We Get Ashes?
Stories
Object:
Contents
"We Get Ashes?" by C. David McKirachan
"Proving Yourself, Expressing Yourself, and Knowing the Difference" by Lamar Massingill
* * * * * * * *
We Get Ashes?
by C. David McKirachan
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Years ago, a very wise pastor spoke to me about the need for tactile evidence of our faith. She was speaking of anointing the sick, but it started me thinking.
Protestants tend to be rather abstract in the practice of our faith. It's as if we've become so rational in our reformation, so separated from the messy physical evidence of our humanity, that we shun the sensual. We are truly the frozen chosen. I get the historical roots of rejecting the Roman practices. Teenagers do that when they are proving that they are different than their parents. Hair cuts and "attitude" define their rebellion and desire to establish boundaries between themselves and parental control. So, the reformers rejected a lot of the practices of our faith that smacked of Rome's control.
The trouble is that we are physical beings, sensual, feeling folks. That's probably why God did the whole incarnation thing, "in the meat." So, to reject all of the physical gestures of our religion leaves us with an abstract faith that doesn't really match our incarnational theology.
That's when I came up with the radical idea to distribute ashes on Ash Wednesday. I know, cutting-edge stuff, but the response I got surprised me. There was a guy named George who came with great enthusiasm to receive the sign of the cross on his forehead. It was an evening service. His wife told me later that he insisted on going grocery shopping on the way home, in spite of the detail that they really didn't need anything. He wanted to show off his ashes. He said for his whole life he'd felt like a second-class Christian because he had no sign of the cross on this day at the beginning of Lent.
Now we could try to counsel him out of his delusion that some ashes could make him more worthy. Grace, justification by faith, and a few other profound pillars of our faith demonstrate the silliness of such attitudes. But for all our talking, the touch, the gritty feel of ash mixed with oil, the scorched smell of burned palms, the smudged sign of the cross mark this moment of the first step on the road to the cross, mark us so much more effectively.
We are not a concept. We are the body of Christ. That's spiritual, surely. But it's also physical, with all its messy, limited, tension-filled, glorious incongruity. It's one of the main reasons I'm Christian.
The priests prayed to the Lord, "Do not make your heritage a mockery." I think it's a good prayer for us. This is our heritage. It is our hope. God loves us, human as we are.
Yup. We get ashes. Amen.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
Proving Yourself, Expressing Yourself, and Knowing the Difference
by Lamar Massingill
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Even a superficial prance through the gospels would show that Jesus was never really concerned about the sorts of spectacles he was pointing out during what we have come to call the "Sermon on the Mount," namely, the "hypocrites from the synagogues" who were walking around on the street corners to show others how much piety they had. As a clergyman, I confess I've been there too.
For me, I remember that as a time in my life when I was preoccupied with making a name for myself. I wanted to be seen! I wanted to be the pastor of some mega-church and have all the prestige and visibility that went along with that. Sadly, in that area, the church is no different from the corporation in the sense that making more, having more, and doing more, is the ultimate agenda for our lives.
We are all taught subtly to climb the almighty ladder and "get there" first, and then to our horror, finding that no "there" is there. Self-worth, in our culture, is miserably tied up with activity and visibility. If you are not moving up on whatever ladder you are on, then your life is not valuable or worth anything.
What has happened is that we have not accepted what has been generously given to us, the gift of life, and now we are caught up in the expectation to earn it. Therefore, in the beginning years of my career, I scurried around trying to import some worth into my life from the outside by doing as much as I could "for God." Truth be told, I think it was more for me. The bottom line was that I thought I had something to prove. Looking back, I don't think I was the only one in history who has been there. I have a feeling that many are and have been the people Jesus is describing here.
The illusions of culture, which eventually make their way into the church, are hard. Anyone who plunges into their seas deep enough has to come up red eyed and come to the conclusion that the human races' capacity for self-deception is enormously awesome. Truth is hard and miserable (because it shatters our illusions) and will eventually tear us apart before it puts us together, and though it stares us in the face every day, our self-deception will not allow us to see it until it hits us in the face.
What I was doing in the beginning years of my career was a form of something very old that seems to be bonded into our human nature: the need to "make a name" for ourselves; to prove that we are the best of the rest. If that does not reflect the refusal to trust God that there is enough grace for us to live without such a burden, I don't know what the purpose could possibly be. When we think we have to prove our worth to God, when that is already taken care of, then we are not trusting God. The good news is that God's love takes away the burden to prove ourselves and frees us only to express ourselves, and what a difference those two are! One weighs us down and one raises us up!
