Tempted by More

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7, Matthew 4:1-11 

Every year I indulge in a little fantasy about what I’d like to give up for Lent.  Years ago, I would resolve that I was giving up homework, or being nice to my brother.  More recently, I’ve imagined giving up certain housekeeping chores, or meetings, or sometimes even church and work entirely, because by the time Lent comes, well, it’s been a busy winter, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks it would be nice to have a vacation about now.

This past week, as I talked to commuters and reporters and colleagues about Ashes to Go, our ministry at the train station, I found myself talking about how busy we are.  

We have long commutes, hundreds of chores and meetings, email that follows us wherever we go, basketball and ballet and play rehearsal. 

Multiplied by however many people live in your household.

No wonder people don’t come to church on Ash Wednesday.

Yes, it’s a matter of priorities.  We can still choose to make time for worship, for prayer, for the community of faith.  But the choices are hard, and many of us choose to try to do more, rather than choose between.

Sometimes those choices make us stronger. And sometimes those hard choices lead to frustration and anxiety. 

I find that doing all the things I ought to do, all the things I want to do, can turn me into a person I don’t want to be: Impatient, forgetful, and just plain tired.

(Has that happened to you?)

Work is necessary.  Volunteering is important.  Sports, clubs, music and art enrich our lives and our children’s lives.  Prayer and community feed our souls and put us in a position to help others.

Often our choices are between one good thing and another; between one good thing and more good things.

And that’s exactly what temptation is all about.

When the devil comes to Jesus, alone and fasting in the wilderness, it’s not really self-indulgence that the tempter offers.  It’s the opportunity to do more.

Turn these stones into bread.  You’re not the only one who is hungry.  Shouldn’t the Son of God make enough food for a hungry world?

Throw yourself off the roof of the Temple.  Let the whole world see that God is active, and will protect you.  Imagine the great PR you’d get!  Shouldn’t the Son of God demonstrate God’s power to a doubting world?

Shouldn’t the Messiah rule all the nations?  Isn’t that why the Son of God came to earth?

Those are the questions the tempter asks.

Something similar happens in that familiar episode from Genesis, from the beginning of our human story. Two humans, God’s good creation.  Conversing with another creature – a snake, more clever or cautious than the others, still of God’s creation – who suggests that God has been holding out on them.  That there is so much more that they could have and do.

“Don’t you want to be like God?  To know what God knows, to make your choices with knowledge like God’s?”

It’s a choice between good – serving and tending God’s creation – and more good – knowing what God knows and being able to choose between good and evil.

Shouldn’t God’s servants try to be more like God?

Shouldn’t the Son of God feed and rule the whole world, and demonstrate the power of God so the world will cease to doubt?

Eve and Adam choose more.

Jesus chooses less.

And so many generations later, I am still tempted by more.  Every day, when new knowledge is waved before me by the internet, the media, and other people, I reach for that fruit.  When the opportunity to do good in caring for others, by showing off the power of God, or leading and directing other people shows up in my work, it’s easier to say yes than no.

So I go past my limits.  My body can’t keep up, my heart and my head get overloaded.   I get tired, impatient and forgetful.

In trying to imitate God, I can entirely lose the image of God created within me.

I believe that’s what Lent is about.  A time to reclaim our limits,

to give up playing God for our own lives,

so that at Easter we are ready for resurrection to restore the image of God within us.

Jesus, fasting in the wilderness, declines the temptation to define himself, or his relationship with God, in terms of what he can do or achieve, but keeps turning the conversation to how we depend on God, how we pay attention to God.

We, keeping Lent in a busy, fast-paced world, can learn to do the same.

Maybe that’s why many people were so grateful to receive ashes at the train station.  Not just because they didn’t have to figure out how to fit church into a busy schedule,

but actually being reminded of our limits.

We are dust. 

We do die. 

We do fail. 

With all the goods that we can choose, we can’t create or earn immortality. 

We can’t do it all.  We have limits, and we need God to be more than we are ourselves.

That’s the truth of the ashes.   

And that is also what we practice in Lent.

We choose not to do something we enjoy – eat chocolate, watch a favorite show – so that we remember that we can’t have it all.

We confess things we don’t usually confess, because this is the season to remember that we fail.

We let go of the ways we try to make ourselves like God, so that we can remember the image of God that is already within us, created from the beginning, out of dust.

In Lent, we give things up, we let things go,

so that we are reminded, with every cookie left in the box,

that we cannot heal the world, we cannot save ourselves, by what we do.

When we let go, when we depend on God, the image of God within us is set free. 

