Ashes and Grief

Luke 22:39-46

[Jesus] came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.” Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.”

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How many of you have had the good fortune of visiting Disney World or Disneyland? Whatever the case, Disney is the most magical place on earth, right? – especially if you’re a child, but even for some of you grown-ups, too. I remember being skeptical and cynical and sort of a Scrooge about Disney the first time we took the boys when they were little, because I was doing the math… I was counting the cost… I was lamenting how much more or better or different we could be doing with all of that money, besides giving it to The Mouse. (And we have friends who work there, so we weren’t even paying for all of the things!)

But, we got there and I drank the Kool-Aid real quick. I bought it all hook-line-and-sinker, because the boys were excited and in awe and enamored by the rides and the fireworks, by Buzz and Woody, by Goofy and Mickey, and all the rest, coming to life, right before their very eyes. At one point, after dropping $27 dollars (or something similarly ridiculous) on a Buzz Light Year action figure/drink cup, probably with no more than 10 ounces of lemonade inside, I declared, “Walt Disney can have all of my money.” The boys were just having that much fun.

Well, Disney works really hard at making their parks “the most magical places on earth.” Among so many ingeniously “imagineered” things, did you know that Disney has paint colors they’ve named “Go Away Green,” and “Bye Bye Blue?” They’re the colors Disney uses to neutralize and “disappear” the unappealing, unattractive – but necessary – parts of any public space, like garbage cans, mechanical boxes, fences and partitions … even the utilitarian buildings you might see from the monorails and Skyliner gondola ride are hidden in plain sight with these cleverly camouflaged paint colors. And all of that is great, for fairy tales and child’s play and a week’s vacation in Never Neverland.

But tonight – Ash Wednesday – is about precisely the opposite. It’s about doing anything and everything BUT “disappearing” the unappealing, unattractive, ugly parts of our lives as people on the planet. Tonight is about laying them bear – the shame, the death, and the sin of it all. It’s about calling it out, owning it, rubbing it into our foreheads for ourselves and others to see, and trusting that God will do God’s thing with this dust and these ashes and the brokenness they represent – that God will forgive it, redeem it, wipe it off, wash it away, transform it into something other than the mere smudge and smut that stains us all.

And I’d like to take this all a bit further – dig a bit deeper, maybe – this time around for our Lenten walk in the weeks ahead. If you read my newsletter article for February, you know I tried to get you all thinking about this plan long before tonight.

Over the course of the last several months, I’ve been particularly moved by Anderson Cooper’s All There Is podcast. He started it after the death of his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, a couple of years ago, when he began to take on the monumental, emotionally taxing, spiritually draining task of going through her things – and reliving his life and hers and theirs together – as the last living adult in his immediate family.

For those of you who don’t know, Anderson Cooper’s father died when Anderson was just ten years old, and his older brother, Carter, died by suicide when he was 23, and Anderson was 21. Carter jumped from the 14th floor of their New York apartment while their mother watched.

So, left with all of that history, tragedy, and sadness, Anderson was left to digest and deal with the grief he soon realized he’d never been taught or trained or equipped to do well. And he began to record his reflections about it all and to share conversations with others who’d traveled the road of grief and sorrow, too, so that he could learn from their experience and wisdom – and share it with whoever else might want to listen.

I’ve been so moved by those conversations and inspired by the simple truth that grief is – or will be – the common ground we all share as human beings, that it felt like a holy calling and a faithful responsibility to do together, and for each other, however much we’re able: the good work of teaching and learning and praying about and equipping one another to grieve well, I mean – or at least to broach the topic and engage the notion that that’s possible, and a worthwhile endeavor, to grieve well – during this coming season of Lent.

And in many ways, it should be nothing new. Like I’ve already said, it’s so much a part of what brings us together on Ash Wednesday. And I think there’s something about the common ground of grief that makes this service and our Good Friday worship every year, too, so compelling for so many of us. (More of us typically come together for those two worship experiences than all the Wednesdays in between. But I’m hoping to change that this time around.)

