This sermon is from Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022 and it was originally preached at St. David’s by the Sea Episcopal Church in Cocoa Beach, FL. where I serve as Rector.
Everything is bigger in Texas. Texas cows are huge; Texas sports are huge; Texas egos are huge. And let’s not forget that time Texas tried to become their own country. I mean, Texas thinks their lonestar is more important than the other 49 stars on the map. 😉 I know this to be true because I married a Texan who has named her beloved cat after that great state: his name is Tex.
Rebecca describes Tex as her soulmate and the love of her life…
I describe Tex as my archnemesis.
One of the things that is bigger in Texas is collegiate cheerleading. In 2020, Netflix released the new famous docuseries called Cheer which focused on the cheerleading team from Navarro Community College in Corsicana, Texas. Under the leadership of head coach Monica Aldama, Navaro has won 14 national championships and 5 grand national championships since 2000. Aldama has built a programmatic juggernaut.
You’re probably asking yourself, what on earth does Cheer have to do with Ash Wednesday?
The Navarro cheerleaders can be heard cheering–pun not intended, but there’s really no good way of saying that–the same 6 words before getting on the mat: We can, we will, we must. They shout it over and over again, getting louder every time, until they reach their own fever pitch, completely hyped up and ready to perform.
This cheer perfectly captures the mentality of twenty-first century, western society. As the days of Christendom fade in the rearview mirror, our collective worldview, particularly in America, is none other than pull yourself up by your bootstraps; we have bene encouraged since the Gilded Age to go and become self-made men and women.
The message of performance, achievement, and doing surrounds us.
Ash Wednesday is the radical reversal of that cheer. We are here because we can’t, we won’t, we mustn’t. We are here because when left to our own devices and of our own accord we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. I was talking with Judi Eberle this week and she reminded me of another way to say this: I can’t. He can. Maybe I should let him.
Ash Wednesday is nothing more and nothing less than an opportunity for you to give up. Tonight, we are going to talk a lot about the power of giving up, of letting go, of standing down, of utter surrend. Amid all this talk, I want you to know that there is hope at the end of this, there is light at the end of the penitential tunnel, there is peace to be found, there is joy to be embraced, there is glory in our midst. In order to find the hope, light, peace, joy, and glory we must have a shift of perspective and discover the remedy to our heart condition and sin-sick souls.
We first experience this perspective shift in the passage from Isaiah 58. Things are not good for Israel at this point. Isaiah has been sent by God to prophesy to Israel, first as a warning of impending doom due to their rebellion, and then second to offer words of hope that their calamity will not have the last word over them. Both judgment and hopefulness are depicted in this passage.
Divine judgment occurs immediately in verse 1: Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want my rebellion announced in a loud voice like a trumpet…I mean, honestly, if you all knew just how many waffles I had last night you would be horrified! Actually, if you knew how many waffles Ellis had last night you would be horrified! None of us want our sins, failures, flaws, mistakes, and transgressions counted back to us in any setting, private or public.
Isaiah points out Israel’s sins by identifying how much she had missed the mark. Despite Israel’s use of the right words, God knows that the hearts of Israelites are far from him. Israel spent more time talking about what she would do, should do, or wanted to do in relation to God than she did in actually doing it. God says of his chosen people, “as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.” It’s not enough to talk the talk, at some point you have to walk the walk, too, and Israel wasn’t doing that.
Instead, Israel served her own interests, oppressed her workers, fasting only to quarrel and fight, and striking with a wicked fist.
Israel’s heart wasn’t in it.
She didn’t want to practice righteousness, she wanted a favor from God.
She didn’t want to obey the covenant, she wanted to appease God’s anger.
She didn’t want to live according to God’s plan, she wanted to abey God’s judgment.
She didn’t want to repent, she wanted a “get out of jail, free” card.
Even as she says she wants to be redeemed, she doesn’t want to pay the cost of discipleship.
God has a much different fast instore for his people. They think it’s all fasting, sackcloth, ashes, and verbal apologies…but God wants action, he wants them to rend their hearts and not their garments, he wants true repentance, a complete about-face, instead of lip service.
God’s fast is loosing the bonds of injustice, ending slavery, letting the oppresed go free, sharing bread with the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless, giving clothes to the naked, taking care of those in need. In our own time, we would say that we need to work to rid the world of systemic racism, shatter all forms of injustice and degradation, we need to promote peace in the world which means standing alongside the sovereign nation of Ukraine; we need to end food insecurity, improve educational systems, and promote the dignity and wellbeing of all people. Why? Because in God’s Kingdom there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, rich nor poor. The ground at the foot of the cross is level.
Notice what God says in verse 12: if you do these things…“you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.” Isaiah tells us that God’s vindication of his people, his grace and mercy will flow when Israel begins to live into her calling as repairers and restorers of the world. Israel was called those many years ago to be a blessed-people-who-bless-people. They won’t have their sins read aloud for all to hear, instead they will be known as breach repairers and street restorers.
Jesus has a similar message in Matthew 6. This is part of the Sermon on the Mount which means that Jesus is preaching to a group of people who have followed him up the hill to listen to him teach about what radical discipleship looks like.
In this passage, Jesus presents two ways of doing things. The way of the hypocrite and the way of the righteous. The second option, the righteous option, is headlined with the phrase, “Truly I tell you.” When you hear Jesus say the words Truly I tell you, you better start paying attention because he is saying something abundantly important.
The opening verse is our interpretive key: beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them. The issue isn’t practicing your piety before others…the issue is doing it in order to be seen. The problem isn’t the action but the heart’s motivation behind the action.
