Putting our Hearts in Lent

 Ash Wednesday - 2-17-21

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

In “the before times,” I feel most of my pastor colleagues – and myself included – often started our Ash Wednesday sermons with some version of “I’m not ready for Lent!” But this year feels different. Because the original lockdown from Covid-19 happened during the season of Lent last year, we joked at first that we were just in one long Lent until we could come back together again. In fact, some proposed delaying Easter (for just a few weeks) to be celebrated when we could all be “back.” How naïve that feels now, almost one year later.

Ash Wednesday is truly one of the “Last big things we did together in the before times.” Everything else from here on out, we will have done before in lockdown. Thank goodness for the gifts of previous experience! But almost one year later, it certainly does feel as though we have had a year of Lent. So, this year, I’m not ready to start a season we really never left. 

But ready or not, Lent happens. Just like life. Like Lent, life arrives like an unwelcome guest. Our lives have been interrupted when we become marked by death, grief, and pain. When we are suddenly not the person we were before, but aren’t yet the person we will become. And this is a very uncomfortable place to be.

This has been the human story from the very beginning, as we heard from the story of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden. After they had eaten from the fruit of the tree, they were no longer the same. God asked them a lot of questions about what happened – “Where are you? Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree? What is it that you have done?” And, instead of exploring these questions, our first parents chose to blame one another… the snake… God… anyone but themselves for their own actions.

In one of her songs, Sara Bareilles describes the scene in Eden from Eve’s perspective: “Walking in the garden was a serpent-shaped heart and he told” her a lie about God: “What is broken cannot show,” and “less than beautiful is worse than unholy.” She did not trust that God had created her good, just as she was. Like for our first parents, it’s hard for us to see ourselves as God sees us. It’s hard to image that God actually does love us for who we are.

I’m guessing, if you are human and have lived on this planet for more than a few seconds, your heart is not pristine red, shiny, or intact like the decorations for valentine’s day just a few days ago. Of course, we all know that love and other feelings don’t originate with this blood-pumping muscle in our chests. But we CAN feel so full of love our hearts feel as though they might burst. Our hearts can ache with compassion and empathy, or with longing or loneliness. Our hearts can sting from being hurt. Our hearts can get bruised. Our hearts can even get broken.

We have a saying that we “put our hearts into” things that we care deeply about. Some of these things seem innocent enough – family, friends, country, our jobs, living a comfortable life, freedom. But, as Jesus says about what happens to these treasures after a while … these things we think we should love above all else WILL fail us. Our homes and our cars, our careers, our health, all the stuff we bought online out of boredom…. They will let us down.

We are human. We love what is bad for us – and I’m not talking about chocolate or giving up sugar for Lent. I’m talking about how we hang on to what feels comfortable and normal. And how trying to go back to these things is one of the reasons we are still here, almost one year later. We love what is comfortable, familiar, and convenient, because – let’s face it! Change is hard! Altering our behavior is hard! Even when – ESPCIALLY WHEN – it would be for the best.

We’re not in Eden anymore (as if we ever were) but we are definitely in a strange and unfamiliar place. Our efforts to ignore this wilderness only prolong our time here, until we cannot keep it out any longer, and this reminder knocks us off our feet. Like Ash Wednesday, the start of our 40 days in the season we call Lent.

Ready or not, Ash Wednesday is the time to take stock of our dusty, sore hearts. And we often find what we don’t want to find. We find our sinful and broken actions have left scars on our hearts, and left scars in the lives of others. We find we are lost in a wilderness we don’t want to be in.

But we are not left in our dusty, heartsick state. We are not abandoned to the wilderness surrounded by our comfortless treasures. Our damaged hearts are not cast aside and thrown away, like unwanted valentines on February 15th. We can show our broken selves to God and know that Love will find us there. God renews our hearts, minds, souls, our whole being. The good, the bad, the ugly, the parts that feel unlovable and unworthy. All of it. All of us. No matter how long it takes. 

And so, we wear the sign of the cross in ashes on the outside to remind ourselves of the work that God is enacting on the INSIDE Of us. The confessing our sins. The accepting and embracing of our brokenness and trauma. Acknowledging and processing the ways that we have been marked by death and loss in the last year. Beginning the slow and painful process of the transformation of our dusty and broken hearts into ones that are healed and whole…. All so that we might be better able to love the other dusty and hurting hearts out there in our lives and in the rest of the world.  To love one another with our whole hearts… with hearts that are broken AND beautiful. 

We know that will likely take more than forty days. It might take more than a year. It will likely take our entire lives. But together, trusting in Jesus, we will get through this Lent-within-Lent, hearts intact and ready to love, beautiful broken bits and all. Thanks be to God. Amen.