And we are free to be healed by God, when we cannot do it ourselves.

Being Seen

Ash Wednesday 2011: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

I was excited last week when I found out that the Daily Herald was interested in a story on our “Ashes to Go” ministry at the train station.  Thrilled that 25 other Episcopal congregations around Chicago were also taking Ash Wednesday to the streets. And very pleased when I heard there’d be a photographer from the Chicago Tribune.  
I want the cool things we can do in the Episcopal Church to be seen.   I want us to be recognizable as the people who think outside of the box, and bring church to the places where people need to meet God.

So we met people in the midst of their daily busy-ness, and prayed.  People who met us at the train got to see the gospel news it’s sometimes hard for us to say, and spent the day with a sign of our faith on their forehead: in meetings and errands and ordinary labor: a silent witness to our relationship with God.

And we got our picture taken.

And then we came back to church, and read the Gospel of Matthew.

"Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them…

Don’t blow your own horn.

Don’t disfigure your faces.

Don’t give, or pray, or practice self-denial so that other people can see you.

It’s ironic that we read this gospel right before we get ashes on our foreheads, but it is also exactly right.  Because even as Jesus tells us not to show off in order to be seen, he’s reminding us that everything we do is seen.  When you give, or pray, or fast: your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

God sees us. Even when no one else sees us.  Especially when no one else sees us.

Even if we don’t do “Ashes to Go” and call the newspaper, every Ash Wednesday you and I still have to consider those words, and decide if other people will see us with ashes on our foreheads. And we have to consider how we are seen by God.

Being seen by others isn’t entirely bad.  Being seen gives us instant feedback that we are meaningful, and interesting, and that the good we do is worth doing – even, sometimes, allows us to inspire others to do more good.  Those are good things.   Just as Jesus says: being seen by others is its own reward.

And some things require being seen by others. We couldn’t proclaim God’s invitation to repentance and forgiveness to strangers if we weren’t seen today on the train platform.

Of course, our human need to be seen, to be recognized, to know that we are significant to someone, even my desire to get our photo in the paper, can sometimes lead us into those things we are going to repent together in a few minutes.

But our desire to be seen by others reminds us that even more, we need to be seen by God.

And God does not see us through other people’s eyes, or even through our own.

That’s what the ashes are about.

We who receive ashes today were seen by God – noticed, recognized – when we were dust, when we were atoms and potential, before we were ever born, before humanity was created.

And we go back to that dust, to that formless state, in which no one can see us.  In which we can’t even see ourselves.  And in dust, in our formless, unseeable state, God’s recognition of us is just as real as it is in this moment.

Today, being seen by God is how we are called to repentance and grace. Or at least, that’s what allows me to face my failures,

my inability to measure up,

the things left undone,

the wrong I didn’t challenge,

my need to be “seen” by others,

every way in which I am broken.

Today we remember that when we are broken, God sees us more truly than we see ourselves.  From dust before we exist to dust beyond where we can be recognized anymore, God recognizes us.  And God who knows me in that way is the only one who can truly hear and forgive all of the ways in which I fail, and the things I don’t want anyone to see. 

I believe that’s why Jesus reminds us that God sees us “in secret,” and that’s why we receive the ashes. Because our everyday, public selves can’t bear the weight of what we will confess today. Only our self that is dust, the self visible only and always to God, can see all the ways we need God’s grace and love.  Only if we know that God sees us when we cannot see ourselves can we ask forgiveness for the things we don’t realize we do.

So today is a good news day.  Not because we were seen in the paper and the local news.  Today the really good news is that we can be seen in the ashes themselves. 

God sees us in the dust that comes before and after the life we know.  So God can heal even the brokenness no one else can see. And you and I, dusty or whole, can see grace we’ve never yet imagined.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

In God’s sight that’s not the end of our story, but the very best place to begin.

It's the thought that counts

Matthew 5:21-37

Maybe it’s happened to you – on a birthday, a Christmas, even a Valentine’s Day.  You open a gift, and discover that the object inside is well, awful.  It’s ugly, it’s the wrong size, there is no gift receipt, and you cannot imagine any circumstances in which you would ever use this gift.

And then – if you’re lucky – you remember what your parents taught you at childhood birthdays when your friends or grandparents gave you something you absolutely positively didn’t want…

“It’s the thought that counts.”

After those birthdays, probably your parents made you write a thank you note.  So you gritted your teeth and said thank you.  The giver was happy, Mom and Dad were satisfied, and sooner or later you got over your disappointment.

