Clearing Out the Pipes - Ash Wednesday
The Venerable Joan Clark
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Ash Wednesday, which begins the season of Lent, is a time when we have an opportunity to squarely face our humanness. It begins a season where we have an invitation to be honest with God, with ourselves, and with one another. The season of Lent, which begins this Ash Wednesday, offers us a forty-day time period modelled after our Lord's forty days in the wilderness. Some of us may not feel the need to take on extra disciplines during these forty days. Perhaps our lives already feel full of enough challenges that a day of prayer or fasting may seem trivial. Others of us who are just as challenged may welcome the external disciplines of regular prayer, fasting, and acts of service as opportunities to get out of ourselves and away from the messes that for many comprise significant portions of a life.
Ash Wednesday, this first day of Lent, provides us with an opening to the possibility of transformation. Saint Francis used to refer to his own body as Brother Ass; he was constantly aware of the stubbornness and limitations that comprised his life. There is something very good in the disciplines and work that reminds us to recognize our humanness, our frailty, and our vulnerability. Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent requests the honour of our presence in such activities. Our Lord Jesus Christ has personally stamped each invitation with the seal and sign of his own blood.
Have you ever had trouble with a sink that did not drain very well and the problem had to be resolved through our own labours. The drain went from the sink under a concrete slab and out the back of the house. From there we had a difficult time tracing the drain but eventually found a drainage pit full of stones, which it was supposed to drain into. Unfortunately, there was a blockage somewhere in the pipe.
This became an image to me of the kind of work that we will want to do during the season of Lent. Perhaps years of accumulated potato peels and other roughage had made its way down that sink and finally the liquid had nowhere to go. It sat still, no longer responding to the best plunge one could muster. What past hurts, unresolved griefs, and resentments lurk in our lives and clog the flow of the Spirit in us? The only thing we knew to do was to dig up the pipe. I began to remove the dirt and follow the pipe until I noticed a particular place in the garden where the soil was wet and muddy. We found the break in the pipe. We were able to flush out the blockage using a garden hose and we learned that this particular pipe was not designed for anything but water or other non-congealing liquids.
The season of Lent provides us with an opportunity to experience a kind of personal unblocking of pipes. It's foolish to take on spiritual disciplines if we have no expectation or hope for growth, for change, or for transformation in our lives. And it's equally foolish to take on spiritual disciplines that become badges of honour that we display to others. The kind of spiritual disciplines that our Lord invites his disciples to take on themselves aren't a whole lot different than cleaning out clogged pipes between houses and septic tanks. Our Lord desires us to have a fully functioning system of connection with him. The difference is that we do the work of cleaning our pipes, our lives, so we can connect more easily to the source of grace, glory, and goodness, so we can connect to God our Father in heaven.
The words in the Ash Wednesday liturgy remind us that, "you are dust and to dust you shall return." Ash Wednesday in the season of Lent reminds us not only of our need to be transformed; they remind us of our mortality. It is extremely challenging to see ashes placed on the forehead of a newborn sleeping in their mother's arms — the newborn so fresh, so innocent, so seemingly far from ashes and death. Yet, perhaps the mother who cradles the child as the child receives the ashes is deeply aware of the pain of childbirth and how close birth and death really are. Both birth and death involve a very powerful process of letting go, and isn't letting go a rather large part to what we are called to do on Ash Wednesday and in the season of Lent?
The ashes that get marked on the forehead's of those who come to the Ash Wednesday services may appear startling, strange, and even incongruent with the gospel text that invites us not to make a show of our piety. Yet, perhaps the crosses that are sealed upon the foreheads of those who come to Ash Wednesday services are strangely appropriate. Our children are not our own; in fact we do not even belong to ourselves. All of us belong to God and in the end, unless we let our best gifts and intentions be marked by the cross, we will not experience the joy of growth. Nowhere do we find this truth more dramatically portrayed than in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Nowhere do we participate more fully in this truth than in the liturgical drama of the Eucharist. Here we celebrate, we touch, and we eat and drink the death and life of our precious Lord. Here we learned the price and the liberation of letting go."
So here we are at the beginning of a journey. Where will it take us?
For nearly 2,000 years, Christians have observed with deepest devotion the passion and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. These verses in scripture remind us not to make a show of our religion, to offer charity with humility, to pray in secret, and to fast without making a show of it. These verses show us a method by which we can make ourselves more pleasing to God as well as more honest in our devotion. We may be strengthened by one another on this journey but ultimately God himself and our own self-examination will measure the integrity of our experience.
The work of prayer, fasting, and self-denial, the work of reading and meditating upon God's word, the work of repentance and self-examination is a work designed to clean out our pipes. It's a good work of creating a clear channel through which the grace and favour and Spirit of God can flow to our hearts, minds, souls, and our whole being through the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season provides us with an opportunity to let go and to allow ourselves, our children, our parents, our friends, one another — everyone to belong to God. Perhaps this year we can go beyond trivialities as we recognize that God's desire for each of us is to come into a deeper relationship with him thereby becoming more capable of engaging ourselves with one another and with the world in which we live. And at the end of the day and at the end of the season let us pray that our hearts and lives will be fuller, filled with the treasure of a renewed and empowered relationship with the living God, through Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Amen.