Rev. Jennifer Shultz
February 10, 2016
Ash Wednesday, Year C
Joel 2: 12-17
There it was the high-pitched, monotonous screaming, ringing, growing louder with every stoplight it rolled through, lights flashing and doors flung open, the gurney outfitted by two EMTs. Their steps were quick and efficient and managed not to validate the urgency of the situation. One, a tall female with burley features pulled out her clipboard, but took one look at me and decided the questions could wait. The urgent care doctors and nurses scrambling around the crowded room, all 8x8 square feet of it, anxiously trying to console not one, but two mothers assuring us of his health, promising that once we arrived at Duke Sage would be in good hands, that the worst trauma had passed.
My son, Sage, celebrated his third birthday on January 14, and just two days later on January 16 what started as a normal Saturday for our family with breakfast at Elmo’s & blueberry pancakes, a full day of puzzles, and trains ended with our greatest fear: the mortality of our first-born child in question. When he was first diagnosed with a peanut allergy, the diagnosis had a paralyzing effect, first the threat of alienation ensued as the walls we had so faithfully and carefully built seemed to be collapsing one by one, all around us. First, it was eggs, and then peanuts and then soy, sesame, and finally tree nuts. How could he continue as a normal 2 year-old with playdates and Sunday school, nursery and preschool? Overnights at Grandma’s house to look forward to? How could we ensure our child’s safety when not in our care?
That Saturday afternoon, taking Sage and Quinn with me, I made a quick stop at Target while Shannon was getting her haircut. Like every toddler I know my son was ravenous and letting me know it. Kicking the cart, doing everything he could to cajole me to get him what he wanted; whatever brightly colored packaged food that caught his eye at the time. I relented and grabbed a box of Lara bars. If you are familiar with these bars they are as healthy as a packaged granola bar can be, including only fruit, nuts, coconut and a few other natural ingredients. In our household we READ labels, and I mean read like a poorly written book that forces you to read between the lines. On this particular Saturday, I grabbed the box, read the label and was assured of my child’s safety. blueberries, vanilla extract, lemon and dates.
That’s what I read, blueberries, vanilla extract, lemon and dates.
What my hyper peanut focussed eyes did not read or see on the list of ingredients was cashews. I realized that I had been reading for what was “not” there rather than what was, as I assumed peanuts were the only thing my son would respond with anaphylaxis to if ever exposed.
I was at the customer service check-out line returning a bicycle helmet when his whining and squirming quickly had me reaching for a blueberry larabar. I held it in my hands, quickly unwrapped the blue shiny paper, and handed it to my child who thankfully took a bite, and then another… within seconds I heard it, “The quivering fear in your child’s voice that alarms you that something is not right. “Mommy??” and he began to cough. From that point on the details are blurry and I could honestly live forever without ever replaying them over in my mind… the story unfolded with me stabbing my child with an epi pen in the middle of Target where my son started to go into anaphylactic shock…
Mortality. Yours, mine, our children’s and grandchildren’s, nieces and nephews, husbands’, wives’ , friends’. This Ash Wednesday the prophet Joel invites us to “return to God with all of our hearts, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning: to rend our hearts and not our clothing, to return to God whose abounding steadfast love awaits us, gracious, merciful, slow to anger…
Just as the prophet Joel signals the alarm, calling the people of Judah to repent and return to God, in the very next breath he calls them to HOPE depicting a God who is jealous for our affections, hungry for our return, like a mother whose only consolation is the breath upon her son’s lips, the light in his eyes, the love in his sweet soul, the touch of his tiny hands- holding gently to hers. This Mother God is both raging with lust for her children's affections and gracious and plentiful in her abundance from which she will hold our pain.
One question for us to consider this Ash Wednesday evening is What in our lives is keeping us from returning to God? Surely, we think, one reason is this mortal flesh, this body in which our souls dance from one place to the next, weaving in and out of one another’s lives, never fully capable of living faithfully, but always teetering on the verge of mortality until finally this body is laid to rest in the final hours of our earthly existence. Another reason we keep God at bay is for fear. No, not fear of death as we often think, but rather it is life that we fear, the fear of living. Fear that our mortal lives are actually capable of more than what we are able, willing or brave enough to consider?
Fear. He will threaten and confiscate much of what our subconscious harbors behind closed doors, and between the lines. He, like a masked man lurking in the shadows, will invite us at every turn to abandon our beliefs, moving farther and farther from the truth as we yield ourselves to the perceived trauma that we are somehow convinced is awaiting us around every corner. Fear has a way of dismantling our foundations those things most grounding and stabilizing in our lives, bleeding our egos one quick glance in the mirror at a time. With bullet-proof vests and a quick getaway always on the ready, fear clothes us with the illusion that safe keeping comes at a high cost, that anymore than superficial engagements or half-honest relationships spell ruin and almost certain calamity, so fear with the promise of life-long partnership quarantines our spirits- leaving us free from defecting yet unwinding, ungrounded, unmistakably hollow, wanton, and laden with the burden of guilt-stained abandonment. The abandonment of our own kindredness, of the likeness peering back at us through the mirrors of our lives. Fear seeks to convince us that life is as we know it and nothing more; That what we see in this flesh and bone is all there is, brittle and used up, broken, slow and out of sink, out of step, out of style, that the visage most known to us is either tinted too much or too little in the wrong direction.
Friends, as we consider our own moralitly this evening, our life, our breath, our death, let us look upon one another with grace that we might see our own faces, our own souls, our own selves reflected there and as we do may we understand more fully what it is to rend our hearts before God. Beginning on this Ashen evening, let us move one step closer to Jesus allowing the fullness of Jesus’ love to spill into us, the only love that can truly wreck us, dissolve our brokenness and piece it back together, ashen cross by ashen cross, one long look in the mirror after another. I know I will seek to move more closely to my Mother God this season, the gracious Mother who is ready to receive me with abounding steadfast love, ready to look into my eyes, saying, “it is not your fault, you are forgiven, I am here to hold your pain.” This God will will cradle our insecurities and breathe courage and comfort into our darkest places where fear has taken residence. May we move one step closer to Jesus who, like none other, understands what it is to be housed in these our bodies of flesh and bone.
As we move into our time of prayer, I invite you to hear these words from fellow UCC Minister Michael Coffey: Ash Thursday:
He did the yearly black solemn ritual
and got smeared and humbled though he
didn’t like it much with the flecks falling down
in his eyelashes and the soul’s grief exposed so
He got home and stared at his conundrummed face
for five minutes give or take in the bathroom mirror
it wrecked him to be so humiliated, so mortified
he washed away the ashen cross and dreamed of dying
He woke up Thursday and after peeing and scratching
looked in the mirror and there it was like a Mardi Gras drunken tattoo
his forehead graffitied, black, sooty,
haunting him he wore it all day like an unbandaged wound
At bedtime that night he washed and slept like a storm-tossed boat
woke up to his sunrise reflection, his sleet eyes squinted
again it was back, his skin tagged with midnight streaks
and he walked the day mortal through to his marrow
After that first Ash Thursday and Ash Friday
and Ash Tomorrow, Ash Next Week
Ash March, Ash Autum, Ash Solstices
never a day went by when he didn’t see it, let it have its way
Never a day went by thereafter that he didn’t
rise to bless himself with Wednesdays words:
remember you are dust and to dust you shall return
and every day then on he was his free earthy self until he died
Let us pray:
