Ash Wednesday Sermon
The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scriptures: Joel 2:1-2,12-17; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
“Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart.” This may be the perfect mission statement for the season of Lent. We tend to think of this season as a time of penitence, of giving something up, of staying sober in a broad sense that we may know the weight and solemnity of death, but penitence, self-denial, and remembering our mortality are not ends in and of themselves, they are practices on behalf of the greater purpose: returning to God.
“Rend your hearts, not your clothing,” the prophet Joel tells us. In the prophet’s time, and actually even today in some cultures, the act of rending one’s garments is meant to be an outward display of mourning or grief or repentance. The idea is that a person has such profound sorrow either for a loss or about something that they’ve done, that they tear at their clothes because of their anguish. Jacob tore his clothes when he thought his son Joseph was dead. David rent his garments when King Saul died.
But we humans tend to get competitive. If there’s one person tearing at the hem of their garment in sorrow, there’s another tearing theirs in half from the neck down to show that they are in even more anguish. What so often starts as a bone-deep, irrepressible expression becomes a performance for others to see.
Jesus speaks of this same impulse: “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from God in heaven,”
So the question we are called to ask ourselves today and throughout this season of Lent is: “What is motivating you?” When you pray, when you give something up for Lent, when you talk to your kids, when you post on Facebook: what is motivating you? Is it to be seen? To be praised or revered? Is it to punish yourself? Or to show your power over another? Or is it to rend your heart, to tear it open and see what’s really there, and, when we see malice or envy or apathy that keeps us from God, to return?
Which means that the season of Lent invites us into radical honesty, a willingness to see parts of ourselves that we’d rather not see. But the problem with that is: other people see them even when you don’t. Your kids, your coworkers, your friends see so much more of you than you can see yourself. And you can see so much more of them than they can see. You can see so much more of me than I can see.
Oh lord, some of the things I’ve done even as a priest, and how clueless I was about my impact on others. A sermon I preached that wasn’t mindful of a particularly painful experience that many people have had. A time I sharply interrupted someone during Bible Reflection and made them feel small and unimportant.
You know how I got to see those not-so-wonderful parts of myself? Those people told me. And because they did, I’ve had the opportunity to shift, to grow, to return to God, by being more intentional about how I preach and how I hold small group spaces.
And listen: radical honesty is so hard sometimes: receiving it, giving it, and holding yourself to it. It requires curiosity rather than judgment, openness rather than shutting down, sometimes even playfulness instead of harshness. As I told y’all awhile back, I have a practice of calling myself “good buddy” whenever I catch myself wandering away from God. You’re getting a little aggressive towards your fellow drivers on the road, good buddy. Your tone was a little sharp there, good buddy. It’s how I keep from dwelling on the mistake and gently calling myself into repentance, which is just another word for returning to God.
But however you approach it, there’s no getting around it. It’s impossible to repent, to return to God, without stepping into radical honesty.
And returning to God is the mission for these next forty days in the wilderness.
So when you feel those ashes scrape across your forehead, let it be a call to curiosity, openness, and even playfulness in the face of recognizing those moments when you wander away from God. Let those ashes be a call to radical honesty, to returning.
Amen.
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