Ash Wednesday,

The Rev. C. Dean Taylor

For several Wednesday nights, we’ve enjoyed a class that we call “The Gospel According to Everybody Loves Raymond”. Our favorite episode so far is the one where the wife and children come home from Church and find Raymond at the kitchen table—Raymond who did not really feel like going to Church that day.

His little seven-year-old girl hands him a picture that she drew at Sunday School. “Oh,” says Raymond, “this is nice. What’s all this red?” “It’s Hell”, says the little girl. “Well, who’s this stick figure down here? Is it the devil?” “No, Daddy. It’s you.” “It’s me?” “Yep. Granddaddy says that’s what happens to people who don’t go to church.”

And so begins the coercion, the threats, the guilt, throughout the whole episode, to try and get Raymond to go to church. Most of which, of course, don’t really work. But in the middle of it, there is this wonderful conversation between husband and wife.

“Why don’t you want to go to church?” she asks him when they’re alone. “Oh,” he whines, “I don’t know.” And he gives all the usual excuses. “I don’t have to go to church to prove I’m a good person,” and all that. And then he asks, “Well, Mrs. goody two-shoes, why do you go to church?”

And she gives one of the most beautiful answers that you’ll ever hear on network television. She says, “I go to church to thank God for you and the kids…and to pray for the strength to get through another week with you and the kids.

I go to get re-energized, to be part of something bigger than me and my little problems, to remind me that I’m not the be all and end all, that there’s something out there that’s greater than me…”

So there, in that one response, you have the basic spiritual needs of life, right there: The need to give thanks, to gain strength in life, and to get some perspective on your everyday problems.

2.

What she has done, basically, is to carve out a time and a place in her life—in her case, the habit of going to Church on Sunday morning—and allowed that sacred time and space to allow God to come into her life.

That’s really what the season of Lent is all about. It’s the church’s invitation to each one of us to carve out time and space and special activity so that God might come into our lives. “I invite you,” says our liturgy, “in the name of the church, to the observance of a Holy Lent.”

But this is important. Taking on Lenten Disciplines is not like a New Year’s Resolution, where the aim is to Do Something to Make Yourself a Better Person. No, the goal here is not to “Make” something happen in your life. It is, rather, to let something happen in your life. To allow something to happen in your life. That something, of course, being God.

But you don’t go to all this effort to try and get God to come into your life. It doesn’t work that way. God is there already, just behind your ear, whispering a word to you, a word that is just exactly the word that you need to hear in that moment.

Spiritual maturity is not the ability to “conjure up” the right prayer to cajole God down into your life. Spiritual maturity is when we learn, slowly over the course of our lives, to move away the other noise and distractions so that we might be able to hear, every once and a while, that whisper of God that has been there all along.

So, what brought you to this service? What spiritual hunger, what wound, what hope? For you, what word to you need to hear from God most of all, at this moment of your life?

Is it a word of healing? Has life hurt you, and you still have that wound hidden deep inside, and it longs to be healed? Is it a word of courage that you are hungry to hear, a word from God that says, “Yes, you can do this. You really can, and I will be with you all the way.” Is the word that you need to hear from God a word of wisdom or guidance, where you’re trying to figure out where to go in your life, or the right thing to do?

3.

Or maybe it’s this: maybe the word that you most need to hear from God is simply a word of love. Maybe you need to hear the same thing that Jesus heard at his own baptism, just before he went into the desert: “You’re my beloved child, you’re my boy, you’re my kid, and I love you so, so much.” Sometimes that’s what we need most in life.

But you don’t know what that is until you get rid of the clutter, the spiritual clutter, all around you. And that’s where confession comes in, and that’s where Lenten Disciplines come in. That’s what they’re really for. What stands in the way of your hearing God’s word in your life?

A hectic schedule? Do less for Lent, and take time for silence and prayer. Remember, silence feeds the soul.

Do you eat or drink for comfort or reward? Give something up for these forty days, and do spiritual battle, see what you can learn about yourself from it.

Something about yourself that stings when you read the confession we’re about to read? The way you treat other people? The way you spend your money? What you do with your life?

All these are things that get in the way of that whisper of God that we all need to hear. So ask God’s guidance about how to get them out of the way. Ask one another. Ask your ministers. Ask God. Lord, what to do for Lent? And be quiet, and listen.

For we are about to be reminded, with these ashes of death on our heads, that we are absolutely in God’s hands, from the moment of our birth to the day of our death. And, as we celebrate each time we receive this bread and wine of the living and resurrected Christ, even beyond. We are in God’s hands. And they are good, loving hands. So let us now begin this holy journey, that will begin and end in the love of God.