Because it seems to me that – as hard as it can be – something about it all draws us to the ritual of and to the reflection on the grief that gathers us. So I’d like to do more of that, more deliberately in the weeks ahead. And while we don’t always know or acknowledge or have language for it, our penchant for this is a great part of the human experience – and it would and should and could be, for us, a deep, meaningful, exercise of faith as children of God.

In scripture, we read about Job, in the throes of relentless grief, repenting in dust and ashes. We know that, in Old Testament days, prophets and priests, kings and commoners, put on sackcloth and covered their heads with earth and dirt and dust and ashes, too. In the book of Judges, we read about the women of Israel who made an annual, public display of their grief over the murder of Jepthah’s daughter – one of their own – so that the nation would never forget it. In Jeremiah, we read about the wailing of Rachel being heard in Ramah for God’s children who were lost and banished into exile. And, of course we know of Jesus, weeping over Jerusalem, mourning the loss of his friend Lazarus, shedding tears as thick as blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, and crying from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

My point is, this is God’s desire for us, believe it or not – to acknowledge, wrestle with, and experience the grief that finds us in this life. There’s no such thing as – or at least not enough – “Go Away Green,” or “Bye Bye Blue” – or “Go Away Grief” or “Bye Bye Blues” as the case may be – when it comes to the sorrows of this world. It’s hard and feels unholy and it can be unfair too much of the time. And our inclination can be to cover over it and pray it away and paint it into oblivion if we could – or sleep, and sleep-walk our way through it like the disciples in tonight’s Gospel.

But tonight … the ashes on our heads … these Lenten days that lie ahead … the cross of Christ that waits for us down the road … all of it is an invitation to see that grief and sorrow are part of life in the world, that no one escapes it, that none of us is immune from it, that not even the God we know in Jesus could shake it at every turn.

And that’s what this obnoxious wall is all about. Each week we’ll bring something forward to this shrine of grief and sorrow. We will grieve those we’ve loved and lost on this side of Heaven. We will grieve the loss of and damage to creation. We will grieve our regrets, our missed opportunities, the generational sorrows of our people, God’s children, the Church, and more. I suspect it will be hard and holy. I imagine it will beautiful and brutal, at times. And I pray it will be instructive and healing and unburdening and life-giving and hopeful, in the end, too.

There’s a poet named Denise Levertov who wrote this about grief:

To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul’s hall.

That’s what I hope we’ll do with our grief in the days ahead. Speak of it, at the very least, so that it doesn’t block our connection to God’s greatest desire for us. Not deny or hide or run from it. Not keep quiet about the challenge it can be to our faith. Not feel bad or guilty for wishing it wasn’t ours to bear.

And I hope we’ll trust what God can do with it … what God can do with us … if we will let our grief and sorrow be; if we feel it; if we learn to live with these ashes for more than just an evening, perhaps; more than just a season, even; as more than just a symbol, and as something God is always undoing, always making new, always redeeming, always raising from the dead … to new life … with love and full of hope, in Jesus’ name.

Amen

"Dust and Defiant Discipleship"

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

‘Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

‘And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’

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My wife, Christa, has complained about the dust in our house for years – as though it was any more prolific than anyone else’s dust. I never wanted to give her complaints much credence – mainly for two reasons. The first is that her main theory revolved around the dogs – who become MY dogs, of course – whenever there’s a problem like the copious amounts of hair they leave laying around, especially at this time of year; or the damn dog dander she deduced must certainly be the source of our abundance of dust. The second reason I never wanted to give her complaints much credence is because, as soon as I did that, I would have a dust cloth in my hand and a chore to do.

Well, a few months ago, we had the privilege of having a new furnace installed at 3872 Redbird Trail. I say it was a privilege because we were never without heat, nor did we have to worry about our pipes freezing, enduring a cold night’s sleep, or anything like that. Ours was a pre-emptive home improvement based on the prediction of the technician who did the regular, seasonal maintenance on our decades-old furnace and warned us that, sooner rather than later, we’d be replacing the unit whether we wanted to or not.

Anyway, when they dismantled the old furnace to install the new one, they found the sheet metal ductwork that sat on the ground in our crawl-space, had completely rusted and rotted to nothing but dust. Our old, dying furnace, which had a terrible filter system to begin with, was literally sitting on the ground, in its own dust, and had been blowing said dust up, into and throughout our house, for God knows how long.

