Ash Wednesday 2009

When I was an undergraduate, some of my favorite haunts were the theaters on campus. There were weeks when I simply could not see enough of the plays and musicals put on in West Philadelphia. Maybe it was because I was a fairly shy person and loved to see people behaving in sometimes outrageous ways, the sword fights and the grand betrayals played out in front of dozens, even hundreds of people; the flamboyance and exaggerated gestures that I felt I could never make as a slightly too serious music student. But what seemed truly marvelous to me was the way all the actors seemed to instinctively to know the physical limits of the space they occupied; no matter the abandon at which Tybalt and Romeo went at each other, they always knew where the edge of the stage was.

In many ways, Lent is about the borders in our spiritual lives, in our private spiritual disciplines and in the ways we serve the communities in which we live and worship. In his teaching on the mount, Jesus tells us not to be like the hypocrites, the ones who practice their piety before others, who sound a trumpet in the synagogue before offering alms, who pray openly on the streets, so that others can have a better view. It is because these people are really practicing theater: the meaning of "hypocrite" is literally a stage actor, and they are playing their piety for all it is worth, so that even those in the last row can see all they are doing. The assumption on this first day of a new season is that we are all a little like that. As much as we want to see ourselves on that hill in Galillee with the rest of the crowd, nodding and smiling as Jesus chews out the religious establishment, we too play to a crowd, even if it is only ourselves. We are aware of what shape our prayer life is in, and even if it is a wreck, it's better to look as reverent as possible. Even when we shut the door, it is easy to make the grand gesture toward our own good opinion after we have memorized the daily office or have managed our centering prayer for the entire week this time.

Lent, and Ash Wednesday in particular, are partly about knowing the edge of the stage. The custom of having ashes imposed on the forehead is almost a thousand years old, begun in a time of war and plague, in a world that so often seemed out of control. We could "remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return", because the uncertainties of being human were so transparent. But its meaning right now, in this place, is not that different. It is partly a reminder which we are forced to acknowledge, that we are only creatures of God, however impossibly loving that God is, and that our lives are a gift which we have for a brief time, whatever the make-up ads and car commercials tell us. We are of the earth in every way, and the lives we lead are both limited and infinitely precious.

But embedded in that knowledge is an opportunity. We are, after all, in the care of a God who hates nothing he has made, as our liturgy puts it. God's creative work no more stopped in us when we were born than a river can stop cutting through a canyon it has made. We were created to grow and to change, to turn when we threaten to leave behind the image in which we were created. Some of us will begin today to take on a few hours of community service, to give up a favorite food, even seriously take a look at the condition of our prayer lives. And it is all in the name of creating a space for this God who created us, even to find rest, in Augustine's words, in the one without whom our hearts will always be restless. The invitation is to return, but in doing so to find the edge of the stage we are on, so that we might see our real identities, the ones that God created, beyond the ones we have invented for ourselves.

A few years out of college, when Wendy and I had married and our children were very small, we used to take trips to western North Carolina to visit Wendy's sister, who was teaching at a local college. We would drive the Blue Ridge Highway around some heart-stopping turns, but my favorite parts of the trip were the hikes we would take up the mountain itself. We would start out at a brisk pace and eventually get tired; the trip would seem long indeed, especially when we ended up carrying exhausted kids. But then we would reach a clearing, where we could see how the Tennessee River had carved its way through the valley below, and I understood why we had begun the climb in the first place. Leaning against a metal rail on the edge of the cliff, I could see the layers of black and white rock that the river had cut into the canyon over thousands of years, a transformation that was still occurring right in front of us. I was a witness to the slow change of identity of that place, something happening not through the drivenness of the world or the whim of a Madison Avenue executive but through the will of God.

It is that kind of change that we are called to in the invitation to observe a holy Lent.

In opening that space for God, we are being called into the continuing creative work of the divine in our lives. We learn how deeply woven we are into the fabric of God; we open ourselves to the holy in what seems to be the most mundane parts of our lives. We are invited to look out over the edge, as the priest William Countryman says, " into a world that undergirds our everyday world, limits it, defines it, gives it coherence and meaning, drives it. It is the everyday world seen at new depth, with new comprehension." It is where we begin to see "the transcendent in the ordinary and to recognize the dullest circumstances may be shot-through with fire." In opening that place, beyond the noise of the world, we begin to recognize the kingdom growing within us and among us.

And so I invite you to observe a holy Lent, in the recognition that the God who hates nothing he has made is still making us, still forming us as the flawed, wonderful creatures we all are. There will still be times when we play to the crowd, but ours is a God of second, third and fourth chances, one who desires only our return. Ours is a God who creates and makes in us new hearts, that we might know ourselves and the rest of creation more fully and deeply, a God who is still forming us and the rest of creation, who invites us to the edge of our own stages, to look out at that world in gratitude and in wonder.