Ash Wednesday

Most buildings are made by a process of addition. Stones or timbers are stacked. Maybe the walls are assembled or poured into forms on the ground and then tipped up. Shingles or tiles or sheets of tin are fastened on top. And the built thing stands where once there was nothing.

But buildings can also be made by a process of taking away.

About 1700 years ago people in Southern Asia began sculpting temples out of living rock. Rather than quarrying stones and arranging them into buildings they just started chiseling away.

Their work was more revelation than construction. The towers and columns and intricate statues had been quietly present in the hillsides all along, until these builders, perhaps the greatest the human race has known, just chipped away all that the temple was not.

In Lent we are inclined to consider pleasures or practices that might be removed from our lives. Maybe these forty days are a clearing away of some debris. The bad habits or patterns or any of the accumulations that bury long lost parts of our selves. But Lent is not about what’s chipped away. It’s about what remains. It’s about the good and lovely thing that God wants to be exposed to us in the process.

Whether you give up ice cream or bourbon or umbrellas, whether you take up serving at a soup kitchen or teaching someone to read, our attention is often on the ice cream or the umbrellas or the act of service itself. We think it’s good to give something up or to take something up—just because. Or just because it’s hard.

But listen to Isaiah. “Is this not the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?” For Isaiah the fast itself wasn’t the point. The results of fasting were meant to play out in the life of the community. Play out as justice and freedom and “…when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin…”

Isaiah seemed to be saying that fasting should bring an experience of kinship, or expose a kinship that was hidden. The practice was meant to connect people to one another, or make visible a connection that was present in their lives already. But
people were moving apart. Fasting employers still oppressed their workers. Quarrelling and fighting, pointing fingers and evil words persisted.

Even among good religious people. Imagine that!

We know all too well how this can happen. As soon as we begin to take our faith and our religious life seriously, we’re tempted to start making categories. There are people who fast and people who don’t. People who give things up for Lent and people who don’t. People who read their Bibles, or say their prayers, or speak in tongues and people who don’t.

We make distinctions where God meant us to make connections.

Of course we can do the same with Ash Wednesday. You and I can share a smug satisfaction about the fact that we’re here while the heathen world goes about its oblivious and sinful way. And we’ll miss the point of this day completely.

Because taking a smudge of ash on the forehead should expose for a moment the wonderful truth that the differences between you and me and the governor and the fellow who just passed out on the street corner amount to nearly nothing before God. “Remember that you are dust,” we hear, “and to dust you shall return.” Those somber old words apply to exactly everyone.

And Isaiah might say that forgetting this truth or denying this truth is a way of hiding ourselves from our own kin. It’s satisfying to reassure ourselves with all the ways we’re not like those less devout or less sober or just less interesting people. But is there really much difference between your dust and mine? Between our dust and theirs?

Confessing our mortality on Ash Wednesday is a way of chipping away almost everything away from our lives for a moment. And maybe one of the lovely things that remain is our kinship with one another before God. Admitting that we all have come from and that we all will return to the same dust means that we can’t so easily ignore or dismiss the suffering ones, or the offensive ones, or the hungry ones.
Because there’s not much difference between their dust and ours.

So whatever your practice might be this Lent, whether you give up a little food or a little time for prayer or service or whether you give up a little of your routine, consider Isaiah’s words and look beyond the practices themselves and into the lives around us.

Look beyond these practices and see the strange paradox of Lent’s abundance. The season is not about the things we chip away from our lives. It’s about what remains or emerges when we do. Things like justice and broken bonds, things that arise naturally as we remember our essential kinship with one another before God. And if we look up and out and beyond our lives perhaps Lent becomes for us not a parched place, but the rebuilt ruins and watered garden the prophet spoke of. A time in which our bones grow strong, when light breaks forth like dawn.

A copper plate from the great Kailasa stone temple bears this inscription: “…Even the architect who constructed [this temple] was struck with wonder. His heart failed him when he considered building another like it, for “how is it possible that I built this except by magic?”

Could Lent be even a time of such magic? A time to be wonderstruck at what remains when we chip away at the edges of our lives a bit? What we may find is that when we give up a little of those lives, God gives us, or God exposes to us the lives of the people around us, and shows us that these are the lives of our own kin. People of dust like us made suddenly visible to one another in this room, on these streets, in our homes, wherever we go. And maybe we’ll find that the grace of Lent is not in what’s chipped away. It’s in what remains. In all these blessed remains. Amen.

Sermon: The Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany

"At the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the parsonage of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct—a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward."
(from In the Beauty of the Lilies, by John Updike)

Clarence Arthur Wilmot is a character in one of the now late John Updike’s novels, so you can hold off on your prayers for this doubting pastor’s soul.

What escaped upward along with Mr. Wilmot’s faith that day in 1910 was the sanctity of the world. Suddenly nothing was holy. Not himself nor his wife nor the farmer and horse clacking their way up State Street at the moment of his faith’s exit. The universe suddenly seemed as oblivious to each of these at is was to a lump of coal.

But the clergyman did not resign his position immediately with the church. And he soon lost something else. Midway through the Sunday service his vocal chords clenched, and Wilmot lost his voice. Worship halted and waited until his wife Stella “stepped forward to the rail and called into the varnished depths of the ill attended church, ‘With gladness, let us present the offering of our life and labor to the Lord.’”

It was, of course, a desecration to have a woman speak these words. And Mrs. Wilmot wasn’t finished. She let the rest of the service. The congregation coughed and rustled, the ushers bumped into each other as they made their way down the aisle with the alms basins. Miriam Showalter, the church organist, was so stunned that she forgot to start the accompaniment to the offertory solo, so the plates pass through the congregation in a fraught and awkward silence.

