Ash Wednesday: Eliminating Self-Deception and Prioritizing the Kingdom

Transcription

 Well, good evening again everybody. Thank you so much for being here tonight. Thank you for making the drive. I know the weather was a little challenging and a lot of you are coming from work, so thank you for making time to begin Lent together with your church community.

I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church, and this is a season that reorients our priorities to the priorities of the kingdom of God. Lent is a season that helps us peel off all the layers of self-deception that we have started to build over time, to do the hard work of naming the truth and then asking for God's help and mercy because he's more ready to give that to us than we are to ask for it. And so as we consider getting our priorities straight, I want to look at three parts of this passage. 

First, keeping good rhythms. Second, be honest about where self-deception lies. And third, framing your earthly life in light of the life of God's kingdom. And so as we look at this passage, Matthew chapter 6 tonight, let me pray for us. In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer. Amen.

Keep Good Rhythms

Well first, keep good rhythms. Keep good rhythms. In the passage today, Jesus mentions almsgiving, fasting, and prayer. And it's assumed that these pious Jews, his followers, are going to have these rhythms.

He's not exhorting them to start doing them as though they're not. They are already doing them, having these rhythms of almsgiving, fasting, and prayer. These are the rhythms that recalibrate God's people to God's covenant faithfulness when God is their king.

So giving towards the plight of the poor is an invitation to the justice of God's kingdom where the wrongs are going to be made right. And that's what we're giving towards as we give to the Lord. Prayer is this invitation to commune with the God of heaven, to get clarity on what his love is and what his will looks like, so that as we pray every day, his will might be perfectly done on earth as it is in heaven.

And then fasting is this invitation to depend on our Creator. It doesn't always mean food, but for them it often did. For us it often does. And it's this invitation to depend on our good Creator to examine all the ways that our appetites, our wills, and desires lead us and guide us rather than the God who loves us. And so the church, even in the earliest centuries, continues these habits in the new covenant where Jesus is king to recalibrate life to what it looks like to return to the covenant where we live under the kingship of our Lord Jesus. And so when we fast, pray, and give alms, we're invited into dependence, justice, and love that frames our earthly life in light of heaven.

And if you haven't realized this yet, you will, that living in northern Virginia can feel frenetic. Yes, I know that's surprising. And sprints are fine. 

If you do a 50-yard dash, it might be doable. But you can't sustain that pace for years and for decades. And so Lent invites us, helpfully, to just stop and slow down, cultivate rhythms that are this wholly upsetting of our sprinting pace.

Changing your evening routine, maybe waking up earlier, how you do a meal, perhaps intentionally skipping a meal for the sake of prayer, changing a diet like going vegan, carving out part of your budget to support God's work in your neighborhood or in the church or around the world, using prayer tools like the examine or other prayer tools. All of these things contribute in new ways to a wholly unsettling to push us off our frenetic pace, to disorient us so that we're reoriented to the kingdom of God where Jesus is Lord. Lent is a wholly unsettling, so we need to keep good rhythms.

Be honest about self-deception

Second, we need to be honest about where self-deception has filled our hearts. Jesus had warned his followers about the motives that they were doing for prayer and for almsgiving and fasting. And it's not wrong to be noticed by others.

It's not like if you see somebody with a cross of ash on their forehead during the day that they're somehow disobeying Jesus. It's about motivation. What is the aim and the goal of practicing piety before the Lord and the outward actions that are associated with that? Wanting to be noticed fuels self-deception.

If you're wanting to be noticed for how holy you are, you are fueling self-deception. It reminds me of gardening because we were doing some gardening yesterday, and there are a lot of plants that I've tried to plant along our fence, and they all die. Even ones I thought would do just fine, like thyme, have died along our fence.

And now what's happening that is killing those plants? It's Virginia clay, my arch-nemesis. And so, besides English ivy, that's my other arch-nemesis. So I have two arch-nemeses, but Virginia clay. So unless I spend some time amending the soil, you know, what's underneath the surface is going to continue to kill whatever I put there. Doesn't matter how nice that plant is, it's eventually going to die. We don't want to have the kind of spirituality that signals our piety to other people, but what it's actually doing is fostering a kind of death inside of us in our interior life.

