Ash Wednesday - Matthew 6:1-18

Well, what are you doing here? Didn’t we just hear Jesus tell us not to pray or fast or give alms in public ways? Yet here we are, perched at the opening of a season in which we do extra of all those things, and we do them as a community, in a rather public way. In fact, we start off the whole season by gathering here and receiving ashes on our foreheads, so that when we leave here, everyone will know where we’ve been and what we’ve been up to. Most of the time, when we’ve been to church, no one really knows. But on Ash Wednesday, we leave, and we know who has been at church and who hasn’t. We can look around and know just how pious everyone is, because they are wearing it, not on their sleeve, but right there on their forehead! Are we falling into the kind of pious display that Jesus has just warned us about? Why would the church choose to read this text, of all texts, on the one day that we are most forward in displaying our faith for others to see?
Last week, my daughter Grace and I were driving through downtown Minneapolis. At a street corner where we were waiting for a light, there was a man standing, holding a sign. You know what he looked like, though you probably don’t know that particular man. He was wearing several layers of coats and hats and gloves, holding a sign that said, “Homeless, please help. God bless.” His face was expressionless as he watched cars go by, including me, sipping my coffee and listening to the radio, trying to avoid his eye, feeling guilty about how I was not going to give him anything. And from the back seat, Grace piped up. “Mommy, why does his sign say that?” I had forgotten for a moment that my almost 7-year old can read now. “Why does his sign say ‘please help’?” So I explained that he was someone who didn’t have a home right now and he was asking for money to help. “Why don’t we give him some money?” I thought of all the reasons I could tell her, how we give through charities, or how we give some of our time, or how we didn’t want him to use it for drugs or alcohol, but none of that would mean anything to her. What she wanted was a connection with that man standing on the street corner. Grace, my sweet little extraverted girl, wanted to share with him, not with the vast array of people experiencing homelessness. She didn’t see a homeless man standing on the street corner. She saw this man, a man with a story, a story that had led him to ask for our help.
That way of seeing, that way of setting aside the categories and looking to the relationship, is something that gets trained out of most of us by the time we reach high school or early adulthood. Other concerns move in – what do others think of me? How will I take care of my own needs? How can I move ahead? Doing the right thing often becomes something we do for the wrong reasons. Even going to church becomes something that is expected of us.
The gospel lesson today comes to us as a part of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus is talking to his disciples about how to do what is right. In fact, he uses the word “righteous.” Most of us know at least some of the Sermon on the Mount, like the beatitudes, the list of blessings for the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, and so on. We may have heard before the section in which Jesus speaks of fulfilling the law, and then gives what seem like more and more things that we ought to do in order to be considered “righteous.” At one point in that section, just a few verses before today’s reading starts, Jesus says, “let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven,” a phrase that we borrow from Matthew when we welcome the newly baptized into the Body of Christ. As we journey through Lent, we will hear a series of sermons from the Longfellow Parish pastors on living the baptized life and letting our light shine before others. But here, in today’s lesson, Jesus seems to contradict himself, telling us not to display our righteousness, but to do what is righteous in private, in secret, so that others will not see. It seems as if Jesus knows us too well.
Because, of course, I want to do what’s right. In Jesus’ day, the assumption was that righteousness meant giving alms, praying, and fasting. For me, those three things still form the cornerstones of righteousness, spiritual disciplines that we try to uphold in our family, though they take different forms today than they might have 2000 years ago. But Jesus knows me well. Do I give because I want others to know how generous I am? Do I pray just to let others know how devout I am? Do I fast so that everyone knows how disciplined I am? Or do I do these things in order to glorify God? Do I do these things in ways that build relationships, that sustain and nourish my neighbor? Unfortunately, as Jesus knows and points out, too often I am the hypocrite. In the Greek, this word, “hypocrite,” doesn’t carry quite the same negative sense that we hear in it. It just meant an actor, someone who hides her true identity behind a mask. And in fact, it’s true, at least I can say that it is true of me, and I would guess that at some level it is true of you as well. Though I sat in the car, trying not to see the man out there with the sign, comfortable and certain that I was doing what was right, I was hiding my true self. Because really, I am just as in need of help as the man out there holding the sign. Though I am not literally homeless, I am often lost, disconnected from my neighbors and from God, and I long to be reconciled. At the heart of all of my prayers are the words of his sign – “please help.”
