Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
1 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Ash Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2015
“Dreaming Smaller”
Founding Pastor of Grace Commons in Chicago, Nanette Sawyer wrote a wonderful article in this month’s Christian Century magazine, an Ash Wednesday reflection, asking herself the question, “Could I treasure washing the dishes?” Reflecting on the Corinthians text she says “This would mean treasuring the fact that I am alive - as Paul puts it, that I am “treated… as having nothing and yet possessing everything” If I could do it, she said, I would remember and experience what a miracle life is. Throughout the remainder of the article she contemplates how her life might look, feel and be experienced differently if only she could remember that she was “alive” each and every day.
And this is where I think she connects truly with what the gospel is inherently about: She says,
“If I could treasure washing the dishes, I would not be storing up treasures on earth “where moth and rust consume” and “thieves break in and steal.” But I would be storing up treasures in heaven, treasures of the heart, treasures of love and honor and simply joy.
I would be fasting in secret, too. Secretly I would be giving up my fear that I am not enough, that my life is not enough, that there is not enough time or money or reward, that there is not enough suffering to atone for all that has been done wrongly in the world. I would be giving up resentment that life includes more work than play. I would let that resentment go, and I would find the play in work. I would do my work for the doing and not for the outcome. I would realize that I am alive for this— to serve, to try to make the world a better place, to love through the efforts I make. And sometimes I would serve the world by doing less, by having smaller dreams, by letting enough be good enough and trusting that our value comes from the fact that we exist.”
I know that I struggle on a daily basis with feeling like my good is good enough. And I know that I am not alone. More often than not my obsessive thinking these days is around being a good enough Mommy… with a two year-old running around I think this is only natural, but it doesn’t keep me from doing what we parents do best- compare ourselves to all of the other parents in the world. That’s right, in order for us mommies to feel better about our mommy skills & selves we typically seek the most important and influential resource of our time, the most reliable wisdom-filled parenting source out there… FACEBOOK. That’s right…we read dozens of Facebook articles most-often posted by other mommies about what they are doing or not doing with their babies and toddlers. Did they breastfeed, did they co-sleep with their child, did they let their baby “cry it out?”, did they make all of their own mashed-up sticky baby food from organic fruits and veggies, did they record every single day in a 1000 photos or more of which they shared on 6 social media sites, did they join a mommy group and a playgroup so that their infants could all lie on their blankets and practice rolling over together, did they stay home from work after delivering the baby to devote all of out time and energy to being the best mommy possible???????? And the list goes on and on, doesn’t it?
This weekend while procrastinating writing this sermon I was browsing Facebook when I stumbled across something my sister-in-law posted called “Mommy Guilt Bingo”. And the comparing began…
The first line of squares had me feeling pretty good, I was still an average mommy having served pizza for dinner, and with an incomplete baby book, but I could still at least take pride in the fact that I have not yet picked my child up from daycare in yoga pants with bedhead, or used the tv as a babysitter…and have not yet heard Sage repeating a 4 letter word. Phew!
Then, on to the second line…Failed to cherish every moment today, Birthday party wasn’t pinterest worthy (because we didn’t have a birthday party)…I work outside the home, i have on the rare occasion purchased non-organic produce when I just refused to drive across town to Whole Foods, and last, but not least I have bribed my toddler with a completely sugar-infested high fructose corn syrup laden lollipop- even just this week! And then, as I made my way through the bingo board - there it was - the real reason that mommy hood seems like an epic failure at times… I had an epidural!
Am I a good enough Mommy? Am I parenting to the best of my ability? Feeding him the right foods, playing the right games, making the right friends, choosing the right schools, the right playgrounds, the right playgroups? Am I spending enough time with my sweet boy? Am I letting the nanny do the mommy’s job? Is my best Mommy-self good enough?
Rev. Sawyer said, “treasuring washing the dishes was a way, for her, of storing up treasures in heaven, treasures of the heart, treasures of love and honor and simply joy, and a means of fasting in secret. Secretly, she said, she would be giving up her fear that she is not enough, that her life is not enough.
What if we could do our work for the doing and not for the outcome, work for progress because we believe that our efforts can change the world for the better rather than progress for progress’ sake, what if we would parent our children moment by moment without obsessing over the future, about the unknown, celebrating each diaper change because it reminds us that we are alive, sweeping the
floor with a whistle on our lips because we know that life is as brief as the moments between our
births until the time we will lie down for the last time, that with every nap time battle, each teenage infraction, and marital conflict- we can look in the mirror and be reminded that our best is good enough, that we are good enough simply because we exist. Sawyer reminds us that in so doing, “we are alive to serve, to try to make the world a better place, to love through our efforts, however small they may be. What if we could treasure washing the dishes?
As we prepare ourselves for this Lenten season, dipped in the ashen reminder of our fragility, a time to reflect upon our own lives, and to explore what it means to be “reconciled to God”, perhaps leaning deeply into these questions: am I enough simply because I exist, and could my life be such that the smallest of moments, those often overlooked, could be life-giving for me? …perhaps living with an orientation towards this smallness could be God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done in your life as it is in Heaven.
Sometimes, said Rev. Swayer,
“I would serve the world by doing less, by having smaller dreams, by letting enough be good enough and trusting that our value comes from the fact that we exist.”
