"The Most Uncomfortable Day"
Psalm 51 and Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Rev. Everett L. Miller
It’s pretty ironic that on a day when we purposely have a cross of ashes marked on our foreheads so that everyone else can see it, our main gospel passage, the words of our Lord Jesus himself are, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Throughout chapter 6 of Matthew, Jesus uses the word “hypocrites” over and over again. Ouch.
When I was in my senior year of seminary I took a course in which we spent an entire semester looking very closely at Jesus’ interactions with other people in the gospels. Once, I wrote a paper about the time when Jesus’ disciples are plucking heads of grain for snacks on the Sabbath and the Pharisees accuse them of breaking the Sabbath commandment. When I received my paper back from my professor he had written a note, I’m not sure if it was a note of appreciation or surprise, saying that through my explanation of the beauty of Sabbath and the possible motives of the Pharisees I had portrayed them as very faithful, pious Jews who were in many ways right in their accusations against Jesus. My professor was used to students railing at the Pharisees as nitpicking legalists. He wasn’t used to students identifying with them.
Later in that same semester I had to write a paper about the actual legal (as opposed to theological) reasons that Jesus was put to death. So I analyzed the accusations made against him by all the different groups. I read over and over the accounts of his makeshift trial before the Sanhedrin and the High Priests. I tried to put myself in Pontius Pilate’s shoes. Then I wrote this long paper about Jesus being killed because the leaders of the Jewish people could not afford for anything to happen that would upset the Romans because then the Romans would come and destroy Jerusalem and kill thousands of Jews, which turned out to be a valid fear as the Romans eventually did do just that about 40 years later. Then I wrote the last sentence of that paper and it was as if it had come from somewhere else, somewhere deeper than usual, because I typed it out and just stared at it with surprise and almost shame. I felt like crying or running away and hiding because I knew that it was true. I had written these words: “I have come to the realization that had I been in their place, I would have killed Jesus too.” Every now and then I pull that paper out of my filing cabinet and just stare at that final sentence.
I am pretty sure that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, when they wrote their gospels did not intend that their readers identify with the Pharisees, Chief Priests, and Pontius Pilate. They seemed to have wanted their readers to identify with the band of ragamuffin disciples who loved Jesus but who just couldn’t get it quite right. I believe that is what they intended. But I also believe that they didn’t intend for there still to be people around 2,000 years later reading their gospel with 2,000 years of religion and tradition heaped on top of the faith they were sharing. Those early Christians who had been cast out of the Jewish religion and who had given up the Roman religion, who had no church buildings but were meeting before dawn in the houses of believers or in the catacombs beneath the city streets, probably weren’t what you could call “religious” people. They were simply people of faith in Jesus. That’s how I imagine them anyway.
So although the early Christians had many challenges that we do not have and we can freely worship and we can afford to have beautiful sanctuaries and stained glass windows and our pastors have begun to wear long flowing robes, we have to come to the realization that so often because of the very advantages that we do have, we have perhaps become more like the Pharisees than like the disciples. When we realize this we find that today’s passage from Matthew 6 isn’t there so that we can cheer on Jesus, clapping along and saying, “Oh yeah, Jesus. They are hypocrites. We don’t want to be like them” because Jesus is actually warning his disciples not to be like us. Jesus is warning us not to be like ourselves. I love how it is paraphrased in The Message, “Be especially careful when you are trying to be good so that you don’t make a performance out of it. It might be good theater, but the God who made you won’t be applauding.”
Maybe I am telling you something that you don’t agree with or maybe something that you know is true but didn’t want to hear, especially by some guy who isn’t even your own pastor. But if Ash Wednesday is worth anything, it gains its worth from being a day of truth telling. I read an article this week by a Methodist pastor who called Ash Wednesday the most uncomfortable day of the church year. He realized this most fully one year after he had gone through the motion of saying, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return” and marking the cross of ashes on over a hundred foreheads. While he was doing that his wife had gone to the nursery to get their three year old daughter before she came forward for the imposition of ashes. All of a sudden, after all that “religious” repetition he was standing face to face with his precious three year old daughter and he was placing ashes on her forehead and saying, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.” That is when the meaning of the action, that we are all mortal and that we are all sinners who must continually run into the embrace of a gracious God, moved from his head and even his lips down to his heart. He looked at his smiling and somewhat confused toddler of a daughter with a cross of soot on the same forehead he kissed every night and he had the same realization I’d had when I realized I would have killed Jesus too: This is uncomfortable but it is the truth.
