Ash Wednesday Reflection: Pausing for God

 Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Ash Wednesday Reflection: Pausing for God
James Sledge                                                                                                  February 17, 2021

I’ve always found it a little odd that the gospel reading for Ash Wednesday, a day when many Christians walk around with a cross marked on their foreheads, is a teaching about keeping one’s religious practices secret. No one is doing this in a pandemic, but normally I have colleagues who stand out on the sidewalk or at the entrance to a Metro station and offer to mark people with ashes who are coming and going.

I’ve never been entirely sure what the point of this is. Is it about trying to connect just a bit with unchurched folk? Or is it meant to offer the imposition of ashes to folks too busy to drop by the church for the service? Perhaps it’s something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, ashes at the Metro station seems an apt image for our society, always busy, always on the go, needing a little religion between stops. Perhaps some of those hurrying in or out of the station appreciate the chance to grab a little religion on the fly.

A little religion. What exactly is the point of a little religion, or a lot of religion for that matter? What is the purpose of religion? What are people supposed to get from it? What do we get from it?

Our gospel reading talks about rewards, the rewards for those who make public displays of their faith and the rewards of those who keep their piety hidden. Presumably those Jesus labels hypocrites get exactly the reward they are after, getting noticed, being held in high regard by others, and so on. Those whose piety remains secret also receive a reward, but Jesus doesn’t really say what it is.

I’m not sure that getting noticed for your religiousness is quite as rewarding as it once was. Religion isn’t at the center of community life in our time. Even those of us who are religious may prefer to get noticed for something else: our possessions, our accomplishments, our influence, our intelligence, our power?

Religion is a bit more off to the side for most of us, not the main thing we want to get noticed for. But presumably we still expect something of it. Some people hope that being religious will make life go better for them. If God is on their side, then surely they will do better than they might have otherwise. Other people are hoping religion or spirituality will fill a void they feel in their lives, give them a sense of meaning or contentment that has eluded them. Surely most of us have some reason why we engage in religion.

Jesus’ words on religious practice and rewards are part of his Sermon on the Mount, the largest single set of teachings on what it means to follow Jesus. These teachings cover all manner of topics. Just prior to our verses are words on loving your enemies. Just after are words about not being able to serve two masters, God and wealth. And our verses jumped over Jesus teaching his disciples the Lord’s Prayer, words meant to recommend simplicity in prayer rather than the heaped up, empty phrases popular with some in Jesus’ day, and with a lot of us religious professionals in ours.

As I think about the gospel reading for Ash Wednesday, along with some of those other teachings from the Sermon on the Mount, it seems to me that there is an emphasis on our internal disposition, on the inclination of our hearts. And Jesus wants that inner inclination to align with God’s, for our hearts to be more like God’s.

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In the liturgy for Ash Wednesday, when the mark of ashes is received, it says, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent have a focus on penitence, and certainly all of us have plenty of things to be penitential about. But these words about dust are not mainly about penitence, not about human sinfulness.

“Remember you are dust,” is a call to remember your creatureliness. We are formed from the stuff of the earth, and we are all destined to return there. We are creatures who have a Creator. We are dependent creatures, dependent on our Creator for life itself, and for a true understanding of what that life is for.

The coming of Jesus is, in large part, to show us what life is really all about. Insomuch as Jesus is both truly human and truly God, he is the ultimate creature, the embodiment of what creatureliness should look like, a human whose heart is fully aligned with God’s.

Much of religion is utilitarian, seeking to get what we want from God. But Jesus calls us to something very different, reorienting our hearts and becoming more like God. Such heart reorientation doesn’t come from the busyness our culture encourages or from accomplishing something impressive. It comes from being still, from pausing and letting God work on us.

The Lenten devotional booklet that many of you helped write is an invitation to pause and spend some time with God. Becoming still, taking the time to read scripture and reflect, provides a chance for God to work on your heart, for the Spirit to shape and form you, to reorient your heart so that the image of God within begins to shine forth.

Pause, become still, and remember. Remember you are dust, a creature formed by a loving Creator who longs for you to know the joy and fullness of life born of a heart aligned with God.