Ash Wednesday Meditation
2 Corinthians 5:1-5, 14-6:1
February 21, 2007
Rev. Drew Henry
I have heard a number of people this week say that Ash Wednesday is their favorite worship service of the year. I believe this may be so because Ash Wednesday reminds us of the ultimate nature of our faith. This day reminds us that our faith is a matter of life and of death.
For that very truth I find the words I’ll read from 2nd Corinthians to be so appropriate for us tonight. Paul wrote these words to the believers in Corinth and they are written to us, the believers in this time and place also. Listen to God’s Word speaking to us of death and of life. I’ll be reading from The Message.
1-5 For instance, we know that when these bodies of ours are taken down like tents and folded away, they will be replaced by resurrection bodies in heaven—God-made, not handmade—and we'll never have to relocate our "tents" again. Sometimes we can hardly wait to move—and so we cry out in frustration. Compared to what's coming, living conditions around here seem like a stopover in an unfurnished shack, and we're tired of it! We've been given a glimpse of the real thing, our true home, our resurrection bodies! The Spirit of God whets our appetite by giving us a taste of what's ahead. He puts a little of heaven in our hearts so that we'll never settle for less.
14-15 Our firm decision is to work from this focused center: One man died for everyone. That puts everyone in the same boat. He included everyone in his death so that everyone could also be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than people ever lived on their own.
16-20 Because of this decision we don't evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don't look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We're Christ's representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them. We're speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he's already a friend with you.
21 How? you ask. In Christ. God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God.
1 Companions as we are in this work with you, we beg you, please don't squander one bit of this marvelous life God has given us.
(2 Corinthians 5:1-5, 14-6:1)
My wife Tamara and I moved from Argentina to Alabama in May of 2001. I had been serving as a Presbyterian mission volunteer in Buenos Aires, and part of my return involved participating in what our church calls a Reentry Retreat for mission personnel who are concluding a time of service.
This retreat was scheduled to begin at the Stony Point Conference Center, just 45 miles north of New York City, at the end of September of 2001. Following the events of 9/11, there was some serious discussion as to whether we should go on with the retreat or not.
Finally a decision was made that it was important for us to gather there at that time as missionaries who had served taking the message of Jesus Christ all across this country and around the world. Tamara and I had plane tickets into the Newark Airport, the site from which Flight 93 was hijacked on that tragic day. We were also at the time expecting our first child, Santiago, and we decided that flying into Newark just weeks after 9/11 was more than we could handle. So we drove.
The retreat at Stony Point was a powerful one, and many tears were shed for a variety of reasons. One evening we were offered the opportunity to go into New York City and visit lower Manhattan and Ground Zero. I remember we took a van into the city and were dropped off at Union Square. There were candles lit there in vigil and homemade flyers taped up everywhere with the faces of missing loved ones.
We went down into the subway and took the train to last station that was still open in lower Manhattan. We emerged from that tunnel into a reality I will never forget. The normal activity of that world had vanished and had been replaced by an abnormal military presence, armed soldiers and vehicles of war stationed in the streets of New York City. We walked together in silence, not because we had been ordered to but because there were not words sufficient to name what we were experiencing.
We walked right past the ancient cemeteries of Trinity Parish to the closest point the public was allowed access to this freshly torn open grave which had been given the name Ground Zero. I remember the faces of the people whom I’d never met as we looked into each other’s eyes in disbelief, as if we had known each other for the entirety of our lives. I remember the smoke that was coming off the pile of twisted steel, still smoldering weeks after towers had collapsed. I remember the stench in the air – an odor I could never describe but never forget. And I remember all around me as I walked around lower Manhattan in every crevice and on every ledge there were ashes.
Two weeks ago I had a chance to return to this site for the first time since 2001. I traveled to Manhattan with a group of clergy with whom I’ve just begun a three-year study of the connection (or the dis-connect) in our lives between faith and money. One of the sites we visited was St. Paul’s Chapel, an Episcopal Church that was built in 1766 and in 2001 found itself directly across the street from the World Trade Center. This was George Washington’s parish after he was installed as the first president of our country in the then capital of our nation. This would also become the site of an extraordinary 9 month, 24-7 volunteer relief ministry for the recovery workers at Ground Zero.
Two weeks ago we sat in that sanctuary and listened to the stories of the staff and volunteers who continue an amazing ministry at St. Paul’s Chapel. We listened to the first hand accounts and reflections of the Rev. Dr. Stuart Hoke, chaplain at St. Paul’s, who like many and unlike so many others, nearly escaped death that tragic day. We listened to Alessandra Pena, the program director at St. Paul’s, passionately tell the stories of thousands of volunteers from across the country and around the world who were united across all racial, social, cultural and religious lines to provide food and a multitude of relief services to the rescue and recovery workers, working tirelessly for months on end. We listened to Vestry member and volunteer Chester Johnson recount his own experiences and read from the poetry that emerged as a part of his own grief process. People gathered around us as we listened and there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.
I tell you these stories today because they too speak to us of life and of death. What I witnessed in the ashes almost six years ago was literally death. What I witnessed two weeks ago was how in that very same place life has emerged from those ashes. St. Paul’s, right across the street from Ground Zero, has become a community of faith and reconciliation grounded in the radical hospitality that is so key to our Gospel.
This radical hospitality is not of our own design. It is rooted in God’s radical action of hospitality, of which we are reminded in 2nd Corinthians. “One man died for everyone. That puts everyone in the same boat. (God) included everyone in his death so that everyone could also be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than people ever lived on their own.”
The amazing thing I heard and saw at St. Paul’s Chapel two weeks ago was the new quality of life that was born out of that tragedy. A complex diversity of people working together rooted in a common humanity. Our letter to the Corinthians continues, “Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look…Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other.”
Friends if you take on anything during this season of Lent, I encourage to consider taking on an active spirit of reconciliation – settling our relationships with each other in this world. God has already settled our relationship with him. “God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving (us) a fresh start by offering the forgiveness of sins.” Now “God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing…God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them.”
Since 9/11, at 12:30 p.m. every day there are Prayers for Peace offered up at St. Paul’s Chapel. We joined with all those gathered there a few weeks ago in praying “…for an end to prejudice throughout our country and the world; that we will respect all people as precious children of God; and that racism, sexism, religious intolerance and all other forms of bigotry and discrimination will be forever banished from our hearts, our society and our laws.” We also prayed to the God of eternal life and resurrecting love “…for all who have died as a result of violence, war, disease or famine, and we held up most especially those lives that were lost merely due to human blindness, neglect or hardness of heart.”
Friends, our faith is a matter of life and death. For that very reason we celebrate Ash Wednesday and remember that we too go from ashes to ashes and from dust to dust. We also remember that because of Christ, God, and not death, has the last word. God has given us “a glimpse of the real thing, our true home, our resurrection bodies! The Spirit of God…puts a little heaven in our hearts so that we’ll never settle for less.”
So as we begin this season of Lent, I beg you to take on this task of reconciliation. God has already reconciled the world to himself in Jesus Christ. Now with whom do you, with whom do we, need to be reconciled? Begin in your own backyard and let God be the one who defines the limits of your ability to drop differences and to make things right between you and the rest of the world. “As (I am) in this work with you, (I) beg you, please don’t squander one bit of this marvelous life God has given us.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.