And so what have we allowed to calcify in our inner life that needs to be broken up and amended? I can't answer that question for you. It's a question to ponder during Lent. What have we allowed to calcify in our inner life that needs to be broken up and amended? Have we begun to believe false narratives that we've created about other people, about ourselves, about God? Are we making decisions, communicating out of a place of fear, allowing our external circumstances to guide our decisions? But we need to let our prayers, each of our gifts, each thing that we give up or take on in this season with new rhythms, each of those things is contributing to the breaking up of the hard soil of our inner life.

And so we do these things all with intention to break up what is hard underneath. And so don't be afraid to look undone before other people. This is a season to remind each other that you are a mess. I mean, we are a mess. All of us are a mess. We are like that unfinished wall that is sitting there that is completely undone. That is all of us. We are a mess. This is a season to acknowledge it, embrace it, and give comfort to one another that it is okay to be a mess together in community.

Acknowledging our mess in community is actually the beginning of rightly ordering your interior life under the rule and the reign of King Jesus, who, as I said, and as the colic says, he is more ready to hear than we are to pray. And I love that collect.

Adopting Kingdom Priorities

So we looked at keeping good rhythms. We looked at eliminating self-deception. Finally, let's look at adopting kingdom priorities. Jesus ends this passage with this reminder that where your treasure is, that's where your heart's going to be also.

Heaven is God's realm. So heaven's God's realm where he abides and where his will is done perfectly. It's not something ethereal out there.

It's an alternate sphere that overlaps and interlocks with the age that we're in now. The age to come, the age we're in now, heaven and earth overlap and interlock. And that's important because what that means is that there's the possibility that we get glimpses of heaven in our day in and day out experience right now.

And it's not all something just to be looked forward to in eternity. And that's important because Jesus, what he does in his earthly life and in his death and resurrection and in his ascension on high, is he breaks into this age into the realm of the earth with the realm of heaven. And we see heaven meeting earth in the person of Jesus.

And so in Lent we make extra space to ask God to break into our realm again. And then to give us glimpses of what things will ultimately be when Christ is in all and over all and all things are in him. And so it's not an invitation to be so heavenly minded that you're of no earthly good.

Let me say that again. This is not an invitation to be so heavenly minded that you're of no earthly good. Instead, it's an invitation to prioritize your earthly life around God's priorities. 

We learn to love our enemies even when we publicly or privately disagree with them so that we learn God's love for them and for us. And so that ultimately they learn it as well. We abide with Christ.

We endure disappointments. We endure unmet expectations and sufferings not as things that are distracting us or taking us away from the will of God, but as those things that are, in accepting them, they are meaningfully part of God's forming us into the image of Christ. And so we take, we make time and we allot our resources to love and serve those who are the least, the lost, the forgotten, because in God's kingdom those are the ones to be honored as divine image bearers.

And this is the reality of heaven breaking into earth. Prioritizing God's kingdom has ethical implications both personally and publicly, and we don't do things to be seen by other people because we want God to break in through our layers of self-deception and to form us into the image of his Son. So in conclusion, this passage has three important points. 

Keep good rhythms. Break through the hardened layers of self-deception and adopt God's kingdom priorities. This is the invitation of Lent, to keep good rhythms.

Break through self-deception and adopt God's kingdom priorities. And so tonight you're gonna receive a bit of ash on your forehead, and it's in the shape of a cross, the Lord being our helper. I'll do my best.

The ash reminds us that each of us one day will die, which is really hard to think about. The reality is like in our culture they have built habits to avoid remembering death, and so Ash Wednesday cuts through the culture's self-deception to remind us to make things right with God and right with others as there is still time. And the shape of the cross reminds us that there is hope for us, that Christ has defeated death, and that God loves the dust that we are.

God hates nothing that he has made, as our collect says tonight, but God longs for our forgiveness, and he longs to grant us his mercy. And so tonight invites us into a whole season of repentance and renewal as we start to break up that hard soil and begin to rightly order our interior life once again.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.