But Jesus isn’t done with us there.  Jesus wants us to be genuinely delighted by the gift

(the hideous, unuseable, un-returnable awful present). 

Writing a nice thank you note is right, but it’s not the path of righteousness, of the kingdom of God.

Because it’s the thought that counts.

You have heard it said, Jesus tells the disciples, that you shall not murder.  And I say to you that you shall not be angry.  You shall not be furious or resentful with anyone; instead, when there is anger in your heart, you shall drop whatever you are doing and resolve it.

When Jesus talks about “leaving your gift before the altar” he doesn’t have our Sunday morning worship in mind.   He’s thinking about a person in the middle of one of the mandatory big high holy day services at the Temple in Jerusalem – a service that’s taken two weeks off work and a major chunk of the household budget to attend – remembering a grudge against a brother-in-law who never pays back what he borrows or a co-worker who keeps lying.

And Jesus says that person is to walk out of the middle of the Temple sacrifice, travel several days back home, confront the person, offer compromise, whatever it takes to work out the problem for good – and then walk the several days journey back to Jerusalem to finish the service.  (The service the Law says you must attend, which will have ended while you’re on the road.) 

Jesus says that’s following the Law.

The law against murder – a law easy to agree on and not really that hard to follow – is a good and necessary law.  But righteousness – having a good, holy relationship with God – does not depend on keeping that lousy brother-in-law alive.  Following God’s law truly depends on abolishing the root of murder - keeping our hearts free from anger and fear and resentment. 

It’s not enough that you said thank you for the lousy present, and it’s not enough that you never had any intention of killing (or even smacking) the lousy brother-in-law. 

God wants gratitude and forgiveness from our whole hearts. 

Because it’s the thought that counts.

In today’s gospel, we hear Jesus talk about the Ten Commmandments, about adultery and murder, and swearing in the name of God. And Jesus’ teaching on these is incredibly demanding, offering ways of truly following the Law that feel very close to impossible to live out.  The week-long round trip to reconcile with the neighbor in the middle of a one-day mandatory Temple festival is a good example.  So is redefining adultery to include legally permitted divorce; so is cutting off your hand, or ripping out your eye.

It’s not a at all a comfortable lesson to take seriously, to preach, or even to hear.  Jesus knows that.  He’s just reminded us that we are to be salt to the earth and light to the world, bringing zest and clarity to life all around us.  And now he points out that living righteousness, living lives that shine with God’s light, is much more than following the letter of the law.

The letter of the law helps: Saying thank you when we wish we’d gotten something different, keeping our hands in our pockets when we’d love to wrap them around the neck of the person driving us crazy, staying out of our neighbors’ marriages, and telling the truth under oath are necessary.

We learn gratitude, and forgiveness, and honesty and healthy relationships by following the rules.

But to truly keep the law, we have to live with transformed hearts. 

Hearts that naturally resolve the lingering resentment before it gets in the way of our worship. 

Hearts that love the gift for the giver’s sake even before we write the thank you note. 

Those are hearts that give light to the world.

That’s why I’m so glad that Nancy and Marilyn proposed and planned our “Attitude of Gratitude” practice this month. Because you and I are already working, right now, on giving our whole hearts to God.  When we stop to remember and to write down and to talk about and celebrate our gratitude our hearts are healed and made ready for God’s law.

This past week, I started using the gratitude tracker and discovered that it’s really delightful to stop and write down the things I am grateful for: nephews, a cuddly cat, asparagus, music, the refreshing perspective of our first and second graders on prayer. 

And even though I thought I was pretty good at being grateful and open to God, I’ve been surprised at how much less worry and frustration I feel every day while I’m writing down the things I’m thankful for.

Every grateful thought is the door to a whole heart, given gratefully to God.  

This radical law of the heart is actually a wonderful place to live.   Because a heart that’s not weighed down by anger, or selfishness, or lust or half-truth is a heart with infinitely more room for joy and generosity, and love. 

Remember that awful present – the hideous one you’d never use that you still had to say thank you for?  Imagine opening that present and being genuinely, naturally, easily delighted by the care that someone took to find, make or purchase it for you.  Imagine not experiencing even a moment of disappointment.

Imagine never even feeling the resentment or the fear or betrayal at the behavior of a family member, neighbor or co-worker. 

Imagine a heart so whole that you never have a desire or an action that you’ll regret.

Those are the thoughts that count.

That’s why we practice saying thank you, saying we’re sorry, and keeping our hands to ourselves.  We practice to make our hearts whole.

Because when God has our whole hearts, we have hearts more whole than we ever imagined, and the world is full of light and life.