Ashentine’s Day: God Loves You To Death

 

A cheesy picture to let you know that God loves you!

Joel 2:1-2,12-17

Psalm 103 or 103:8-14

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10

Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

 

ã2024 The Rev. Seth Olson

 

Holy God, let my words be your words and when my words are not your words, let your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen.

 

Happy Valent—wait, that’s not right. My beloved spouse, Kim, first thing this morning told me, “Happy Ashentine’s Day!” This confluence of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day happened back in 2018 and it will happen again in 2029, but that will be it for this century. So, soak up this strange merger of a day when we say, “I love you,” and a day when the Church reminds us, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” 

 

All joking aside, there is a connection between these two occasions, and it is love. Although, it is not the type of love that most often gets bantered about today. The world around us—from Hallmark card designers to restaurant staffs to chocolate companies, all of them want us to spend today in a sappy love haze. This isn’t the love that Ash Wednesday is about. 

 

Now there is nothing wrong with romantic love. C.S. Lewis in his wonderful work, The Four Loves, describes this Valentine’s Day-type-of-love utilizing the Greek word eros. Although often derided as merely puppy love, a feelings-based love, or even lust, in its rightful place of a committed relationship, eros lends itself to us understanding something much larger than ourselves. God’s yearning to woo us, to beckon us deeper into a larger love. Go read Song of Solomon if you want a taste of this love.

 

At my household, Valentine’s Day is not only about romantic love, as our older child presented multiple cards to the rest of his family. Lewis would describe this love as storge love, or the love that we share as a family. Desmond Tutu described this by saying, “You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.” This love which we share within our family reminds us that God is our Heavenly Father, a loving, divine parent who cares for us as a doting father adores his children. 

 

A third love we see less often displayed on Valentine’s Day Lewis describes as philia, brotherly or sisterly love. If you celebrated Galentine’s Day with your best girl friends or if you are involved in a bromance, this is philia, a fraternal love. In it, we understand a sort of connection that unites us with friends who are more like family, or at least the family of our choosing. When Christ Jesus on the night before his death called his disciples friends, he was expressing philia. He was also leaning into the fourth type of love, which is truly where Ash Wednesday and this preparatory season of Lent leads us. 

 

The fourth love is agape. A love so powerful that it allows one to sacrifice for another. Agape is what all the other loves point towards, and it is the foundation on which all other love emanates, for it is the love God harnessed in Creation. This is the love we experience in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus! What greater love can one have than this, than to lay down one’s life for another. And, on this penitential day, agape is what we experience all around us. 

 

In Joel, the trumpet blast and the day of darkness are serious. And yet, in God’s agape love the people are spared, as God pours out love upon us as we turn back to be embraced like a prodigal son running into a loving father’s arms. In our Psalm, we discover that God is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness. Compassion means to suffer with us. Although God is infinite, beyond our understanding, in Christ Jesus God comes to be with us, to suffer with us, and to walk alongside us—again, agape love. Paul in his letter preaches agape to those in Corinth—Jesus took on our sin even though he himself was sinless. This is laying down one’s life, this is sacrificial agape love. Finally, in our Gospel lesson we are reminded, that even when God leads us into self-sacrificing love—whether through alms giving, praying, or fasting—we are not doing these things to be seen for our acts of love. Rather, we are loving because our treasure is not praise from others, but the glorification of God who is the source of all love.

 

In just a few moments, I’ll invite you to the observance of a holy Lent. I’ll ask God’s blessing on these ashes. And, I’ll pronounce some difficult words: “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” Even here in this sobering realization that we are mortal, that we are fleeting, that we are finite, even here agape persists. It is good and right for us to recognize our human nature, our sinful disposition, and our need for reconciliation. This is what we do on this day. 

 

And yet, in the same place where we receive an ashen cross, we also received a cross of chrism, holy oil during Holy Baptism. There in that initiation into the Faith—in that moment when we are adopted into God’s family, joining Jesus our friend and brother—there we hear, “You are marked as Christ’s own forever.”