And Jesus gives us the words to ask for that help. It is interesting that here, in the middle of a passage about giving and fasting and praying in secret, Jesus teaches us a communal prayer. This prayer, the one that is prayed by all Christians everywhere, is a prayer to be said together, even when we are alone. From the first word, this is a prayer of all the people: Our Father, give us this day our daily bread, forgive us as we have forgiven, do not bring us to evil but deliver us. Though we say it so often that we risk it becoming like the “empty phrases” of the Gentiles that Jesus warned against, still, this is a prayer that we share across borders of language, gender, ethnicity and time. Through the generations, this has been the prayer that we say when we cannot think of the words for prayer. It is fitting that it will be the focus of the Lenten devotional series, in a season when we are inclined to focus on individual disciplines. These are the words that Jesus taught us to say when all we can think to say is, “please help.” When we ask for God to bring God’s kingdom, we are confessing that we cannot bring the kingdom ourselves, that we need God’s help. When we ask God to give us today daily bread, we are confessing that all that we have comes from God, and that we need God’s help. When we ask God to forgive us our sins, we are confessing that we cannot free ourselves from the cycles of sin in which we live, we cannot make ourselves righteous, and we need God’s help. I need God’s help, as one person. And we need God’s help, as a congregation, as a community, as a society.
As I sat there at that stop light last week, I remembered something a classmate of mine had said. This was a woman who had spent years working with and advocating for the impoverished in our society. She said, “you either give a dollar or you don’t. when you give a gift you don’t decide how it’s used. You give it, and you let the recipient decide.” So I dug into my back pocket and found a dollar, and I handed it to Grace. She rolled her window down, just as the light was about to change, and she smiled at the man beside the road. And his face lit up, and he limped up to her window and thanked her in the kindest, most sincere way.
Though I do not know what it is to be homeless, I do know how it is to have a prayer answered, to be on the receiving end of a gesture of kindness, and to be reassured of God’s presence in the world through that gesture.
On Ash Wednesday, that gesture comes to us as ashes on our forehead. We do not come to church today to do something, to display our piety for all to see. Instead, we come to receive something, to, as Paul says, “be reconciled to God.” We come to church today to receive the news, in a very tangible, physical way, that “the acceptable time is now…now is the day of salvation!” We come together, gathered as a community, to hear the words at the imposition of ashes: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” These words remind us of our un-righteousness, of our death, of how far we are from being able to pull ourselves up from the dust. These words remind us of our prayer, “please help.” And then we receive the sign of the cross, placed on our forehead today as it was at our baptism. And we remember that death has been overcome for us, that we have already died with Christ, to be raised with him. We remember that God has helped, that God has made us righteous, not through our actions, but through God’s. God has come to us in the flesh, died for us on the cross, and been raised for us from the grave. Through that life, death and resurrection, we have been reconciled to God. We have been made righteous.
And that is why we are still sitting here. It is for this that we have gathered. Not to display to one another and the world how righteous we are, how pious we are, but to display to one another and to the world how called we are. As we walk out of here wearing this dusty cross on our foreheads, we are showing that we are more than dust. We are more than the categories and stereotypes that the world sees. We are the Body of Christ. On Ash Wednesday, we push back against the social propriety keeping us from one another, we push back against the social categories telling us that the man on the street corner is just a homeless man. Marked with the cross of Christ, we are given eyes to see him as a man with a story, a man who is himself marked with a cross, whether he has come to church or displayed his righteousness for all to see. Made righteous ourselves in Christ, we are free to see in this man one who is made righteous in Christ, whatever his situation, a man who is, like me, a child of God.