Jesus gives three solid examples of public vs. private piety: giving alms, praying, and fasting. You should note that these three practices form the very backbone of Lenten discipline. These things are not bad in and of themselves, in fact they are neutral; it is all about how we do them.
Jesus refers three times to a group called “the hypocrites.” We can assume with some certainty that Jesus is specifically referring to the scribes and Pharisees, but we need to do some “soul work” lest we unintentionally create an “us v. them” situation where hypocrites become “the other” and we get off scott free. That Jesus is warning the crowd against such behavior suggests that the disciples and would-be-disciples listening to him have the same impulses running through their hearts. A hypocrite, in this sense, is anyone who “engages in charity work, prayer, fasting, and caring for others for the purpose of making an impression before the public eye.” We are encouraged to take our own personal inventory and assess those places and moments when we have been hypocritical.
Those who practice their religion solely for others to see them have already received their reward. When your motivation is more Facebook likes, more retweets, more hearts on Instagram, more personal fame and glory, more accolades and validation from friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors then you will get precisely what you want. The alternative to personal fame and public recognition is your heavenly Father seeing what you have done and knowing you did it. Doing the right things for the right reasons, now that is the actual miracle which takes place only through the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit.
I have overheard multiple people in the last 6 months complain about the fact that Christians are hypocrites. And on some level these people are right, there are hypocrites who call themselves Christians because they “who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle.” That doesn’t make Christianity by default a hypocritical religion, it means that the Church is made up of sinful people desperately in need of grace, struggling daily to do what is right versus what they want, and often it’s one-step-forward-10-steps-back. Failure to live up to the standard is different than blatant disregard for God’s commands and covenant. Disciples of Jesus Christ aren’t hypocrites or actors, they are sinners in need of salvation. BIG DIFFERENCE.
The picture that we’ve been given from Isaiah and Matthew is that humanity is suffering from a serious heart condition and a sin-sick soul. To make matters worse, we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves. Since Genesis 3, we have been unable to create, compile, curate, cultivate, or construct a remedy for sin’s power over us. Try though we might, we have come up with NOTHING. As the old hymn puts it, we have “sin-sick” souls and no man-made tonic, salve, or balm will heal us. Despite what the world might tell you, you cannot pull yourselves up by the bootstraps out of sin’s power or grip, because if we were capable of saving and redeeming ourselves there would be no need for Jesus, no need for the cross, no need for a savior.
Tonight our liturgy and lessons remind us of our utter finitude and the fragility of our mortality. When we read in Psalm 103:14 that God knows we are made of dust, it is a biblical reminder that we are not immortal beings. Cultures in the Ancient Near East used the language of mud, dirt, and dust as a means of describing mortality. World events right now, specifically Covid and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, serve as daily reminders that life is precious, that nothing is certain, and that we will all die one day.
If we cannot save ourselves, if there is no man-made remedy to our sin problem, no created cure for our heart condition, no genetically modified balm for our sin-sick souls, what do we do?
Two words: give up.
In a world that tells you to do and achieve and work and earn and strive and attain and accomplish and perform; Jesus invites you to give up and lay down your life.
The Christian life, the life of discipleship isn’t about earning or honors or merit badges or AP scores or bank accounts or retirement funds, it’s about dying to self; it isn’t about your own strength, but only that which God can do for you.
Right now, in this moment, God is inviting you to give it up.
He is inviting you to lay down your burdens.
He is inviting you to take your sorrows, your pains, your fears, your anxieties, your sins, your hurts, your insecurities, your anger, your rage, your regrets, your resentments, and your remorse and lay them down.
He is inviting you to take your need to perform, your feeling of being perpetually behind, your propensity to overachieve, your never-stopping-always-working-always-striving attitude and to lay it down at the foot of the cross.
He is beckoning to take your self-degrading thoughts that you are not good enough, smart enough, strong enough, fast enough, pretty enough, worth enough, or loveable enough and to cast them at his feet where he can trample them just as he trampled down death. As I have told you before: you cannot earn, achieve, or merit God’s love because he gives it freely. You don’t have to do anything to receive his forgiveness other than ask for it, because he has already given it to you and he has paid the price to do it with Jesus on the cross. You cannot earn grace because grace is freely given–the moment you do something to merit grace it ceases being grace and becomes a payment for services rendered. The cross is not a payment for services you have rendered, it is a service that Jesus has rendered for the life of the world and when he says from the cross, “It is finished”…he actually meant it.
Once you lay it all down and give it all up, there is a simple prayer to offer in penitent gratitude: create and make in me a new heart, O God. That’s it. Give me a new heart, God.
So, as we prepare for the imposition of ashes here is what I want you to hear: you are loved more than you will ever know. God created you in your mother’s womb, he knew you before the beginning of time. The Collect today reminds us that God hates nothing he has created. That includes you. You are loved by the Creator of the Universe and he is ready to give you a new heart, but you have to give up the old one first…
We can’t, we won’t, we never will.
We can’t. He can. Maybe we should let him.
May this Lent be a daily reminder that you cannot save yourself and that God can; that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God; that we are also called to be blessed-people-who-bless-the world; that there is victory in giving up and triumph in laying your burdens down. Surrender yourself to Jesus as you receive the ashes; give your heart to God as you hear the words, “You are but dust and to dust you shall return,”; and embrace the new heart God is offering you.
Keep it simple this Lent, my friends: give up.
Porter C. Taylor 