 

Today is a rare day—both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. What binds these unlikely days together? Love! And, all good, healthy love points to the all-encompassing agape of God. Happy Ashentine’s Day—God loves you to death, and beyond! 

Embracing Mortality

Happenings Article - 2/14/2024

Greetings Holy Apostles Family,

On this day when we celebrate love, give out chocolates, and recall an arrow-firing cherub, I have a loving message for you: “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” Think I’m crazy? Keep reading!

 

Clergy around the world offer the words above, as they apply the grey remains of palm branches on people’s foreheads. They make the sign of the cross with those ashes in the same place where we are marked as Christ’s own forever in Holy Baptism. As hard as the truth of our transience is to accept, this day is an occasion when we in the Church give it our best shot. 

 

On Ash Wednesday, we hear the truth of our dusty frailty; however, this certainty—that none of us get out of this life alive—flies in the face of so much of the culture around us. Companies in our world love to promote and pedal anything and everything to prevent aging and to avoid death. From workout systems to magic creams to miracle pills advertising agencies pitch us on the idea that if we just fork over some of our precious dollars, we can lengthen our days. With all this death-avoidance in our cultural drinking water, it is no wonder that we buck against our human nature with all our might. Ash Wednesday offers an antidote and another perspective—simply put this service makes us confront that we come from dust, and we return to dust. 

 

We may buck against this emphasis of Ash Wednesday because of culture or even because of instinct. However, embracing mortality allows for us to live into our vocation as human beings. We are not God. We are not infinite. We will not live in these mortal bodies forever. And yet, at the very same time, God made us. God is infinite—and loves us infinitely. God invites us into eternal life, which has already started! Knowing this, we are free to be ourselves—creatures formed from the dust, molded into the likeness of God, and purposed to give God glory by serving our neighbor as ourselves.

 

Today, therefore, I invite you to rest in the good news that you are indeed finite, and not God. You do not have control over all things. You will not live forever. And, while you are mortal flesh and to dust you shall return, you are made good in God’s image, made to worship an infinite God, and made to share God’s eternal love with all whom you meet. 

 

God’s peace be with you,

Seth

 

 

Crosses on Your Forehead

What do a cross of Chrism and one of ash have in common?

If we could not wash off the Holy water and Chrism oil from Baptism, nor the ashes from today’s liturgy we would notice that we have multiple crosses in precisely the same location on our brows. An almost invisible strand ties together today’s penitential rite and the Christian entry rite. Surprisingly, the service of Holy Baptism begins only 29 pages after the conclusion of the Ash Wednesday service; somehow though, the two feel farther and further apart than that. What binds together these crosses on our foreheads? What ties together the one made of ash and the one marked with oil?

In a few moments, you will be invited to observe a Holy Lent, and then anyone who wishes will come forward. You will be reminded that you are dust and to dust you shall return, and at that same moment burnt up branches from Palm Sundays past will be shaped into the form of a cross on your forehead. In this way, one year’s journey to the Cross fades into the next. And, for many ages Lent, which comes from a word meaning spring, has served as a time when converts blossom into full-fledge members of Christ’s Body. On one side of Lent the ashen cross and on the other at the Great Celebration of Easter the cross of oil, in between was the final formation before the church recognized one as a Christian. Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Holy Baptism, thus have been inextricably linked together, as a time of growth. And yet, is that all this season is about: personal progress?

Lent, if approached haphazardly, shifts into a short-lived season of discipline used for our own purposes of self-importance. When we make Lent a six-week season of “doing good, rather than building a Lent that becomes a life” we miss the mark.[1] As all of us, the novices and the elders alike, begin to walk the Lenten way of the Cross, we would do well to remember that Jesus’ public ministry began not with forty days of piety or self-discipline, but first within the deep, brooding waters of Baptism—waters that call to mind the depths over which God first moved to create. As there is only one Baptism, once baptized we do not enter these waters again, but Lent does allow us to be refreshed and renewed, as we repent and return to God. As we turn to God in this penitential season we may very well see the hidden feature tying Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Baptism together in an unexpected place. For these occasions are as much about death—that is turning away—as they are about new life. Somehow though, death does not play well in our culture.

