On borrowed breath
An Ash Wednesday message
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been racking my brain wondering what to “give up” for Lent this year. This season seems to ask so much of us. “What are you giving up this year for Lent?” seems like an awful question to ask yourself or anyone else after two years of a plague. Add to that all of your own individual stresses and strains and you might ask, “What more can I possibly give up? What else does God want from me?”
“What are you going to give up for Lent?”
The question begs of performative piety and moralistic one-upping, does it not? Putting ashes on our heads can so quickly lead to the sinful religious impulse to show them just how holy we are (aka, how holy they are not).
It’s oddly anti-scriptural that we even do this - that we even put ashes on our heads. Especially since, in today’s very passages, we are exhorted by the prophet Joel and Jesus himself NOT to be all showy with our piety. Joel tells us to rend our hearts to God, not our clothing. Jesus tells us not to show others that we’re fasting. He tells us to wash our faces, not smudge black ashes on our foreheads.
It seems that we’re stuck in our performative self-righteous ways. Either way we go... If we show off our ash smudges to the world all day to show how righteous we are, we’re performing. And if we refuse the ashes because we’re the ones following what Jesus told us to do (or, actually, in this case, not to do), we’re also performing. Either way, we’re stuck.
Theologically, we call this being “trapped in the law.” We’re stuck debating what we should or shouldn’t do to prove ourselves worthy of God’s love.
Even secular people fall into this. It’s a performative world we live in - especially since the advent of social media. In my algorithm of friends, everyone’s faces are turning blue and yellow since the Ukraine crisis. Do I do it? Do I put the Ukraine flag filter on my profile photo? Would that just be copying them? What should I do? Am I a good person if I don’t? Am I a better person if I do? Is it too late?
Do you see what we’re doing here? We’re relying on outside things to define who we are on the inside. We’re striving for a sense of worth and belovedness through the things that we do or refrain from doing. We’re trying to justify our existence by being more religiously/moralistically aligned than those people.
We all have performative ways of justifying ourselves. And do you sense the level of bondage that this imposes on us? This is the trap that we so easily fall into any day, but especially during Lent.
Capital-S Sin is separation, at its core. We all live with a sense of separation from God, others, and self. Our lower-case-s sins are all of the ways we try to fill, numb, or distract ourselves from the lack that we feel in our hearts. We try to fill the hole with substances, lifestyles, identities, ideology, wealth, status, food (both good and bad), parenting, news, social media, exercise, and the list goes on and on.
Lent is a season that we allow ourselves to sit in the muck with this aspect of ourselves. We all experience it and we can’t skate around it. We cannot go AROUND the cross.
So here we are at the foot of the cross on this first day of Lent, as we see how trapped we are in our performative self-righteous ways that never fill the God-sized hole within us. There’s only one thing that will free us. And that is the Word of God that was spoken into our hearts at the dawn of everything.
See, Joel had a hard time confirming this eternal word, for he posed the honest question, “Who KNOWS whether he will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him?” Who KNOWS if God is truly gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love?
Well... We (hopefully) do. As Christians, we are not just given an abstract question about the possible intentions of an invisible God. Rather, we are given, in Jesus, the Word made flesh. In Jesus, God allowed us to hang him on a cross so that we’d know that EVEN THAT wouldn’t change God’s mind about us.
As is written at the beginning of God’s story, God took the dust and breathed life into it to create us. We are all borrowing God’s breath. This breath surging through our lungs is a gift from on high. Must we waste our finite breaths in this human form trying to relentlessly justify our existence against others or against the accusing voices in our heads?
No. You are here. God has given you the breath of life - not because of the things you’ve done or not done. The mark you’ll soon receive on your forehead is not a stamp of deserving that you’ve earned or that you must uphold. See, we wear our ashes, not as a sign of earned personal holiness. But as a reminder that we have been graciously given the temporary gift of human life from a God who IS love.
Ash Wednesday rests between our baptism and our funeral. Today, we examine our finitude in order to see the gift of life we’ve been granted. All of the ways that we try to fill the hole can be laid down in lieu of this. Not because we’re required to or because we have to. But because who we are is defined by the light of God’s love. And when we’re in love, we don’t do good things because we HAVE TO but because we’re FREE TO.
God doesn’t need you to give anything up. That being said, as any loving parent can relate to, God invites you to lay down the things that keep you from knowing the radical love He feels for you right here, right now, in the midst of all the ways you might have fallen short or messed things up. Right in the middle of your struggles and strains and disappointments.
My fellow God-breathed creatures of dust... God’s Love for you is your true identity. God walks with you through Lent as a lover, not as a taskmaster.
There’s so much freedom in this Lenten journey.
Breathe and know that God is for you.
Thank you and amen to that.
Thank you so much for these thought-provoking words on Ash Wednesday.