Jesus is talking about this very thing in describing the "hypocrites in the synagogues and the streets. "Perhaps he saw in them the self-deception I talked about earlier. Perhaps he saw an arrogance that is the epitome of a massively damaging competitiveness between human beings. Perhaps he saw in them the false security they were always erecting to shield themselves against their insecurity.
Why else would these ones stand on the street corners and pray and give alms so that people will see and praise them for their public piety, which is really deified virtue in disguise? Jesus says that they have their reward, and what is the reward for virtue but virtue itself? These folk must have been awful ambitious. In fueling the blind ambition they (and most of us still) called success, they had lost the truth.
To prevent the sort of religious show that he described, Jesus says to the crowd gathered there: "When you practice your piety, go to your own privacy, and your Father, who is in secret, will reward you." That's pretty straight forward: if any of us need more than God's affirmation, then we're too ambitious. And by trying to reap praise from everyone else, little did the people Jesus described know they were murdering themselves in the process. They were becoming the "Great Mask." Worse, they were losing what C.S. Lewis called their "real faces." In trying to be something they were not, they could not be the beautiful creation they were.
This is the very reason Jesus separated himself from the priests and scribes of the synagogue -- they were good at doing good things in order to be seen, but not too good at being the kind of human beings they were created to be. To them, it was the exterior that mattered most, not the interior.
Which brings me to what the invitation of Ash Wednesday and Lent is: get out of the limelight and into your private place, talk to God, and find out how to express yourself. Truly your life will then become your sermon. If you know who you are and your needs have already been met by God, you have nothing to prove to anyone.
Lent, which begins on this day, Ash Wednesday, invites us to go and be reflective and know that we will not be on this earth forever. In that reflection, renew ourselves to shed the burden of proving our faith and start being and living our faith, as Jesus did. This is the secret of fulfillment, not proving yourself as better than others, thinking you are superior, but being free to express yourself to others in creative ways.
If we treat this season as it was meant to be, do these things, when you come out of the solitude of your own secret wilderness, then like Jesus, you will be a different person!
The Rev. Lamar Massingill, a former Southern Baptist pastor, and also long time minister at the historic United Methodist Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi (1988-1999), is now Religion Editor for the Magnolia Gazette (magnoliagazette.com), for which he writes a weekly column. Massingill has traveled nationally and internationally and has lectured widely on the interaction between religion and psychology. He recently retired from the parish church after thirty years of pastoral ministry.
*****************************************
StoryShare, February 22, 2012, issue.
Copyright 2012 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"We Get Ashes?" by C. David McKirachan
"Proving Yourself, Expressing Yourself, and Knowing the Difference" by Lamar Massingill
* * * * * * * *
We Get Ashes?
by C. David McKirachan
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Years ago, a very wise pastor spoke to me about the need for tactile evidence of our faith. She was speaking of anointing the sick, but it started me thinking.
Protestants tend to be rather abstract in the practice of our faith. It's as if we've become so rational in our reformation, so separated from the messy physical evidence of our humanity, that we shun the sensual. We are truly the frozen chosen. I get the historical roots of rejecting the Roman practices. Teenagers do that when they are proving that they are different than their parents. Hair cuts and "attitude" define their rebellion and desire to establish boundaries between themselves and parental control. So, the reformers rejected a lot of the practices of our faith that smacked of Rome's control.
The trouble is that we are physical beings, sensual, feeling folks. That's probably why God did the whole incarnation thing, "in the meat." So, to reject all of the physical gestures of our religion leaves us with an abstract faith that doesn't really match our incarnational theology.
That's when I came up with the radical idea to distribute ashes on Ash Wednesday. I know, cutting-edge stuff, but the response I got surprised me. There was a guy named George who came with great enthusiasm to receive the sign of the cross on his forehead. It was an evening service. His wife told me later that he insisted on going grocery shopping on the way home, in spite of the detail that they really didn't need anything. He wanted to show off his ashes. He said for his whole life he'd felt like a second-class Christian because he had no sign of the cross on this day at the beginning of Lent.
Now we could try to counsel him out of his delusion that some ashes could make him more worthy. Grace, justification by faith, and a few other profound pillars of our faith demonstrate the silliness of such attitudes. But for all our talking, the touch, the gritty feel of ash mixed with oil, the scorched smell of burned palms, the smudged sign of the cross mark this moment of the first step on the road to the cross, mark us so much more effectively.
We are not a concept. We are the body of Christ. That's spiritual, surely. But it's also physical, with all its messy, limited, tension-filled, glorious incongruity. It's one of the main reasons I'm Christian.
The priests prayed to the Lord, "Do not make your heritage a mockery." I think it's a good prayer for us. This is our heritage. It is our hope. God loves us, human as we are.
