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.