Ash Wednesday

The Venerable Richard I. Cluett

This day, Ash Wednesday, may be for some of us the most important day, the most wonderful day in the Christian calendar. With the exception of Good Friday, all the other days are major feast days, days of remembrance, celebration, and contemplation on the acts of God – in the past. Even Good Friday is something like that; the day is totally focused on the acts of Jesus.

But today, today is about us. It is a very personal day that has solely to do with our relationship with God, and with ourselves.

Bishop Steven Charleston writes about today:

“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, the cycle begins again, the ancient whisper of our own frailty, slipping the fine clothes from our shoulders, taking the crown from our heads, bringing us back to that humble place where it all began and where it will surely end.”

This is the day we can be released from whatever it is that has bound us for so long. This is the day we can be released from whatever it is that has separated us. We can be released from whatever it is that has isolated us. We can be released from whatever it is that wakes us and worries us or frightens us in the middle of the long night. This is the day we can be released from whatever it is about us that has condemned us in our own sight. We can finally lay these burdens down, all of them.

Garrison Keillor says that "Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving" - and we give it to ourselves. We bind it upon our own backs.

But this is Ash Wednesday. This is "Get out of Jail" day. This is "Get home free day". At the end of this day, at the end of this liturgy, we can be washed clean. At the end of this day, or at the end of this season of Lent, we can be made dazzling white, cleaner than any fullers bleach could make us. Fresh and clean as a newborn babe, as a newly baptized babe. You and I – a new creation.

Today is our Yom Kippur; today is the Christian Day of Atonement. It is the day that opens the way for clearing away all the stands between our truest, most honest selves and our God. A season of spring-cleaning lies before us, a chance to rid our lives of the detritus of life, the clutter of our consumption. It is the day to start a process of once again becoming “at one” with our God, living in harmony with our God and God’s Creation.

If we will repent and re-turn to the Lord, "our God will have compassion and he will richly pardon." St. Paul tells us in his second letter to the Corinthians that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” God was in Christ reconciling You to himself. And me. And so we can begin again in hope and in faith that God will make us a new creation – again, at one with God and in harmony with those among whom we live.

We can start anew. We can get over it - whatever it is. We can get over ourselves, and get right with our God, and begin to get right with those with whom we live, and among whom we live, and with the rest of God's creation.

Today is about us - about God and us. It is a day to get over ourselves, beyond ourselves, outside ourselves, and get on with life as God intends it to be. Get on with our life in the fullness God has prepared for us.

Today God says, "It is over. What is done is done. You are mone and I love you and you are now forgiven. I absolve you from all that has separated you from me. I absolve you from all that has separated you from your family or friends or neighbors. I absolve you from all that has separated you from yourself."

William Countryman is a wonderful teacher and theologian. He writes about it this way:

"The message of forgiveness says to us, Get over yourself! Get over your goodness and your righteousness, if they threaten to keep you from full participation in your humanity. Get over your faults, your inadequacy, if they're what hold you back. Get over whatever it is that makes you self-obsessed, whatever makes you reject God's wooing of you, whatever makes you feel that you would rather not go in to the party, whatever makes you feel like you belong to some separate and superior race of beings, whatever makes you feel like an eternal victim, whatever makes you imagine that there's something in this world more important and more fundamental than love."

If we repent and turn to the Lord, we "may obtain of the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness". Do you hear that? "Perfect remission and forgiveness." Made worthy to stand in the presence of God. Washed through and through from our wickedness and cleansed from our sin. 

Freed from all that binds us. Freed from all that separates us. Freed from all that isolates us. Freed from all that condemns us. Free at last. Free to take our rightful place at the table. Free to get on with life. Free to get about the work of building the kingdom. Free to help release others from whatever binds them or diminishes their God-given humanity. Free at last! Today. It’s Ash Wednesday. And new life can begin today.

Thanks be to God.

The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

Jesus offers wonderful and gracious words of God’s promise being fulfilled. Those who heard them joyfully receive it. And then Jesus tells the people that he is being sent, not to his hometown, but to others to bring God’s Good News. The people are enraged that Jesus has, in effect, rejected them and they try to do him harm. But he is not able to work with them because they think they know him so well. He cannot help them because he is “only Joseph’s son”. We might call it, The Curse of Familiarity.