Now this revelation was both good and bad. The good news was that our dust problem wasn’t the fault of MY dogs, after all. The bad news, of course, was that Christa had been right. The dust in our house was apparently more prolific than anyone else’s dust; and what’s more, I had been perfectly comfortable living in denial about that, pretending that it couldn’t possibly be true.

I got a call from the paper last week wanting to know about Lent, generally. The writer wanted to know about what we do and about why we do what we do, as a church who seems to make our way through the season of Lent more deliberately than some other flavors of Christians do. I feel like that’s true – that we do Lent a bit more deliberately around here than some others – but I didn’t know anyone else had noticed, so I was pleasantly surprised by the chance to talk about it.

So, of course I told her about our midweek Wednesday meals and worship. I told her about Holy Week prayer vigils and other worship services like Good Friday and Maundy Thursday, where we’re used to celebrating “First Communion” with our young people, stripping the altar, sometimes washing feet. And, of course, I told her about tonight – this Ash Wednesday stuff – where we begin all of it together with a smudge of dust and ashes on our foreheads. I even told her about how some of us get our ashes imposed in the columbarium – surrounded by the ashes of those who’ve gone before us – and she seemed particularly interested in that.

And I told her that, generally, for me, Lent – as a spiritual discipline – is about acknowledging that life in the world is hard. I think we do ourselves and the world around us a dis-service when we pretend having faith makes everything easier all of the time. Like, yeah, “God is good all the time and all the time God is good,” as some like to say. But God never promised there wouldn’t be suffering and struggle and hardship and adversity along the way.

I think too many people believe that too many of us believe that, because of our faith, we don’t or shouldn’t have to suffer or struggle or ENDURE, what so many out there in the world suffer through, struggle with or ENDURE, in this life. But looking around this room, I know that you and I know, that this couldn’t be further from the truth of our experience.

There is divorce and cancer; addictions and diseases of all kinds.

There are floods and wildfires; mass shootings and war; chemical spills and spy balloons.

There are racists, homophobes, and bullies.

There is sin and shame and sadness and regret that get the best of us, too much of the time.

But, rather than see these ashes on our foreheads and the beginning of another Lenten walk as an act of despair or self-flagellation; as a “woe-is-me” kind of fatalism, or some navel-gazing resignation to the sin that surrounds us, I’d like to invite you to let all of it – these ashes and these Lenten days – be an honest, brave, faithful, defiant, hope-filled engagement with the dust that covers us in this world.

This is an opportunity to acknowledge that the dust of our sin and struggle can feel – and be – heavier some days; and more-so for some of us than others. And it’s an invitation not to ignore that dust – as some of us are wont to do.

It’s an invitation to see it, to name it, to wear it, even – the dust and ashes of our sin and struggle – not pride-fully or with some sort of false humility, either. But so we might acknowledge and proclaim that none of us is alone in this.

And all of this is a chance to do as Jesus suggests and expects us to do:

We pray. We give our offering. We fast, perhaps. We put our faith, our time and our treasures, not in earthly, mortal, temporary things that rot and rust – but into the hands and heart of God. And these things we do – these exercises of faith – these acts of discipleship – are not meant to be chores. We don’t do them because we have to. We do them because we get to. We don’t do them because they will clean or clear away all the dust the continues to pile up among us. We do these things – we practice our faith – we live as disciples – precisely because we cannot clean or clear away any of it all on our own.

All of this is an exercise in trusting and proclaiming that the hard stuff won’t win; it won’t last forever; the dust and despair never get the last word, because God has… God does… and God will always have the last word.

Here and now we remember that we are dust … so much dust … and that we will be again, someday.

But here… now… and in the days to come… we are invited to hold out hope … so much hope … that God makes beautiful things out of the dust; that God can’t wait to redeem whatever is lost, to fix whatever is broken, to heal what is hurting, to find what is lost, to raise what is dead, even – through the love we know – and the life we share – in Jesus Christ, our Lord

Amen