Our Amazing Humanness

A sermon preached on Ash Wednesday at St. Francis by the Lake Episcopal Church, Canyon Lake, Texas.
The readings for Ash Wednesday are here.

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All right, since it’s Ash Wednesday, I have a confession to make. My biggest issue in the season of Lent isn’t about giving things up, I’ve already proven to myself I have the self-discipline to give up just about anything for six weeks. My biggest issue is that I over-indulge in Lent devotions. Seriously, I’ve either bought or downloaded 4 different ones for this year. And that’s on top of the year long devotional book that I began in January, I mean, am I supposed to suspend that for the next 40 days or add my Lent ones to it?

The last one I bought just last week is titled, “God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us” by the Reverend Lizzie McManus Dail. The title hit me hard in my lifelong journey to heal from the harm of my childhood church. I know it’s supposed to be a daily devotional for 40 days but I’m already about a third of the way in. Our prayer for Ash Wednesday says the same thing in a peculiar way: God hates nothing God has made. And, despite what the prayer may go on to say, I proclaim with confidence that God does not make us wretched. I really dislike that word, it’s so, so … well, wretched. If I were on the Prayer Book committee I’d ask to change it to ‘humanness’.

So, what is it to be human, to be in our humanness, to acknowledge our humanness? I know this is challenging for many to hear, but being human means we have limits, that we are finite. We can’t do everything or know everything or even be everything anyone ever wanted. But neither does it mean we are worthless or wretched. Being human means that despite our best efforts and how we might pretend to others, we never really have it all together. Being human means we are The Created of our Creator God. Being human means God chose to create us so that God could love us because God is love.

And in the stories our faith ancestors tell of this amazing Creator God, when God made us, God declared that all of creation is now Very Good. Being created from the dust does not mean we are insignificant; being created from dust is about our connectedness to both our Creator and all of Creation. Often the ‘you are dust and to dust you will return’ of Ash Wednesday comes across as harmful And demeaning because with much of our theology, our understanding of God, we make the mistake of not beginning at the beginning.

This Creator God who made the beauty of the stars, the wildness of the wind, the well ordered rhythm of days and seasons, the whimsy of flowers and butterflies, the strength of tigers and bears, the oddity of platypuses and penguins and sloths, the solidness of rocks and mountains, the fluidity of rivers and streams, this God made US! And even better, this God made us in God’s own image!

One of my desires for all of us through this Lent season is that we rewind our theology of humanness a bit, to start with how and by whom we are created and for what purposes, rather than starting with the moment we attempted to put ourselves at the center of the universe, what is commonly referred to as the Fall.

This is not where God started. It’s is where we used our freewill not to love God back but to take our own journey thinking we could create our own universe. The Fall is where God started God’s relentless pursuit of us to remind us we are created in love and by love and for love.

I think ‘acknowledging our wretchedness’ is going against God’s view of us. He sees us as beautiful beloved children AND God knows we do and think and say things that are harmful to ourselves and others AND God loves us and chooses to make us worthy to be heirs of God’s Kingdom.

And none of what I’ve just said means that any of us are perfect or can do whatever we want without guilt. Part of being human is that we often make choices that go against God’s purposes for us. Instead of living from the place of God’s Image within us, we try to be the small ‘g’ god of our own universe. Sometimes it’s intentional because we want to have power over others. Sometimes it’s accidental because we are just behaving as we have been taught to survive.

But, regardless of intent or accident, we have to acknowledge our humanness, come to terms with who God is and who we are, and confess this knowledge to God (even though God already knows).

This is what Ash Wednesday is all about, acknowledging our humanness, saying to God and our community of faith that we realize we cause harm to others and ourselves and we want to be better humans. The season of Lent is an intentional time to focus on those aspects of our lives that cause harm, the way we treat others and ourselves, the way we tend to our bodies and souls, and the way we care for all of creation, to acknowledge we do harm and then do the intentional work of BECOMING and BEING better at living from the Image of God within us throughout our lifelong Journey with Jesus.

Lent is not about showing the world how good we are at punishing ourselves or beating ourselves up or about how good we are at self-discipline. This is the point Jesus is trying to make in this sermon as recorded by Matthew. Not that Jesus was talking about Lent because it hadn’t been invented yet but the point fits. Sometimes, in ChurchLand it’s like we are having a competition to see who can prove themselves the most wretched when what we should be concentrating on is how to become more and more the humans God created us to be by living as Jesus shows us to live, in love and for love.

God doesn’t ask us to prove anything – either how holy or how wretched we are. God knows who we are and God has already done the work of forgiveness and restoration and reconciliation by coming to us as Jesus, to live and die as one of us. God invites us to remember we are created good and that we are connected to each other and all of creation. God invites us to live the good life of love and compassion and grace and empathy. Heaven’s treasure is the relationships we live into with the firm knowledge that we are neither less than or more than any other human being. We are all on equal footing. Heaven’s treasure is the freedom we feel when we allow ourselves to be who God created us to be instead of trying to be better or worse than anyone else. Heaven’s treasure is the abundance of God’s love flowing through us into the world.

These rewards are here for us now, as we work with God to build up the Kingdom on earth as in heaven. Have a blessed intentional Lent in all of your Humanness. Amen.