When is the last time, if ever, you heard someone suggest that serving the world might mean “doing less”, having smaller dreams? I don’t quite think she meant what we might assume with the initial hearing of these words, that we should dream smaller, aspire to less, but with “small-er” dreams… not larger than life, but precisely life-sized, not overreaching, but reaching just far enough, not above the table where our eyes scan the room falling upon each and every color and size that this world would have us seek, but at table, and below the table where we can see what is directly in front of us, where our feet, sitting side by side, can reach the floor and where what’s sitting just below us is not out of our reach.
Brother Lawrence, a 17th century monastic brother, whose name was Nicolas Herman of Lorraine, worked for 15 years in the monastery kitchen and then the rest of his years as a sandal maker for the Carmelites of Paris. He is best known for his writings and correspondence collected in the historical text The Practice of the Presence of God, later edited by Harold Chadwick.
For Brother Lawrence doing less, and dreaming smaller was the largest, most expansive thing in his life.
He said, “It matters not to me what I do or what I suffer, so long as I abide lovingly united to God’s will—that is my whole business. I am in the hands of God, and He has his own good purposes regarding me. I do not concern myself, therefore, about anything that people can do to me. If I cannot serve God here, I will find some place else in which to serve him.
Since I first entered the religious life, I have looked on God as the goal and end of all the thoughts and affections of the soul. Possessed thus entirely with the greatness and the majesty of God’s infinite being, i went straightway to the place that duty had marked out for me- the kitchen.
There, when I had carried out all that called for me, I gave to prayer whatever time remained, and also prayed before my work and after.
Before beginning any task I would say to God, with childlike trust:
O Lord, be with me in this my work, accept the labor of my hands, and dwell within my heart with all Thy fullness.”
I believe that as we remember the life of Jesus and listen to his teachings from Matthew’s gospel about personal piety and prayer, and his encouragement towards the secret life, that when we do in secret we will be rewarded in secret,
and then we turn the pages to hear a disciple of Jesus, a committed follower to the way,
calling the church to be reconciled to God, we see a window opening up for us, to see ourselves as “more than enough”, an invitation to live into this divine “smallness”…
When I was in seminary I lived in an apartment complex that had a lake at it’s center, and most days before school I would run around the lake 5 or 6 times as part of preparing myself for the day. And, without fail, each time I would round the Southwest corner of the lake I would come upon an older man named George. George was always standing in the same place near the southwest bank just in front of an old wooden bench with a bag full of bread crumbs where he would patiently wait for the ducks. Most days I just smiled or waved and continued on my run, but on occasion I would stop and sit on the bench near George and just enjoy being in the company of his humble routine, watching and observing his interactions with the wild around him. George was hard of hearing, and was a disabled war veteran, so for the last 17 years had lived in this complex and found it his sacred business to attend to the ducks of this very lake. Before I moved that final spring semester I went on one final run hoping to run into George, but what I found was even more compelling… as I rounded the corner this time, I saw a small boy in the same place with one hand full of bread crumbs, and the other extended upwards held in the gentle grip of an older man… it was George. He was sharing the joy and grace of his practice with his grandson.
In response to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians,
What if we, like George, understood reconciliation with God as a “life-sized” task, and rather than just sizing up the unjustness around us and calculating what piece of the greater puzzle we might play in the great healing of our world we could see the call as personal and as small as one life at a time… as small as the boxes we inhabit, the cars in which we ride, the tables at which we sit, the sacred spaces of our lives that are captured in moments as in a frame… in the mowing of the lawn, the putting our children to bed at night, tucking them in on all sides, the diligent reading that our students must complete on this very night, the emails and papers, and presentations and tasks that hold us captive in time, with deadlines and action points awaiting, with difficult conversations looming over us, disappointment trending in our midst. What if being reconciled to God meant simply abiding with God, as Brother Lawrence expressed saying, “It matters not to me what I do or what I suffer, so long as I abide lovingly united to God’s will—that is my whole business.”
You may be thinking, “Yes, but I am not a monk or a priest, nor one to even aspire to personal piety”, but what can be true for each of us in this time and space as we occupy the flesh and bones that house our souls, that share a common beginning and ending—is that a great treasure, a gift that can only be recognized, unpacked and experienced in “reconciliation” awaits us even now. The gift of the present, of being alive to ourselves and alive to what and who are in our midst, the gift of working as with a whistle on our lips, of feeding the ducks faithfully for 17 years, of loving today as if our hearts would be gone tomorrow, the gift of looking in the mirror and discovering that “enough” is not found in What we complete, but in who we are made complete.
Covering ourselves in Ash this evening is a way to mark this joinery in faith, to receive the call to journey with Jesus these next 40 days… to take a deep breath and rather than looking up, scanning the horizon searching for what’s next, what else, what am I missing?? we are invited to meet one another at eye level, to see as Jesus did, those at table and beneath the table cherishing the very seconds and minutes that form our communal life… And we are invited to contemplate the question, “What if I treasured washing the dishes?”
I pray that as we leave this place tonight we will dare to dream in life-sized pictures, in real time, and that these next several weeks we will take the time to look into the mirror of our lives, and looking with our hearts, believe that what and who we see is enough, and though we may be someone who is “treated… as having nothing we may be found to possess everything”.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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