Yup. We get ashes. Amen.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
Proving Yourself, Expressing Yourself, and Knowing the Difference
by Lamar Massingill
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Even a superficial prance through the gospels would show that Jesus was never really concerned about the sorts of spectacles he was pointing out during what we have come to call the "Sermon on the Mount," namely, the "hypocrites from the synagogues" who were walking around on the street corners to show others how much piety they had. As a clergyman, I confess I've been there too.
For me, I remember that as a time in my life when I was preoccupied with making a name for myself. I wanted to be seen! I wanted to be the pastor of some mega-church and have all the prestige and visibility that went along with that. Sadly, in that area, the church is no different from the corporation in the sense that making more, having more, and doing more, is the ultimate agenda for our lives.
We are all taught subtly to climb the almighty ladder and "get there" first, and then to our horror, finding that no "there" is there. Self-worth, in our culture, is miserably tied up with activity and visibility. If you are not moving up on whatever ladder you are on, then your life is not valuable or worth anything.
What has happened is that we have not accepted what has been generously given to us, the gift of life, and now we are caught up in the expectation to earn it. Therefore, in the beginning years of my career, I scurried around trying to import some worth into my life from the outside by doing as much as I could "for God." Truth be told, I think it was more for me. The bottom line was that I thought I had something to prove. Looking back, I don't think I was the only one in history who has been there. I have a feeling that many are and have been the people Jesus is describing here.
The illusions of culture, which eventually make their way into the church, are hard. Anyone who plunges into their seas deep enough has to come up red eyed and come to the conclusion that the human races' capacity for self-deception is enormously awesome. Truth is hard and miserable (because it shatters our illusions) and will eventually tear us apart before it puts us together, and though it stares us in the face every day, our self-deception will not allow us to see it until it hits us in the face.
What I was doing in the beginning years of my career was a form of something very old that seems to be bonded into our human nature: the need to "make a name" for ourselves; to prove that we are the best of the rest. If that does not reflect the refusal to trust God that there is enough grace for us to live without such a burden, I don't know what the purpose could possibly be. When we think we have to prove our worth to God, when that is already taken care of, then we are not trusting God. The good news is that God's love takes away the burden to prove ourselves and frees us only to express ourselves, and what a difference those two are! One weighs us down and one raises us up!
Jesus is talking about this very thing in describing the "hypocrites in the synagogues and the streets. "Perhaps he saw in them the self-deception I talked about earlier. Perhaps he saw an arrogance that is the epitome of a massively damaging competitiveness between human beings. Perhaps he saw in them the false security they were always erecting to shield themselves against their insecurity.
Why else would these ones stand on the street corners and pray and give alms so that people will see and praise them for their public piety, which is really deified virtue in disguise? Jesus says that they have their reward, and what is the reward for virtue but virtue itself? These folk must have been awful ambitious. In fueling the blind ambition they (and most of us still) called success, they had lost the truth.
To prevent the sort of religious show that he described, Jesus says to the crowd gathered there: "When you practice your piety, go to your own privacy, and your Father, who is in secret, will reward you." That's pretty straight forward: if any of us need more than God's affirmation, then we're too ambitious. And by trying to reap praise from everyone else, little did the people Jesus described know they were murdering themselves in the process. They were becoming the "Great Mask." Worse, they were losing what C.S. Lewis called their "real faces." In trying to be something they were not, they could not be the beautiful creation they were.
This is the very reason Jesus separated himself from the priests and scribes of the synagogue -- they were good at doing good things in order to be seen, but not too good at being the kind of human beings they were created to be. To them, it was the exterior that mattered most, not the interior.
Which brings me to what the invitation of Ash Wednesday and Lent is: get out of the limelight and into your private place, talk to God, and find out how to express yourself. Truly your life will then become your sermon. If you know who you are and your needs have already been met by God, you have nothing to prove to anyone.
Lent, which begins on this day, Ash Wednesday, invites us to go and be reflective and know that we will not be on this earth forever. In that reflection, renew ourselves to shed the burden of proving our faith and start being and living our faith, as Jesus did. This is the secret of fulfillment, not proving yourself as better than others, thinking you are superior, but being free to express yourself to others in creative ways.
If we treat this season as it was meant to be, do these things, when you come out of the solitude of your own secret wilderness, then like Jesus, you will be a different person!
The Rev. Lamar Massingill, a former Southern Baptist pastor, and also long time minister at the historic United Methodist Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi (1988-1999), is now Religion Editor for the Magnolia Gazette (magnoliagazette.com), for which he writes a weekly column. Massingill has traveled nationally and internationally and has lectured widely on the interaction between religion and psychology. He recently retired from the parish church after thirty years of pastoral ministry.
*****************************************
StoryShare, February 22, 2012, issue.
Copyright 2012 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