So if Jesus warns us to, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them,” what are we doing here tonight getting ready to line up to do just that? You may be asking yourself, should I get the ashes or not? Well, that depends on your motives. If we are here because we want people to know that we are so pious that we even showed up at the Ash Wednesday service, or if we are here because we want the ashes on our foreheads so we can go to the grocery store afterwards or drive down to Ponca City to eat at Chili’s and have everyone see how pious we are, then we are here for the wrong reasons and we probably ought to stay seated when the time comes to have the ashes placed on our foreheads. Because, you see, the key to understanding Jesus’ strong statement is the second half of the sentence, “in order to be seen by them.” He doesn’t say that we should never practice our piety in front of others. But he does say we better not do it simply to draw attention to ourselves. If you have come here to have ashes on your head in order to be seen by others you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because even though you might not fully understand what this imposition of ashes thing is all about but you know that you are a sinner in need of God’s help then please by all means be strengthened in your faith by receiving the imposition of the ashes. But as we take part in this religious ritual, let us remember that religion is only valuable insofar as it helps to build our faith and enables us to live it out in the world. Religion for its own sake is the enemy of faith. This is the message of King David in Psalm 51 when he prays, “For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Then just a few verses later, though, when you might expect him to vow to never make a religious sacrifice again he says to God, “You will delight in right sacrifices.”
Jesus teaches something very similar to David’s words in Matthew 5 when he says, “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that [someone] has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to [that person]; then come offer your gift.” He doesn’t say that the religious ritual should be totally avoided but he does say that it doesn’t matter what you do with your hands if it isn’t coming from your heart. So in Matthew 6 Jesus doesn’t say don’t give to the poor. Actually he tells at least one person in the gospels to give everything to the poor. But here he says don’t give to the poor so everyone else can see you. He doesn’t say don’t pray. He says don’t pray just so everyone can hear you praying. He doesn’t say don’t ask God for forgiveness. He says don’t pray for forgiveness if you are not willing to forgive. And he doesn’t tell his disciples not to fast. But he does say don’t fast and then go around telling people all about how you are fasting. This is what the hypocrites do, he says.
But although in the gospels Jesus uses the Pharisees, among other groups of people, as examples of religious hypocrites, don’t fool yourselves. The Pharisees do not have a monopoly on participating in religious ritual for the wrong reasons. The Pharisees don’t do anything that we Christians do not do on a regular basis. I don’t think that Jesus was against the Pharisees because they were Pharisees but because some of them, like many of us Christians, were more concerned about appearances and religion than faith in God and love for God and others.
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the season of Lent, and Lent is a time of soul searching. It is a time when like a ship that is taking on water we begin to throw overboard anything that is not essential for the journey. It is a time when we realize that returning to dust is as far as I can go on my own. It is, perhaps, the most uncomfortable day of the church year, because it is a day of truth telling, of telling the truth about our own mortality, our own sinfulness, our own religious hypocrisy and showmanship. But the truth must be told before the journey can continue because as our Lord Jesus said himself, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
When I was in my senior year of seminary I took a course in which we spent an entire semester looking very closely at Jesus’ interactions with other people in the gospels. Once, I wrote a paper about the time when Jesus’ disciples are plucking heads of grain for snacks on the Sabbath and the Pharisees accuse them of breaking the Sabbath commandment. When I received my paper back from my professor he had written a note, I’m not sure if it was a note of appreciation or surprise, saying that through my explanation of the beauty of Sabbath and the possible motives of the Pharisees I had portrayed them as very faithful, pious Jews who were in many ways right in their accusations against Jesus. My professor was used to students railing at the Pharisees as nitpicking legalists. He wasn’t used to students identifying with them.
Later in that same semester I had to write a paper about the actual legal (as opposed to theological) reasons that Jesus was put to death. So I analyzed the accusations made against him by all the different groups. I read over and over the accounts of his makeshift trial before the Sanhedrin and the High Priests. I tried to put myself in Pontius Pilate’s shoes. Then I wrote this long paper about Jesus being killed because the leaders of the Jewish people could not afford for anything to happen that would upset the Romans because then the Romans would come and destroy Jerusalem and kill thousands of Jews, which turned out to be a valid fear as the Romans eventually did do just that about 40 years later. Then I wrote the last sentence of that paper and it was as if it had come from somewhere else, somewhere deeper than usual, because I typed it out and just stared at it with surprise and almost shame. I felt like crying or running away and hiding because I knew that it was true. I had written these words: “I have come to the realization that had I been in their place, I would have killed Jesus too.” Every now and then I pull that paper out of my filing cabinet and just stare at that final sentence.
I am pretty sure that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, when they wrote their gospels did not intend that their readers identify with the Pharisees, Chief Priests, and Pontius Pilate. They seemed to have wanted their readers to identify with the band of ragamuffin disciples who loved Jesus but who just couldn’t get it quite right. I believe that is what they intended. But I also believe that they didn’t intend for there still to be people around 2,000 years later reading their gospel with 2,000 years of religion and tradition heaped on top of the faith they were sharing. Those early Christians who had been cast out of the Jewish religion and who had given up the Roman religion, who had no church buildings but were meeting before dawn in the houses of believers or in the catacombs beneath the city streets, probably weren’t what you could call “religious” people. They were simply people of faith in Jesus. That’s how I imagine them anyway.
