear about ourselves we become afraid of God: afraid of judgment, afraid of failure, afraid of being found out for who we are, afraid to be truly open to God: in fear of what God will say about our past and present, and afraid about what God might require of us next. Much safer just to hide.

And so the temptation is to hide from God in ways that are more subtle than ducking behind a bush.

You might say, "I don't hide from God." Well, I hope you don't. But it's not always obvious. It wasn't obvious to the Pharisees that's what they were doing, so when Jesus criticizes them, they have a hard time hearing it. The religious practice of the Pharisees had become a mask behind which they could hide from God. They presented to God not themselves, but their good works, their piety, their religious devotion. Instead of coming before God as who they were, they displayed their religious plumage. They presented the externals of their practice, instead of the internals of their hearts.

And that is always the danger of religion. The danger that the very thing that is to build our relationship with God will become instead a kind of shield behind which we hide from God.

As Jesus instructs us in the lesson before us he considers the three highest acts of devotion of the religion of his day. Prayer, fasting, and alms-giving. The assumption was that those who prayed, fasted, and gave to the poor, were close to God. These things were what good, religious people did. Persons who prayed, fasted, and gave to the poor were admired.

But Jesus alerts us to the problem: these acts of devotion may be done not to expose ourselves in humility to God, not to reveal ourselves in love to our Creator, but instead to win the praise of our neighbors. We can use these actions to attain the reward of admiration by those around us.

Basking in this admiration of those around us keeps us feeling hidden from God, for we can then focus not on the reality of our dependence on God, focus not on the sin and death that infects our life, but we can just feel good about how good we are. If we can hide behind the admiration of others for our devotion, that can hide us from God. We can use the assessment of others as a shield from the assessment of God.

If we can hide from God behind the externals of our religious practice, if our religious devotion does not touch our hearts, then we have insulated ourselves, closed ourselves off, from the redeeming power of the love of Christ. We have settled on the treasures of this world: self-satisfaction and admiration, while ignoring the reality that sin and death have already spelled the doom of this world. Hiding from God behind our piety

There's another way we might hide behind our piety. e.g. hiding behind generous giving: If we have the idea that once we give our gift for the Lord's work that then the remaining is ours to do with as we please, we are hiding most of our income behind some.

But our giving is not a bribe to get God to look the other way on the rest, rather it is a sign, a pledge, a down-payment, if you will, that all our resources are to be used to the glory of God. It is not a payment to let us off the hook, that lets us satisfy ourselves with the idea that now I've done my share.

In a similar way we might hide behind a time of daily devotions: We might reason that if we spend a good bit of time in prayer or Bible study each day that this fulfills our time obligation to the Lord. The rest of our time is our own, and we can safely put prayer aside until tomorrow. Here again, this would be to hide from God. It would be like setting up a decoy in our devotions, that we would like God to see, and then we hide out in our real life the rest of the time.

Times of prayer are to be springboards to keep God before us and to keep ourselves before God throughout the day. Bible tells us to pray unceasingly. To pray is not to hide from God, but to come openly into God’s presence so that we might listen for his voice and bring divine attention to the reality of our situation. It is no time for posturing and pride, it is instead time for humility and dependence on God.

Or we can hide behind imagining that we're ok. Perhaps we try to convince ourselves that sin and death are not really an issue in our lives. So then we have no need for God in any decisive way. If we try to imagine that, we are hiding from the reality from which we cannot escape. The reality that it is only the victory of Jesus Christ that saves us from sin and death. Unless we receive Christ into our personal sin and our personal death, unless we come out of hiding before God, we simply shiver alone in our fear, pretending to be brave.

The cost of discipleship is the confession that we're not ok yet. The cost of discipleship is coming out of hiding before God, and sometimes coming out of hiding before one another. The cost of discipleship is to come out into the healing rays of God's love.

The cost of discipleship is to live a life of faithfulness that reflects the light of Christ. Not because we want to cover up our inadequacies with points for extra credit, but because living a life of faithfulness is living a life that puts us before God so that we might be healed, strengthened, restored, and saved.

Or to put it in a different way: Christ is trying to get into our hearts. And as long as our hearts remain unbroken, Christ cannot get in. When our hearts are broken, when we grieve at our separation from God, when we are crushed by the weight of sin and death, when in honesty in our mourning we can rend our hearts and not our garments, then there is the opportunity for Christ to enter in. The openings in our broken hearts are doors for God to come through. With such broken hearts we return to the Lord who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. That God invites you to come out of your hiding into the embrace of the divine forgiving love