All is not right with the world. Jesus knows that. You know that. I know that. All is not right with the world.

The people among whom we live believe we are known quantities. They think they know us from way back when; they know what we did; they know the mistakes we have made; they know some of the not-very-nice things that we have done. So, therefore, how could we have anything of merit to offer? How could we have powers or gifts or ideas that could be put to use for their benefit and well-being. “After all, you are only Ricky Cluett. Dick and Jane’s son.’ Or “You are only my brother. I know you and you can’t.” So they think. 

And eventually sometimes we might even begin to believe it, too. And so we make no offering, we do no deeds of power in our own homes, among our own people, in our own hometown. We keep what we have to offer to ourselves.

All is not right with the world, and so the world does not teach what Jesus teaches about God and about the nature of worth and power. How do we help Jesus bring the reign of God closer in our own day and time to those the world sees “as only this or only that,” people stripped of merit, stripped of ability, stripped of gifts, stripped of power?

How can we share what we know of Jesus so that people are empowered for fullness of life in God’s kingdom, rather being stripped of possibility? How can we help them know the Jesus who has the power to heal and to redeem and to make whole. And that beginning to know, they might begin to believe, and to be healed, and to become whole and holy, and to know themselves as living signs of Jesus? 

How do we build a heritage for our children worthy of Jesus who calls them and empowers them for life? How do we build a church to equip them? How important it is for them to know and for every one, for all God’s children, to know that God has opened the kingdom to every race and nation and tribe and clan and family and condition and person! 

It is true how important it is for us and for the homeless and the hungry and the imprisoned and the disenfranchised and the elderly, and the young. All those whom our society, the world, would separate or exclude because “they are only”; and therefore they cannot, or may not or should not… All are included by Jesus in God's kingdom now, today and forever.

We are reminded by Jeremiah today that God has need of each one of us. We each have something to offer. We each have a unique offering that if kept inside makes the world a poorer place.

All is not right with the world and so too many do not know this Good News. They can't prove it by their experience. Real life has taught them something else. 

Let me give you an example of why I think this is so important. Some of you may remember a time several years ago when the diocese was exploring an alternative model of ministry and lifestyle for faith communities, focusing on small congregations, particularly in Schuylkill County. The model calls for the gifts and ministry of every person in the community.

The principle upon which the model is based comes from Roland Allen, an Anglican Missionary, and states, “The mission of the Kingdom of God in a particular place depends upon the people of God in that place and that God supplies all necessary gifts.”

As part of our exploration, the steering committee asked Margaret Sipple and me to visit each congregation in Schuylkill County to discuss these ideas and to try to help people see how this might work in their community.

As we met with parishes, and introduced the new possibilities, you could see in the faces of the people that “this would never work here because the gifts are not here.” It was obvious that too many felt they had no gifts to discern, nothing to offer, no power over their lives.

In one parish, Margaret asked one elderly woman to trust her and to come forward to be interviewed. She came, reluctantly, shuffling forward, stooped down, face kind of pinched tight. It turned out that she had been a widow for more than 40 years, her husband having died in the mine. She was in her mid-70’s. She had raised four children by herself. She had worked for decades as an aide in a nursing home taking care of the sick and elderly. When forced to retire due to her age, she opened up two rooms in her home to take of people who were too sick or elderly to care for themselves. She had taught Sunday School for decades, served on the altar guild, too. One child was a doctor. One was a teacher. One was back in college training to be a nurse. One was employed in a trade. But in her mind, she had no gifts, no skills, no successes, nothing to offer. And we had brought her into the center of the community.

We asked the people who had listened to her story to tell her what gifts and skills and powers they had heard her using. They spoke of her gifts as love, caring, courage, perseverance, teaching, nursing, sharing... and on and on and on. When they were finished, her face was wreathed in smiles. She sat tall, she walked tall, and she knew she had been wonderfully gifted by God and had been faithfully using those gifts her whole life. And so did her community know of her gifts, too.

Every family, every community, every man, every woman, every child needs to know that they were created in God's image and had been given priceless gifts by God, unique gifts, and that God was with them in every moment of their waking, sleeping, celebrating, suffering, caring, and being cared for. And they need to know that the Lord needs them and what they have to offer – and so do we all need them, everyone.

When we are open to receive what they have to offer, the world will be more all right than it ever was before. Amen.