Now what’s curious about poor Pastor Wilmot’s situation is this: If nothing is holy, nothing can be defiled. Not even having a woman, God forbid, lead worship at the Fourth Presbyterian Church makes a difference. Nothing is supposed to matter any more.

But even Clarence Wilmot’s unbelief in the holy couldn’t insulate him from the collective agony in the church that day. All the familiar emotions from the old sacred, meaningful universe he used to inhabit came rushing upon him. The indignation, the frustration, the embarrassment, the fear. In spite of his crisis of faith, “His cheeks felt hot, but his fingertips felt cold, and a shiver kept passing uncontrollably across his chest.”

So Pastor Wilmot’s discomfort, his own lingering sense that something was being defiled or profaned, raises an old question: Does holiness reside in places and things—like the chancel of a Presbyterian Church in New Jersey—or does holiness happen in the encounters and exchanges of life? Something was still swirling around among Clarence Wilmot’s congregation that day that he couldn’t quite be free of. Even though no one and nothing was sacred any more, something like holiness still moved among them.

Something similar was going on in Corinth it seems. And the pastor of that small first century congregation, a fellow named Paul, decided to help these people sort out the holy from the profane in their lives.

Paul begins his argument by saying, “no idol in the world really exists.” In other words, the things that the meat in question was being sacrificed to weren’t holy or unholy. The idols carried no power in themselves. So a wooden carving couldn’t desecrate an otherwise acceptable lamb chop any more than a Louisville Slugger baseball bat could. They’re both just lumber in the end.

But Paul’s discussion didn’t end there. It was just beginning. Maybe meat can’t be defiled. But a conscience can. “Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.”

Holiness and defilement it seems don’t happen to things. Holiness and defilement happen among people.

What this teaching does, in predictable Pauline fashion, is to simplify and complicate the situation at once. Don’t worry, he says. Nothing has happened if your dinner started out as a pagan sacrifice. But do worry. Or at least do pay attention to what’s going on between you and the other dinner guests. Because even if an idol can’t defile things, we can. And we don’t need wood or precious metals to do so. We can defile things with nothing more than a little knowledge.

Now sometimes this passage is read as instruction never to do anything that offends another person. “If food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall,” said Paul. But you’d better just stay in bed if you plan not to do anything offensive to anyone for a day. And, of course, staying in bed all day is plenty offensive too. So we’re never safe.

No, I don’t think Paul was pretending we can just opt out of offensive situations. Rather, he was reminding us that what’s sacred in our lives is what’s passed between us. Sometimes it’s a plate of food. Sometimes it’s knowledge. But the holiness that happens, happens there. There in the exchange. So if we want to keep from defilement, we have to pay attention to the person in front of us and whatever it is that’s passing between us.

To prove things aren’t sacred or profane in themselves, Paul uses the example of knowledge. He is speaking to people with accurate knowledge about idols. He tells them that they’re right. That the idols are powerless and that we’re not going to get closer to or further from God because of what we eat. But he reminds them that we can defile a relationship even with the truth.

A person can wield their knowledge, even right knowledge, in ways that are destructive. In fact the knowledge itself can be a source of pride. And pride’s a problem because it separates us from the people whom we suddenly find unworthy of us.

A further problem for the community was that the issue of idol meat probably involved class distinctions. Poorer people wouldn’t have eaten much meat at all. But the wealthier ones would have been invited to feasts at the local temples for social gatherings—for weddings, and birthdays, and all kinds of occasions.

Paul insists that the meals were harmless. Smugness about their own enlightenment was a far more likely source of defilement for the upper classes than anything in the pagan rituals themselves. And so, to preserve the holiness in these relationships, each person needs to consider the experiences of the other. What’s perfectly ordinary to one seems strange and forbidden to another. And if we take satisfaction in the fact that we’re in the know and someone else is not, we’ve defiled something. We’ve defiled the relationship. Defiled a relationship with someone God loves. A relationship through which God comes to us. And love doesn’t do that, Paul says.

Like Pastor Wilmot we are caught up in a web of holiness, whether we believe in that web or not. Maybe faith comes easily to you. Maybe some days it doesn’t. But if we play St. Paul’s teaching on out, we may find that there’s a place here for us even in times of doubt. Because it’s not the content of our knowledge that matters most, Paul says. It’s whether we express that knowledge in love. It’s through the love, not the knowledge that holiness makes its way into our lives.

So maybe even our doubts need not defile what happens here. Bread and wine are invested with holiness by God, but through us, in what we do together. Liturgy is always the work of the people. The holiness is present in our loving exchanges, not in the hands of a priest or the possession of right doctrines. And we defile these things not when we get our words or our beliefs or our gestures wrong. But when we use them wrongly. When we let our knowledge puff us up rather than using our love to build one another up.

Unlike his character, the Reverend Clarence Wilmot, John Updike said he could never quite take the leap of unbelief. Many of his literary friends found his religion, especially his church attendance quaint, maybe naïve. But something in John Updike couldn’t quite disbelieve in a God given web of holiness that holds us all together. And he seemed to believe that even people like the doubting pastor Wilmot were part of that web as well.

So remember, when your faith is strong, be thankful. But remember, knowledge doesn’t make our lives holy. And remember, when your faith is wearing thin, unbelief doesn’t defile you nor does doubt defile this place or the great work of our worship. For God has arranged this world so that love, given in the imperfect but faithful exchanges of our lives, love is how holiness happens in our lives. Holiness can be made, even by ordinary people like us, people of imperfect knowledge and inadequate faith. Holiness is built up even among us one loving act at a time. Amen.