The Drama of Ash Wednesday Joel, 2:1-2, 12-17, Psalm 103, 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 February 25, 2004, Ash Wednesday The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi Jesus words as narrated by the author of Matthew include no list of "thou shalt nots"and no list of "if you" but only "when you": give alms, pray, fast. No instruction to do so, but the assumption that disciples already do these things. Jesus assumes that those who are part of bringing about the kingdom of God go beyond commandments. However, Jesus also knows the risks of our humanness. He knows when we leave the land of avoiding misdeeds, the land of "you shall not," the land of commandments, to enter the land of holy living, the land of "you shall," our natural tendency is to want to be acknowledged for our efforts. He knows our risk of turning our piety, our relationship with God, into a performance in which almsgiving is rewarded by trumpet fanfare, prayer is a public parade, and the discomfort of fasting is a spectacle. Such religious performance becomes a gaudy charade. However, Jesus redefines the play. This is not a performance of spectacle or display, but a newly scripted drama performed in secret. This Gospel text and Lent invite us into the drama of holy life. While early in its history wayward Christians used Lent to be reconciled with the Church, Lent is not about making us good after a year of bad behavior, not about adding or taking away some spiritual or dietary discipline in order to make us healthier or more worthy of salvation. It is not even really about journeying with Jesus into the wilderness. This text and the invitation to a Holy Lent is rather about being in a drama in which we encounter God not in the theater of some magnificent cathedral, but the great theater of the Holy of Holies. In this drama both the stage and the theater is a locked room, and God and we are both the actor and the audience in which we allow ourselves to be drawn into the very heart of God. The disciplines of this season offer spiritual tools to help us to remove the distractions which "draw us from the love of God," and to experience God face-to-face revealing our anonymous gift and in the awesomeness of the Holy, acknowledge our insatiable and undisclosed hunger. It is in this theater of the locked room we encounter the drama St. Benedict describes as coming to the awareness that God is not outside of us to be stumbled upon but within us to be realized. Thus, our drama today, draws us to the knowledge that the love of God is in fact a call to return to our beginning, our essential selves, created from the dust of the earth, God's own first creation. To return to that original nature, we must become aware of what keeps us from ourselves through self examination, repentance, fasting, self-denial, meditation, prayer, reading and study of scripture. At first glance these may seem self evident - mom and apple pie sorts of things. Yet if we are serious and examine them closely, these Lenten disciplines are not a self-improvement program but a call to radical discipleship that could transform not only ourselves, but our world as well. But it will not be easy. The forty days of Lenten preparation are in many ways a call to live in the theater that is counter to theater of the 21st century culture. Behind these two theaters - the theater of the crowd and the theater of the locked room - lies a significant irony. Every theater is a kind of game, a kind of suspended disbelief with an agreed set of rules. The players in the game are called the actors. And the Greek word for actor is . . . hypocrite. We are taught that hypocrisy is a terrible thing. But what is giving alms without anyone knowing, if it is not saying one thing and doing another? What is praying in secret, unless it is pretending to be something you are not? In a world where buying is synonymous with godliness, where consumption is an act of patriotism, our drama calls for fasting and self denial. In a world of sound bites and instant messaging where image is everything, our drama calls to look inward to meditation and prayer, to spend time in reflection and silence. In a world where the present is what matters, our drama calls us to study ancient texts, to examine the ways our history is the foundation for the future and knowing the past allows us to reshape what is to come. In a world where respirators and life support machines pretend to keep us alive for ever, the drama of Ash Wednesday, more than anything else, reminds us that there is no denial of death. Lent invites us into a drama in which we no longer run away from death, but face its inevitability as Jesus did. In this drama the line between our life now and the one we will inherit becomes, as the Celts would say, thin indeed. Death is no longer something to fear, but a place we have already been and to which we will return - dust to dust, ashes to ashes. In this most ancient phrase of Scripture, coming right out of the early chapters of Genesis, the script reminds us that we are dust - to remember that our very substance is of the earth. And it is good. Every year at this time we are treated to the images of the pre-Lenten festivities, Mardi Gras celebrations of parades and most particularly, masked revelers dancing in the streets, the last celebration before the Lenten time of fasting and self denial. Symbolically they are masks of anonymity or disguise, worn deliberately and literally during Mardi Gras, but which many of us wear more figuratively in our worldly drama through out the year. But on Ash Wednesday we take off the masks to enter our locked room theater which we share with God to play our roles with authenticity, our true created self. In Lent's drama for God to love us we do not need to wear a mask. We do not need to pretend that we are someone else, or that we do not make mistakes. We need only ask forgiveness and continue the drama of discovering who we are, stripped of all that masks us, and there to find God embracing and loving us all along. This is perhaps Jesus' perfection - his authenticity. He did not need a mask and neither do we. The drama of Lent helps us remove those masks as we are drawn more fully into the heart of God. As our liturgy for Ash Wednesday continues, you will come forward to receive the sign of the drama you and God perform together. The ashes Diane or I will mark in the form of a cross on your forehead is not a mask, but an outward and visible sign of the drama of Lent - the drama through which you encounter not the God outside of you, but the God within you, and through which you experience, as the Benedictine nun Joan Chittister describes, the awareness that you and God are neither one nor two, but that you and God are inseparable, as the sun and its light, the ocean and its wave, and the singer and her song are inseparable. This drama of Ash Wednesday and Lent tell us to play our role with our undivided attention to the present moment, to realize that it can all be gone in a heartbeat. It can all be gone in the time it takes to trace the sign of the cross on a child's forehead.