God Must Laugh

Date: Feb. 25, 2009.
Title: Ash Wednesday
Themes: Repentence, love
Texts: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21, 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10

Note: Sorry, no audio or video for this one.

God is nuts about you, crazy in love with you.  If God were a 13 year old girl, she would write your name all over her notebook, and write sappy poems about you in her journal.  She would blush every time you looked at her, and if you didn’t look at her, she would go home a soak her pillow with tears.  If God were a 26 year old man, he would shower you with gifts, bring you your favorite flowers, leave his home and his family and follow you to the ends of the earth.  He would propose to you from the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium so that the who world could see how much he loved you, or maybe he would propose to you all alone, on the spot you first met so that you would know that he loves you and you alone.  If God were a person, his love would outshine Romeo and Juliet like the sun outshines a 60 watt lightbulb.

So put yourself in God’s shoes.  You love someone with your whole heart, and every day they find a way to break it.  Your true love cheats on you.  Your one and only is a junky, addicted to so much garbage that you’re certain their death will be painful, and it will be soon.  How do you feel?  Sad?  Angry?  Lonely?  Welcome to the Old Testament, where God tries every trick in the book to win his true love back.  He pleads.  He cajoles.  He argues.  He coddles.  He threatens.  He cries.  And for something like 6000 years, he doesn’t go away.  He picks a people, and lives with them until they learn what it is to worship a God who actually exists.  Not some heavenly gumball machine, insert prayer – receive rain.  A living God, who makes demands, who wants you to change, who won’t go away.  God lived with them, annd over the course of 6000 years they began to learn.

They learned that God cares about outcasts.  The people everyone else ignores or abuses, those are the people God had them defend.  They learned sometimes good things happened to bad people, and sometimes bad things happened to good people, and they couldn’t understand why.   They learned that religious perfection is a mirage.  No one keeps the rules perfectly.  And even if you could, God desires mercy more than sacrifice.  The sacrifice that is pleasing to God is a changed heart and a renewed mind. But the harder they tried to change their hearts and renew their minds, the more clear it became that something was wrong.

Our love is not the sun.  Our love is not even a light bulb.  It’s a candle, flickering fitfully, bending to every breath, guttering at the slightest wind.  Our love is fickle.  It’s as if we don’t know how to be faithful.  We give ourselves to whatever attracts our fancy: money, sex, power.  We give ourselves to habits that enslave and degrade us.  If God’s love were gold, we’d trade it for dirt.  We are broken. Humanity is fundamentally, inescapably flawed.

They learned one other thing too, perhaps the most important thing of all.  They learned how to repent.  Today, we say sorry and all is supposed to be forgiven, but we know it’s really not.  Because we know we’re not really sorry.   Mostly we’re sorry we got caught. But it was alot harder to cut someone out of your life back then because the villages were smaller and sooner or later you would need their help, so you had to repent.  The Hebrews had a special tool for this, called sackcloth and ashes.

Suppose you did something really horrible to your best friend and you wanted to make it right.  You would a find a big sack, cut some holes in it, take off your clothes and put the itchy, dirty sack on instead.  Then you go to your fireplace grab a big pile of ashes and throw it over your head.  Why ashes?  Because when Adam sinned for the first time, God said, “You’ll work every day of your life, and then you’ll die.  You were made from dust and to dust you will return.”  Ashes are a reminder of our common brokenness, of the common end that waits for us all.  Dumping ashes on your head is a public admission of guilt and a silent plea for forgiveness.  Now you’re ready to go sit in front of your friend’s house and wait, and wait, and wait.  However long it takes  Eventually, your friend is going to take pity on you sitting there all miserable and humiliated.  Eventually, your friend is going to come out of the house, bend down and help you up, maybe give you some food or some water to wash your face, and send you home.

Think about that for a second.  No one has to say a word the entire time, but how much is said in the silence!  You admit to yourself, to your friend, to the whole neighborhood that you did wrong.  You must be sincere or you wouldn’t endure the pain and the humiliation. You could get up at any time, decide this isn’t worth it, and go home.  And your friend must really have forgiven you, because vengeance loves nothing more than humiliation and suffering.  The Hebrews lived with God, and they learned how to repent.

John the Baptist came, preaching hellfire and brimstone, and people turned out in droves.  Because they thought the day had finally come.  God was finally coming to put things right.  The oppressed would finally see their vindication, and the evildoers would finally get what they deserved.  So what did they do?  They came out in droves… to repent.  They had finally learned that all their righteousness was rags, and their only hope was to recommit themselves, again, to God.

Perhaps they learned a little to well.  Religious types turned sackcloth and ashes into a show.  They would claim to have sinned against God, so they would find the dirtiest nastiest sack they could find, and they wouldn’t just throw ash on their head, they’d smear it all over their face, then they would go sit in the center of town and wail and weep so that the ash and dirt would streak down their faces.  And everyone would walk by and say, “My that person is really holy.  They must really love God.  Why can’t I love God that way?”

Jesus said forget all that.  When you pray, don’t pray like the hypocrites do, standing on a street corner, go pray in secret.  When you fast, don’t mar your face so that everyone feels sorry for you.  Wash your hair and put on your work clothes and go about your business.  When you give money, don’t ask them to name the new Children’s wing of the hospital after you.  Do your good deeds in secret, so that the only person you have to talk to about it is the one person who matters.  Notice that he doesn’t say “If you fast…”  “If you pray…”  “If you give to the poor…” He says “when”.  It’s a given.  After 6000 years they finally learned that if you want to love God, you have to love the people he loves, and that’s everybody, especially the outsiders, the oppressed, and the unworthy. Even yourself.

What has your faith cost you? The early church understood this far better than we do. Listen to the words of Paul “We put no stumbling block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed;sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

They endured everything and had nothing, and behaved as angels.  We endure nothing, have everything and behave like spoiled children.  Or we endure much and claim the world owes us.  Or we have nothing and use it as an excuse to take.  If you believe that you live and you die and that’s it , and you happen to be selfish, then take what you can and enjoy the ride. If you’re noble, leave something for your kids.  If you’re really noble, leave something for everyone’s kids.  But if you believe that you live and you die, and you see God’s face, then repent.  Live like Paul did.

Ditch the talk – look at reality.  Physically do something different.  Give something up, or add something in, but do something different.  We can externalize blame, we can rationalize failure, but our actions speak louder than our words.  Pick absolutely anything that appears frequently in your life.  You could even pick it randomly, and give it up, just to prove to yourself that it doesn’t own you, or maybe to find out that it does.  Think of one small thing, that if you did it, would drastically improve your life.  One small, simple thing – and do it.  Prove to yourself that you can actually make things better, or maybe find out that you really do need help.

This is not a show.  If you choose to receive ashes, do not go visit your friends or go out to eat.  Do not wear them as a badge.  Go straight home, look at yourself in the mirror, and then wash it off.  Remember your baptism, and look yourself in the eye again.  Am I doing this because I love God or because I love applause?  There’s a simple way to know.  Do it in secret.  What matters is who you are when no one is looking. Because that is when you discover your true self, that is when your relationship with God grows or dies.  So give something up, or take something on, and share it only with God.  Because God is crazy in love with you, and would love nothing more than to spend the next 40 days by your side.