Wiping Away the "I": Sermon for Ash Wednesday 2006

Jesus said, "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them...." (Matt. 6:1) Oh! How we might wish that these words of his had been taken more seriously throughout the church's history!

On only two or three occasions, Jesus taught his disciples about prayer. The Gospel Lesson for Ash Wednesday, which we have just heard, is one. A second is in Luke's Gospel when the disciples specifically ask him, "Teach us to pray" and the Lord proceeds to instruct them in the Our Father. (Matthew, however, records the instruction of the Lord's Prayer as part of the story we have just read, so perhaps they are one-in-the-same instruction on prayer.)

The third is the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican who both go to the Temple to pray. The Pharisee, you will recall, thanked God that he was not like other men and bragged about his fasting and his tithing. The tax collector, however, simply prayed: "God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Jesus is rather clear that the tax collector's prayer is the sort to which God pays attention.

Ever since these incidents of prayer instruction by Jesus, the church seems to have been fighting about the proper way to pray and the proper way to exhibit (or not exhibit) one's piety.

The 19th Century New Hampshire journalist and poet Sam Walter Foss offered a rather humorous view of this in his poem Cyrus Brown's Prayer:

"The proper way for man to pray,"
Said Deacon Lemuel Keyes,
"And the only proper attitude,
Is down upon his knees."

"No, I should say the way to pray,"
Said Reverend Dr. Wise,
"Is standing straight with outstretched arms,
And rapt and upturned eyes."

"Oh, no, no, no!" said Elder Slow,
"Such posture is too proud;
A man should pray with eyes fast closed,
And head contritely bowed."

"It seems to me his hands should be
Austerely clasped in front.
With both thumbs pointing toward the ground,"
Said Reverend Dr. Blunt.

"Las' year I fell in Hodgkin's well
Head first," said Cyrus Brown.
"With both my heels a-stickin' up,
My head a-pointin' down;

"An' I made a prayer right then and there;
best prayer I ever said.
The prayin'est prayer I ever prayed,
a-standin' on my head."

True worship, as one wag has put it and as Jesus tries to make clear in today's Gospel Lesson, is "more a question of attitude than of altitude." The truest prayer is that spoken in the heart, not in some public display of piety, whatever form that may take. Psalm 51, which we will say together in just a few minutes, makes this so clear.

Psalm 51 is traditionally supposed to have been written by King David. An introduction to the psalm in the Bible describes it as "A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba." (Ps. 51, NRSV) In it the king cries:

Had you desired it, I would have offered sacrifice, *
but you take no delight in burnt-offerings.
The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; *
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
(Ps. 51:17-18, BCP versification)

Dennis Bratcher, a Nazarene theologian, says of the superscription of Psalm 51:

Here is the importance of the superscription for this psalm. It tells us at what point in life God's people are to pray this psalm as a confessional prayer. The superscription tells us that this is the Psalm we should pray when we are David the king, the anointed one of God; when we have seen Bathsheba on the rooftop; when we have taken her even though she is someone else's wife; then when we have killed her husband Uriah the Hittite, and now stand before Nathan the prophet confronted by the magnitude of our sin!

As theology, this psalm is about that very particular crisis point in a person's life when they are confronted not only with what they have done, but with who they are that has allowed them to do it. The superscription defines this crisis as the only proper context in which to pray this prayer, where this prayer and only this prayer is appropriate. (Psalm 51 and the Language of Transformation: A Biblical Perspective on Holiness, emphasis in original)

The brilliance of our Ash Wednesday tradition and the Prayer Book liturgy's use of Psalm 51 on Ash Wednesday is that it points out to us that "that very particular crisis point ... when [we] are confronted ... with who [we] are that" allows us to sin is a point we arrive at on a daily basis! It is not all that particular or unique; it was not unique to David; it is not unique to any person or any time.

Brother Justus van Houten of the Society of St. Francis has pointed out that ...

The mark of the cross is the shape of a capital "I" scratched out. The capital "I". That which is uniquely me. My strengths and my weaknesses. My talents and my sins. I have imposed ashes on thousands of people, and I am struck at how different each one is: we come in all shapes and sizes, and colors and textures. Each of us is like none other. We are each called into a personal relationship with God that is different from everyone else -- not necessarily better or worse, just different. But this capital "I" is also that which separates me from God. It represents those things that I claim for myself alone: my terminal desire for uniqueness.

There is a fundamental difference between "sin" and "sins". "Sins" are the relatively petty acts that are symptomatic of the underlying "sin." "Sin", on the other hand, is the alienation and feelings of being separated from God, the sense that God is totally transcendent and holy and I am purely mortal and fallen. The capital "I" that forms part of the cross etched into my forehead is the "I" that underlies my "sin" -- that state of being separated from God.

In imposing the ashes, the vertical stroke of the capital "I" is followed by the horizontal stroke of crossing it out. The "I" that is crossed out is the "I" that leads to the feelings of alienation from God. It is as if in the horizontal stroke the loving arms of Christ are stretched out to welcome me back home. The wiping away of the "I" that separates me from God gives me the freedom and the ability to reach out to my brothers and sisters.

We wear ashes upon our foreheads not in order to "[practice our] piety before others in order to be seen by them," (Matt. 6:1) but in order to wipe away the 'I' and remind ourselves that we are "servants of God" perhaps destined to suffer all those things Paul mentioned, "afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, [and] hunger" (2 Cor. 6:4-5), but also promised "purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God." (2 Cor. 6:6-7)

These are the treasures we can "store up for [ourselves] .. in heaven" if we will but "return to [the Lord] with all [our] heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend[ing] [our] hearts and not [our] clothing." (Joel 2:12-13) We wear ashes upon our foreheads to wipe away the "I", to remind ourselves of these treasures, and to recall that "where [our] treasure is, there [our] hearts will be also." (Matt. 6:21) Our ashes remind us that true worship and true prayer takes place in our hearts, that it is "a matter of attitude, not altitude." Amen.