So although the early Christians had many challenges that we do not have and we can freely worship and we can afford to have beautiful sanctuaries and stained glass windows and our pastors have begun to wear long flowing robes, we have to come to the realization that so often because of the very advantages that we do have, we have perhaps become more like the Pharisees than like the disciples. When we realize this we find that today’s passage from Matthew 6 isn’t there so that we can cheer on Jesus, clapping along and saying, “Oh yeah, Jesus. They are hypocrites. We don’t want to be like them” because Jesus is actually warning his disciples not to be like us. Jesus is warning us not to be like ourselves. I love how it is paraphrased in The Message, “Be especially careful when you are trying to be good so that you don’t make a performance out of it. It might be good theater, but the God who made you won’t be applauding.”
Maybe I am telling you something that you don’t agree with or maybe something that you know is true but didn’t want to hear, especially by some guy who isn’t even your own pastor. But if Ash Wednesday is worth anything, it gains its worth from being a day of truth telling. I read an article this week by a Methodist pastor who called Ash Wednesday the most uncomfortable day of the church year. He realized this most fully one year after he had gone through the motion of saying, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return” and marking the cross of ashes on over a hundred foreheads. While he was doing that his wife had gone to the nursery to get their three year old daughter before she came forward for the imposition of ashes. All of a sudden, after all that “religious” repetition he was standing face to face with his precious three year old daughter and he was placing ashes on her forehead and saying, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.” That is when the meaning of the action, that we are all mortal and that we are all sinners who must continually run into the embrace of a gracious God, moved from his head and even his lips down to his heart. He looked at his smiling and somewhat confused toddler of a daughter with a cross of soot on the same forehead he kissed every night and he had the same realization I’d had when I realized I would have killed Jesus too: This is uncomfortable but it is the truth.
So if Jesus warns us to, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them,” what are we doing here tonight getting ready to line up to do just that? You may be asking yourself, should I get the ashes or not? Well, that depends on your motives. If we are here because we want people to know that we are so pious that we even showed up at the Ash Wednesday service, or if we are here because we want the ashes on our foreheads so we can go to the grocery store afterwards or drive down to Ponca City to eat at Chili’s and have everyone see how pious we are, then we are here for the wrong reasons and we probably ought to stay seated when the time comes to have the ashes placed on our foreheads. Because, you see, the key to understanding Jesus’ strong statement is the second half of the sentence, “in order to be seen by them.” He doesn’t say that we should never practice our piety in front of others. But he does say we better not do it simply to draw attention to ourselves. If you have come here to have ashes on your head in order to be seen by others you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because even though you might not fully understand what this imposition of ashes thing is all about but you know that you are a sinner in need of God’s help then please by all means be strengthened in your faith by receiving the imposition of the ashes. But as we take part in this religious ritual, let us remember that religion is only valuable insofar as it helps to build our faith and enables us to live it out in the world. Religion for its own sake is the enemy of faith. This is the message of King David in Psalm 51 when he prays, “For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Then just a few verses later, though, when you might expect him to vow to never make a religious sacrifice again he says to God, “You will delight in right sacrifices.”
Jesus teaches something very similar to David’s words in Matthew 5 when he says, “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that [someone] has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to [that person]; then come offer your gift.” He doesn’t say that the religious ritual should be totally avoided but he does say that it doesn’t matter what you do with your hands if it isn’t coming from your heart. So in Matthew 6 Jesus doesn’t say don’t give to the poor. Actually he tells at least one person in the gospels to give everything to the poor. But here he says don’t give to the poor so everyone else can see you. He doesn’t say don’t pray. He says don’t pray just so everyone can hear you praying. He doesn’t say don’t ask God for forgiveness. He says don’t pray for forgiveness if you are not willing to forgive. And he doesn’t tell his disciples not to fast. But he does say don’t fast and then go around telling people all about how you are fasting. This is what the hypocrites do, he says.
But although in the gospels Jesus uses the Pharisees, among other groups of people, as examples of religious hypocrites, don’t fool yourselves. The Pharisees do not have a monopoly on participating in religious ritual for the wrong reasons. The Pharisees don’t do anything that we Christians do not do on a regular basis. I don’t think that Jesus was against the Pharisees because they were Pharisees but because some of them, like many of us Christians, were more concerned about appearances and religion than faith in God and love for God and others.
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the season of Lent, and Lent is a time of soul searching. It is a time when like a ship that is taking on water we begin to throw overboard anything that is not essential for the journey. It is a time when we realize that returning to dust is as far as I can go on my own. It is, perhaps, the most uncomfortable day of the church year, because it is a day of truth telling, of telling the truth about our own mortality, our own sinfulness, our own religious hypocrisy and showmanship. But the truth must be told before the journey can continue because as our Lord Jesus said himself, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