Death tends to be a topic of which we steer clear at polite social gatherings. We, as a country, are so uncomfortable with death that we spend approximately $20.7 billion a year, so that those in the funeral home industry can deal with death for us.[2] Even though death comes for us all, we attempt to evade it through plans, schemes, and regimes to stay young forever. All of us go down to the dust, and much as we may want to ignore this truth, Ash Wednesday gives us an opportunity to stare death in the face, just like during Holy Baptism. Today we do not dwell morosely on our mortality, but instead as we feel the cross marked on our brows we can realize again the overwhelming reality that even in death we are Christ’s own forever.

When children, youth, and adults are marked in Baptism we tend to focus solely on the new life, but without the often overlooked death that precedes it this rite makes no sense. In Baptism we die, plain and simple. Our individualistic ways are called to cease, as God draws us up into the corporate identity of Christ. We are not just marked as Christ’s own forever, but we become part of the Body by dying to the self. As the Rev. Dr. Will Willimon puts it:

         

The chief biblical analogy for baptism is not the water that washes but the flood that drowns. Discipleship is more than turning over a new leaf. It is more fitful and disorderly than gradual moral formation. Nothing less than daily, often painful, lifelong death will do. So Paul seems to know not whether to call what happened to him on the Damascus Road “birth” or “death”—it felt like both at the same time.[3]

---

A Lent following Jesus, not to mention a life following him, cannot be about making ourselves feel good because we do some new discipline or fast for a few weeks each springtime. Jesus, himself makes this clear in the culmination of his Sermon on the Mount, which we hear today. If our reward is based on impressing others because we are merciful, prayerful, or fasting, we are missing the point. Even if we are doing some great spiritual discipline off by our lonesome, if we are doing it for our own benefit, we are missing the point. “What reward are you seeking?” Jesus seems to ask, “An earthly one for your own benefit or a heavenly one that draws you ever closer to God?” Put another way, “Do not be holy because it is what the world expects of you [or even what you think is required of yourself]; rather, learn to live holy lives because a closer relationship to the God who sees in secret will be reward enough.”[4] Die to self, so that Christ may live!

Today, Christ calls us not to immortal greatness, but to ponder our mortal smallness. Remember that not only will we one day die, but also that we have already died in Baptism. The death we die in Baptism brings us into a new life—a life no longer focused on doing new things to prove ourselves worthy to others, to ourselves, or to God. This is Good News! In Lent, then we are free to explore how we may see God living and breathing anew within us.

Churches traditionally sing “Just As I Am” when they baptize folks. It’s a fantastic song, but I am partial to a line Presiding Bishop Michael Curry borrowed from Max Lucado, “God loves us where we are, but God does not intend to leave us where we are.” When we die to ourselves, not just in Lent, but throughout our lives, we experience the transforming power of God’s love. This may happen by getting rid of something that distracts us from seeing God who resides closer to us than our own heartbeat. This may happen by taking on something that focuses us on God who knows us in secret. This Lent, as your brow is marked by a cross of ash remember the other cross marked when you died in Baptism, so that Christ could live within you.

Lent is when new life abounds, for we turn away from a society obsessed with outrunning death and towards the living God who calls us to die to self, so that Christ lives. Lent is when we become less, so that Christ may become all. Let Lent permeate beyond the next 40 days. May we embrace God’s call to turn towards the Lenten path, the Cross, and those Baptismal waters where death and new life meet. May we remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return, so that we may embrace our eternal God.  May we have a holy Lent filled with God’s transforming love that meets us where we are, but brings us into the ultimate life of God.

[1] Anschutz, Maryetta. "Ash Wednesday: Pastoral Perspective." In Feasting on the Word, edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, 20. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010.

[2] Public Broadcast Service. Homegoings: The Economics of Funerals. June 24, 2013. http://www.pbs.org/pov/homegoings/economics-of-the-funeral-industry/ (accessed February 20, 2017).

