Ash Wednesday, February 18, 2015 | 12:10 p.m.

A Meditation for Ash Wednesday

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 51
Isaiah 58:1–12
Matthew 6:1–6, 16–21

On Sunday mornings in the small Southern town where I grew up, it seemed like everyone went to church. It seemed like everyone made their way to Main Street, where the big Baptist church was next to First Presbyterian Church, which shared the block with a small Episcopalian church, which were all across the street from the First Christian church and the United Methodist church, which was a block down the street from the Catholic church. It wouldn’t be uncommon within the first five minutes of meeting someone to ask or be asked, “Which church do you attend?”

But times have changed. Nowadays, even in that small town, the question is not which church do you attend, but do you attend a church, and most people probably would not feel comfortable even asking that question. It is no longer a cultural given that everyone goes to church. There is no longer any pressure to be pious. Piety is no longer something by which a person gains social approval. Today in America, whether or not to practice religion has become a choice like never before.

So the scripture lessons prescribed by the lectionary for this Ash Wednesday may not resonate with us to the same degree that they did with past generations of Christians and Jews for whom religious piety could have earned them social approbation. The warnings of the prophet Isaiah and the teachings of Jesus should probably be taken more to heart by people like me and John Vest, professional clergy, not because we give more alms or fast more than others, but because our religious actions are viewed in public and thus make us more susceptible to the hypocrisy that they criticize.

In a book written mainly for pastors, Princeton Seminary President Craig Barnes, who was formerly an associate pastor here at Fourth Church, writes that “few pastors will deny that on Sunday mornings we look across the pulpit into the pews with a sense of envy. Everyone else in the church came because they wanted to be there. They’re all free” (The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 6). “Parishioners,” he writes, “are freed by a spiritual anonymity pastors will never know” (p. 6).

It is true that you don’t have to be here the way we have to be here and that you don’t have to wear these black and white collars in order to be identifiable, and we do. You could be eating lunch with a friend before returning to the office, running errands, or doing any number of things other than being here. When there are so many other ways you could be spending this hour, I wonder what reason could compel you to choose an Ash Wednesday service over other options.

I have a hunch that you are here because you know, or perhaps want to know, the profound truth that you are not really spiritually anonymous. Though, yes, we are free to choose to know God or not, the truth is we are already fully known by God. As the psalmist writes in Psalm 139,

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away. . . .
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was being made in secret. . . .
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
in your book were written
all the days that were formed for me
when none of them as yet existed.

Like the psalmist, Matthew speaks of a God who knows us, sees us, so profoundly that he sees not only our outer actions but also our inner hearts. God sees whether the two match up. And if they do, we can withstand Jesus’ warning against hypocrisy.

The prophet Isaiah also warns against hypocrisy. The hypocrisy that Isaiah denounces, however, is the discrepancy between our liturgies and our lives. The prophet sees the gap between our religious piety and our daily practices, between fasting out of self-interest and making self-sacrifices for the good of others. “Look,” the prophet says, “you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers” on other days. “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them?”

How can we make sure that what we do in here, week after week, year after year, makes a difference in what we do out there? How can we close the gap between worship and the world? This is a question that theologian Don Saliers poses in his book Worship Come to Its Senses. As a professor of homiletics and liturgics, he searches for the deep connection between liturgy and life. In his book, he writes that if worship is going to be real and relevant, if the songs we sing, the words we profess, and the symbols we engage are going to make a real difference in how we live, we will have to cut through our politeness with God in order to be truthful—truthful about ourselves and our human condition. Our worship and liturgy can help us to make time and space to attend to the truth about ourselves.

That is what we do during Lent. Ash Wednesday cuts through any illusions we may have or false stories we may tell ourselves about our human condition. The truth is that we are sinful and mortal. On Ash Wednesday, we confess our sinfulness and lament our mortality. In the breaking of bread, we remember our sin and that Christ’s body was broken and his blood was shed for our sake. In the imposition of ashes we remember our mortality—that we are dust and to dust we will return. No matter the many ways in which you and I and everyone else may differ from one another, all of us share this human condition in common.

When our worship and religious rituals put us in touch with the truth about ourselves, about our human condition, we are, I think, not likely to become self-righteous. No, remembering what we have in common with all of humanity, we will become, I suspect, more humane and then more compassionate. In his book The Wounded Healer, Catholic priest Henri Nouwen writes about compassion as the great equalizer that puts us in touch with all people. “Through compassion,” he writes,

it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that [people] feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty that the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends’ eye and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate [person] nothing human is alien; no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying. (The Wounded Healer, p. 41)

Some of you may know well the short story by Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It has been a while since I read it, but I was recently reminded of it while I was reading another book, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and writer for the New Yorker. He begins his book by saying, “I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them” (p. 1). When he looks back to his medical training, he remembers the single hour he and classmates spent thinking about mortality. It was the hour they spent discussing Tolstoy’s story The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In this story, the main character, Ivan Ilyich, is forty-five years old (just two years older than I). He is a mid-level magistrate living in Saint Petersburg, and he has spent his life preoccupied with concerns of social status. One day, he has a minor accident that leads to a pain in his side that, instead of getting better, gets worse. Expensive doctors cannot help him, and he comes to realize that he is going to die.

“No one pitied him as he wished to be pitied,” Tolstoy writes. Though he secretly wished that someone would pity and stroke him the way a sick child would be pitied and petted, neither his wife nor his friends seemed to understand what he needed. Instead they either avoided him or acted as though he were not going to die. Only one person saw what no one else saw. It was Ivan Ilyich’s servant Gerasim. Seeing his master’s suffering and fear and recognizing that someday he himself would face the same fate, Gerasim took pity on him. Sitting with him through the night, lifting him, and cleaning up after him, Gerasim provided Ivan Ilyich a comfort that made all the difference at the end of his life.

Tolstoy portrays the chasm of perspective between those who have to contend with life’s mortality and those who don’t (A. Gawande, Being Mortal, p. 99). To some degree it is true that until we go through death-encountering experiences ourselves, we cannot fully understand the perspectives and needs of those who do. But it is nevertheless on our shoulders to try. By making time and space to attend to the truth about ourselves, our sin and mortality, we can gain the perspective we need to become more humane and then more compassionate.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the forty days Jesus set aside not to become more religiously pious, but to bridge the chasm—the chasm between you and me, us and God, us and the world God so loves.