Ash Wednesday, February 18, 2015 | 7:30 p.m.

Matters of the Heart

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

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

Reflecting on the lessons for this evening, I am impressed by the distance between the situations being addressed and our situation.

Isaiah 58 describes a situation in which people are fasting, bowing down their heads, lying in sackcloth and ashes. They are speaking within a cultural context in which heartfelt emotion and devotion to God were expressed openly, a culture in which the keening of grieving women can still be seen and heard, sometimes in front of television cameras; a culture in which religious ardor is sometimes startling conspicuous.

You can see it to this day at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The Wailing Wall is the western wall of the Temple Mount, the only surviving trace of the temple that the Roman legions destroyed in A.D. 70. Each day devout Jews go to the Wall—to pray, to grieve because the temple is no more. You see them at the Wall, bowing from the waist, rocking back and forth, intoning their petitions, writing prayers on small pieces of paper and inserting them into cracks and crevices between the stones of the Wall. One day, my husband, Kent, and I saw half-a-dozen bar mitzvahs taking place in front of the Wall, with un-self-conscious chanting and singing and dancing and praying for all to see and hear.

Seeing that made an impression on me about the distance of those very public expressions of religious devotion and our own reticence about the things that pertain to God. We begin our Lenten season hearing advice not to be showy in religion, when that is the last thing we are.

Jesus said in our Gospel lesson, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.” So whenever you give alms or donations, don’t broadcast your generosity. Give in secret. Those are tot exactly admonitions directed at us, with our sealed offering envelopes, our confidential giving statements from the church each quarter.

Jesus continues, “And whenever you pray, don’t do it on the street corners, but instead go into your room and shut the door, and pray to God in secret.” Well, actually making a public display of ourselves like that never occurred to us. We are the people who, if someone suggests a prayer before a meal in a restaurant, are embarrassed.

“And whenever you fast, do that in secret, too.” The primary association we have with anything resembling fasting has to do not with faith but with calorie-counting, losing weight, or preparing for medical tests.

The scripture lessons for tonight challenge and criticize spiritual practices that are, frankly, foreign to us. We don’t do it that way.

Which isn’t to say we are not sincere in our faith. We who come to worship on a weekday evening such as this are choosing to begin Lent devotionally and in the presence of God.

We gather on Ash Wednesday aware of a need, aware of a shallowness, an intermittence, an insufficiency in our faith. We don’t feel entirely good that we are so reserved and restrained, even tongue-tied, about what we believe. We gather at the beginning of Lent wishing for more congruity in our relationship with God, yearning for a spirituality that feels right, looking for a better way to be both “in Christ” and “in the world.”

These strange scriptural admonitions come around every year on this night. They seem to focus on the negative, on prohibition, telling us how not to express our faith. What kind of help is it to be told what not to do, what, in actuality, we never do? What brings us here tonight is a desire to make our faith and the way we express it more positive.

The passages are additionally disconcerting in that they come just before a ceremony of ashes, when we come forward to do a public, external thing that tonight’s lessons seem to say, “Don’t do.” So what kind of help is that?

Actually, I think there is some help for us in these scripture passages. I find a clue in them—just a hint—about a better way. It’s found in the word heart.

The prophet Joel said, “Rend not your clothing, but your hearts.” The prophet Isaiah describes the fast that is acceptable to God as one in which compassion is concretely expressed for our neighbors in need. Jesus’ advice about the practice of spirituality concludes, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” The clue, the hint, has to do with matters of the heart—an inwardness, a new orientation in relation to God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian during World War II, struggled creatively to translate biblical concepts for a secular age. You may know the outline of his life: he was born and raised in an upper-class, highly educated, German family. He was surrounded by the best of contemporary culture. A brilliant student.

It was a surprise to the Bonhoeffer family when Dietrich chose as his vocation theological studies and the ministry. But his rapid rise, not only as a scholar and author but also as a Christian student-leader, allayed his family’s reservations.

With Adolf Hitler firmly in power, Dietrich, in the summer of 1939, accepted a seminary teaching position in the United States. But he soon decided to return home, where he directed an underground seminary and participated in a conspiracy against Hitler. He was arrested, imprisoned, and shortly before the Allies liberated the Flössenburg concentration camp, he was hanged in April 1945.

While imprisoned, Dietrich Bonhoeffer explored modern frontiers for Christian thought and practice, seeking to take seriously both the claims of Christ and Christian responsibility to live fully in the world. “Who is Christ for us today?” he asked. Bonhoeffer spoke on interpreting theological concepts nonreligiously. He wanted Christianity to have meaning for a “world come of age.”

Least noted among his creative explorations was his suggestion of the need for what he called “the secret discipline,” an inwardness of worship and prayer and biblical study “whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are [preserved]”—a “secret discipline” to make sure that our necessary identification with the world does not swallow up our identity in Christ. “The secret discipline without worldliness,” he wrote, “is a ghetto, [but] worldiness without the secret discipline is only a boulevard.”

Bonhoeffer’s “secret discipline” remains only a hint. He mentioned it only twice in his Letters and Papers from Prison, although he clearly lived it. I think it is similar to the clue, the hint, in tonight’s scripture lessons, which point to the centrality of the heart in our response to God. Each attestation points us to the importance of the inward journey and the interior disciplines of self-giving (alms) and prayer and self-denial (fasting), of scripture study and contemplation—the inward journey that, this night, is marked externally by the symbol of ashes, to remind us of our dependency on God, without whom we are mere dust.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer remembered his dependency on God. He knew what was most important was not what others saw of him, or even his own self-image. Rather what was most important was his identity in God, his interior relationship with God—where his heart was focused. Shortly before his death, he wrote a poem, with which I close:

Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
As though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
Equably, smilingly, proudly,
Like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which others tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectation of great events.
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Who Am I?”)

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church