ASH WEDNESDAY – Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 103 (Psalm 51 after the Imposition of Ashes); 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 – 25 February 2009 – A meditation given by The Rev. Peter A. Munson for St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Boulder, Colorado

There’s No Real Transformation Without Some Dying

INTRODUCTION – Here we are again!

Here we are again.  Another Ash Wednesday - another Lent.  How are you feeling about that?

It’s time to give up the wonderful communion bread that is baked for us throughout the year by faithful Altar Guild members and other members of St. Ambrose, as we receive the cold, hard wafer in our hands, and let it dissolve (or hear the loud “crunch, crunch” as we chew it) in our mouths.  Lent even tastes and sounds different at St. Ambrose.

At the beginning of the liturgy we recite The Ten Commandments, and just after that we hear a prayer that talks about us “worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness”, and after the ashes are imposed upon our foreheads (with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”), we recite together the words of Psalm 51, among them, “Against you [O Lord] have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.”  And then we move right into a Litany of Penitence.   And – oh, yes – we put our “Allelluias” away for six weeks. The language of Lent is different.

We are invited to observe Lent as a time of self-examination, and repentance, “by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.”  In other words, if we have gotten away from them, we are invited to return to time-tested spiritual disciplines.  Lent is a season of discipline.

We are invited to travel with Jesus once again on that journey to the cross, which, of course, comes to a great crescendo for us during that week with Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and “Tomb Time” Saturday, which we call Holy Week.  There is no other season during the church year, and no other special week, when the emphasis is so much on dying - when we are invited to come and die.

So many serious themes are going on here – confession, repentance, cold and hard wafers, discipline, gathering darkness, dying – that we might be tempted to run away for six weeks and show up again on April 12, and shout “Alleluia; He is risen!”  My advice:  don’t succumb to that temptation, unless you want to stay exactly as you are.

DYING AND TRANSFORMATION

I think one of the most powerful messages of Lent is that dying is a huge part of life.  More than that, by the time we get to the end of Lent, we discover once again that there are no major transformations in our life which happen without some kind of dying.

As you leave home, you die to the idea that someone else is going to take care of you for the rest of your life.

As you say your wedding vows, you die to the notion that you can date and play the field for the rest of your life.

As you become a parent, you realize - more and more – that this life you live is not just your own, that all kinds of things must be given up – sleep, money, vacations, even intimacy and spontaneity and real conversations with your partner at times… if you are going to be the parent that this child needs you to be.

As you go through a divorce, and try to learn from that, you die a lot of little and not-so-little deaths – the belief that relationships always work out and conflict is always resolved, perhaps that you have to have a partner to be fulfilled, and then there’s all the dying that comes up when you allow yourself to begin dating again.

And yet…. and yet… as St. Francis so wisely put it almost 1,000 years ago, “it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”  It is in dying that we are transformed.  It is in dying that new life comes, and we become, more and more, the people that God is calling us to be.

Listen well on Sundays during Lent this year.

Jesus has this amazing, heavenly “high” moment at his baptism, and then we are told that the Spirit – that is, the Spirit of God – immediately drove him into the wilderness, where he stayed for forty days, and was tempted by Satan.  You don’t think that there was some dying going on out there in the wilderness?

We will be reminded of Jesus telling his disciples that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected… and be killed, and after three days rise again.” (Mark 8:31) Then he went on to tell the crowd and his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it…” (Mark 8:34-35)

We will once again hear Paul remind the Corinthians, “… but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Cor. 1:23-24)

And we will hear Jesus say, “… unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; bit if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)

And finally, we will travel to the cross with our Lord.

BEING OPEN TO THE MYSTERY

Can we allow ourselves to be drawn into this mystery, and allow God to work on us once again?  Can we trust in these words of Jesus, that dying is the very pathway that leads to a life that bears fruit?

There is going to be some dying around here this Lent.  How do I know that?  Because there is always dying involved when it comes to the ways of God.  This is one of the great mysteries.  We don’t get to just fast-forward to being enlightened, loving, conscious souls.  There is a process, and the process has dying all weaved into it and around it, above and below it.  And most people outside of the Church won’t tell you this.  In fact, many of them will tell you just the opposite: do whatever you can to avoid dying.

I don’t know what God is going to call you to die to this year during Lent.

Perhaps you will be called to die to some sort of prejudice that you’ve been carrying around for a long time.

Perhaps you will be called to die to some serious denial of the truth about yourself, that you have been failing to see, and failing to acknowledge.

Perhaps you will be encouraged by God to die to your need to be seen and affirmed by others, so that you can learn to take in the affirmation that God has for you, welling up from the inside.

Perhaps you will be called to die to your huge need to be in control of everything, so God can teach you about faith and trust, and help you see how little control you really have.

Perhaps God will call you to die to certain feelings of bitterness and resentment that you have been carrying around for way too many years, so that you can forgive someone else, or – perhaps more importantly – forgive yourself.

Perhaps God will call you to die by asking you to give up your pattern of being a victim, or your pattern of being a villain, or your pattern of being a hero, or your pattern of thinking that you always need to be right.

CONCLUSION

My encouragement to you (and to myself) this Lent is that we allow ourselves to breathe, we allow ourselves to open up to whatever dying God would have us do, trusting that our Lord knows what he is up to - way more than we could begin to imagine.  Let us not be afraid to enter into this holy season that we call Lent.  It is no accident that it happens during the springtime.  But you and I both know that before spring arrives, there is the winter – a time of darkness, and even harshness, a time of paying attention to the shadows, a time of dormancy, and even death.

Let us trust in the deepest truth, that God’s Spirit is always working on us, and if we allow that Spirit to work, we will be transformed - in the very midst of our dying – and brought to places of new life… and new growth… and new joys.