[3] Willimon, William. "Repent." In Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter, 9. Walden, NY: Plough Publishing, 2003.

[4] Anschutz, Maryetta. "Ash Wednesday: Pastoral Perspective." In Feasting on the Word, edited by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, 20. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010.

Having One Purpose

In college I went through a Faith Crisis. Maybe you have experienced a period in life like my own. I began to question everything that I had previously held sacred from my beloved Episcopal Church to the Holy Scriptures. I reverted back to my two or three-year-old self, asking repeatedly, “But why?” to my longstanding beliefs about God existing, God loving me, and Jesus being my savior. Why is Jesus my Savior? That was the question that seemed to linger the longest without my having any progress towards an answer.

As an “invincible” and angst-y twenty-year-old I believed that I needed not a Savior. “From what is Jesus even saving me?” I questioned some friends who were also struggling with their faith. No ghouls, ghosts, or goblins attacked me. No struggle for existence happened. Maybe an existential dilemma or two, but comfortably I sat thinking that I needed not a Savior. At the time I could not comprehend or feel that what I need saving from was not something outside of myself, but something within me.

No beasts existed on the outside, but on the inside a monster lurked that all of us inevitably must face. That monster is the Truth: We are mortal. We are broken. We are sinful. And while I know that we are wonderfully made “very good” in God’s eyes, the lives we live so often distort our relationship with God, as we believe in our own divinity instead of God’s. Like the naïve twenty-something that I was, we sometimes must turn our backs on God scorching the forest that was our faith, so that God can grow something anew and we can realize that it is not we that saves ourselves.

Today is a day when we come face-to-face with our mortality, our brokenness, and our sinfulness. The fires may have subsided, but the ashes remain. The marks we will receive from those ashes on our foreheads keep in the forefront of our hearts and minds that we are not infinite, but merely dust. Yet, how do we honestly confront the truth of our existence? Some of us will take on Spiritual Practices that aid us in remembering the Truth. And yet, Jesus warns us to be mindful of how we go about this discipline.

Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, of which today’s Gospel lesson is a part, Jesus teaches of alms giving, praying, and fasting, as spiritual disciplines. These are ways that we can all build upon our relationship with God. Still a temptation exists in believing that these practices are for achieving some external merit. Even when we do our best, these spiritual disciplines have a way of manipulating our egos making us think we are better than we are.

Not too long after God had found me in the burned up Faith of my youth, I began discerning a call to ordained ministry. Every week I would sit with a mentor and we would discuss our spiritual lives. Inevitably whenever one of us said, “Man, my prayer life is kicking!” or “I am on a real roll spiritually!” that would be the moment when I would fall on my face or he would stumble in his walk with Christ. Again, I wondered why?

A quick glancing at today’s reading from Matthew might give us the impression that Jesus only warns about spiritual practices falling prey to hypocrisy. While hypocrisy remains a troubling attribute of Christianity, a deeper problem persists. Doing something for others to see, saying something and doing the perceived opposite, or being overly showy with religious gestures all seem detestable. Yet, that is not what my mentor or I were doing. We were simply sharing our faith journey, but that moment of saying, “I’m doing well,” took the concentration away from God. Digging deeper in today’s Gospel lesson, we discover that Jesus’ primary concern is one of intention.

Giving alms, praying and fasting do not exist as stepping stones, but rather they develop in themselves a deeper connection with God. Put another way, when we follow Christ’s warning the spiritual practices we choose are most beneficial when they possess an inborn connectivity with God. The point of giving alms, praying, or fasting is not to be seen, heard, or respected, but rather to be in the presence of the Almighty.

Giving up something during this season comes from a need to recognize our complete reliance upon God. Taking on a new discipline is not about also losing a few pounds or restarting a New Year’s resolution. Instead let the Spirit guide your Lenten Discipline, so that whatever it is you do or do not do will in and of itself push you to experience the transforming release of God’s grace. Does this mean we say nothing of our Lenten discipline?

Lent is a communal season for us and to practice Lent as a community remains a valuable gift of the Church. Yet in this time when we take on disciplines we must examine the purpose of what we are doing. Are we trying to save ourselves like I thought I could when I was younger, are we thinking about what others will say or think about whatever it is we are doing, or are we yearning to be in deeper communion with Father, Son, and Spirit?

Lent is a season when we practice storing up treasures not here on earth, but in heaven by returning and reconnecting with the Almighty. This is the one, pure purpose of our Lenten journey. If we are pious for the sake of power, control, affection, esteem, approval, pleasure, security, or even survival, then we are setting ourselves up to be cloth to a moth, metal to rust, or goods to a thief. We are mortal, we are broken, and we are sinful, but we have a Savior who yearns for us to grow closer. Not for the benefit of anyone or anything else, but because God loves you so dearly and yearns that you turn back to God!

Ash Wednesday: Sad, Mad, Bad vs. Coleslaw

"Dear People of God: The first Christians observed with great
devotion the days of our Lord's passion and resurrection, and
it became the custom of the Church to prepare for them by a
season of penitence and fasting. This season of Lent provided
a time in which converts to the faith were prepared for Holy
Baptism. It was also a time when those who, because of
notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful
were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to
the fellowship of the Church. Thereby, the whole congregation
was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set
forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all
Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith.

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the
observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance;
by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and
meditating on God's holy Word. And, to make a right beginning
of repentance, and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now
kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer."

(Book of Common Prayer, 264-265)

Welcome to Lent. The pancakes have been eaten, the beads have been put away, and the revelry has ended... for now. It's time to don sackcloth and ashes. It's time to give up all those things that make us happy. Lent is a time of the -ad feelings right? Sad? Mad? Bad? Well, honestly... NO! Somewhere along the way either in our collective conscious or subconscious we began to believe that Lent is a Church season of competitive depravity. Giving up chocolate, alcohol, or whatever brings us joy makes it seem as though we are supposed to make ourselves sad enough that we feel good enough to receive God's love, forgiveness, and acceptance. The trouble is that is not how God's overabundant love works.

While giving something up or taking something on might be part of the next forty days, if we focus primarily upon what we give up, about how bad we are, about how much we need to get better at this or that, then we overlay an image of scarcity upon God's ability to love us (i.e. God only has enough love for those who are penitent). God's love though is overwhelmingly extravagant. It is enough to overcome any sense of separation. God's love has the ability to separate us so far from our sin that it is as distant as east is from west. The season of Lent is not about what we give up it's about what we take on.

A priest in this diocese offered an analogy that is helpful, for entering into Lent. He was talking about taking care of oneself, but I believe it also works for how we participate in this Holy Season. When one is trying to create balance and establish spiritual depth the first impulse is to take a bunch of stuff off of one's plate. In essence it is like trying to balance the blind Lady Justice's scales by pulling something off of one side, but in life this rarely has efficacy. When we try to de-commit from something we have signed up to do we end up letting others or ourselves down. Instead, this season of Lent is like mixing coleslaw. When you start you may be beginning with too much mayo, not enough chopped cabbage, a lack of salt, too little vinegar, and far too much pepper. Once one has started though one cannot dump the product without wasting far too much of what God has already given. Instead, one must discern what more can one take on and how that will effect the rest of the mix. Perhaps the addition of some slaw mix and vinegar makes the mayo a little easier to handle and cancels out some of the superfluous spice. The Truth is though, we cannot get these ingredients on our own.

Lent is a time to stock up and to mix in some new things, but we have to start by going to the source of all these ingredients. God invites us everyday, and the Church echoes this invitation primarily on this day and in this season, to return to God. To come back to the source of all Creation. A Holy Lent does not mean that we just act sad enough, so we feel good when Easter happens. It is not some sort of spiritual Olympics where the victor gets a crown and a gold medal. It is not competitive in any sense. Rather, it is an intentional time to come back to God, to get a little more of the ingredients that make us deeper Christians, to mix in something that restores our soul, and to share a little coleslaw with our Creator.