Fifth Sunday in Lent – Year A
John 11:1-44
The Rev’d Charles Everson
St. Mary’s Church
​
“I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”[1]

Since before medieval times, these words have been said at the beginning of the burial rites of the English Church, and post-1789, of The Episcopal Church.  And this is a meet and right thing so to do as these two verses encapsulate the Christian view of both life and death.

In today’s lengthy gospel reading, we hear the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. As the story begins, we hear that Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus, has fallen ill. His sisters, Mary and Martha, send word to Jesus, hoping that he will come and heal their brother. But Jesus delays, on purpose it seems, and by the time he arrives, Lazarus has already died and been buried four days. When Jesus arrives, he is greeted by Martha, who says to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Jesus responds by saying, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha, responds by saying, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”  But Jesus has something else in mind. He says to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

What does it mean for Jesus to be the resurrection and the life?  For Jesus to be the resurrection means that physical death has no power over those who believe in Jesus.  Our future is determined by our faith in Christ, not by our death.  For Jesus to be the life means that all of our present reality is also transformed by Christ’s resurrection.  In other words, at our baptism, we begin to experience eternal life here and now. [2]

Next, he asks Martha, “Do you believe this?” Martha responds with a powerful confession of faith: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

With these words, Martha affirms her faith in Jesus as the one who has power over death and the one who has come to bring new life.  This new life we began to live at our baptism is not devoid of drama and high emotion as we see in Jesus’s encounter with Martha’s sister Mary.  When he sees her weeping, he is “greatly disturbed in spirit and troubled” with the RSV’s translation being a bit tame.  The text isn’t saying that Jesus is with in compassion with Mary in her grief. The Greek word translated as “greatly disturbed in spirit” connotates anger and indignation, and the word translated as troubled also can mean agitated. Later at Lazarus’s tomb, he is “deeply moved” or “disturbed” again. Jesus is angry at something, and Mary is beside herself with grief.  While biblical scholars disagree on why he is angry, the Greek text is clear that Jesus is indeed angry.[3] His weeping is in the midst of his anger.  It’s painful to envision Jesus wailing and crying out in anger.  Yes, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, but he doesn’t shy away from expressing the deepest of human emotions.

I think it might be helpful for us to remember this the next time our emotions get the best of us, and even more importantly the next time someone else’s emotions seem way over the top.  Because we have chosen to follow Jesus, death no longer has ultimate hold over us.  But we who are above ground breathing in this world – we who experience, like our Lord, the drama of everyday life with its highs and lows, the dark anger and ridiculous joy – we who live and believe in Him will never die.  In the resurrected life we begin to experience in the here and now, our priorities are changed.  The rich are sent away empty and the hungry are fed; the mighty are cast down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up.   We try to live our lives focused on others, especially those most in need, but sometimes, unlike Jesus, our deepest emotions overcome us and we forget that we have died to sin and been raised to newness of life.

Thanks be to God, as we heard in the opening collect, God can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men (and women).  Even those of us whose dark emotions sometimes get the best of us, and perhaps even those of us who judge those whose emotions don’t always stay within the neat and tidy confines of polite society.

As Lent grinds to a close, we continue to ask the Lord to order our unruly wills and affections.  But five weeks in, we know full well that our wills and affections, marred by sin, aren’t easily ordered by anyone, God included.  It won’t be until Resurrection at the Last Day that we will fully love “the thing that God commandest and desire that which he dost promise.”  Like Martha, it’s easy for us to believe Jesus when he says he is the resurrection, but today he reminds us that he is also the life.  For Lazarus, his newness of life begins not in his future, but his present.  The point of this story is not that Lazarus was raised from the dead, for not long after this story, he dies again, and this time he stays dead.  The real point is that Jesus is Lord of both the living and the dead and that his voice carries through even the walls of the grave. Even through our tears and emotional outbursts.  Even when we fail at keeping our Lenten disciplines.  Even when we are faced with the gruesome torture and execution of our Lord as we will be during Holy Week. 

“I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” May these words of Our Lord sustain us through the gate of death at Calvary to the joy of the empty tomb at Easter.


[1] John 11:25-26

[2] New Interpreter’s Bible 585.

[3] NIB 586.

Fourth Sunday in Lent
The Rev’d Charles Everson
John 9:1-13, 28-38
March 19, 2023

Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?  Are you saved?

This is a question many of us have been asked, and some of may have asked it of others. In certain corners of the Christian faith, it is taught that this is how you become a Christian: at the moment in time when you admit to yourself and to God that you are a sinner, and you ask Jesus to come into your heart, you are “saved” and then are guaranteed a spot in heaven.

When I was 11, my step-dad got transferred to Texas, and once we got settled there, some friends at school invited me to a youth group gathering at Trinity Oaks Baptist Church in Red Oak, Texas.  It was there I had such an experience. And wow, was it an emotional experience!  I felt closer to God than I had ever been – as if I had met him for the first time and all of my spiritual and emotional wounds were healed!  I was convinced that what they were telling me was true.  Finally, I knew I’d get to heaven!

The youth pastor and other, having heard about my experience, encouraged me to be baptized.  For the Baptists, baptism is something you do in response to the purely inward and spiritual act of accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.  No grace is imparted in the waters of baptism.  You get baptized only out of obedience as an outward sign of what has already happened in your heart.

In the passage we heard from the gospel of John, we see the conversion story of a man who was born blind.  Jesus brought about healing and wholeness to the blind man not by teaching him what to pray or what to believe, but by spitting on the ground and making clay with the saliva and spreading it on the man’s eyes, then saying, “Go wash in the Pool of Siloam”.  So he went and washed and came back able to see.  This man’s conversion involved clay from the earth, Jesus’ saliva, the touch of his hands, and the words he spoke. 

It wasn’t until years after my “conversion experience” at age 11 that I learned that this is exactly how the Sacraments of the Church work!  By the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus infuses and transforms the simple creatures of water, bread and wine, and oil in order to communicate his grace, his healing, his wholeness to us. Salvation isn’t just something that happens in the secret places of our hearts, it is also something that happens to the body. There really isn’t any room in Christianity for separating the two.

This passage also exposes another unhealthy dualism that was as common in Jesus’s time as it is in our own.  As Jesus passed the blind man, his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  Many of us get it in our heads that if things are going well for me, God must be happy with me.  On the other hand, if my life is going to hell in a handbasket, God must be unhappy with me.  I must have done something wrong.

Friends, that isn’t Christianity. God’s grace and favor toward us are by definition unearned and undeserved and not related to anything we may have done or left undone.

Rather than treating the human body and soul as separate things, from the earliest of times, the Church has taught that we are one, whole, fully integrated person that is, in a sense, born blind. We are all born with the tendency to sin, and once we’re old enough and have the ability to choose right from wrong, we often choose to engage in sin.

This past Friday night, Bishop Bruce was here and she baptized and confirmed a young woman named Jordan (Jordan works on Sundays, so she’s been coming during the week), and she confirmed eight others: Jami, Aaron, Kait, Monica, Abby, Matthew, Cat, and Minor.  Using the tangible elements of water, and the bishop’s hands, God’s grace was bestowed on these nine persons.  Each of them acknowledged in their heart and publicly before this faith community and the Almighty that he or she is a sinner.  By water and the Holy Spirit, God bestowed the forgiveness of sins on Jordan.  The others renewed the covenant they made at their baptism (or was made on their behalf when they were infants) and by the laying on of the bishop’s hands and the Holy Spirit, they were strengthened with God’s heavenly grace and empowered to do the ministry God has called them to do as mature Christians.  

While I know some of them better than others, it is certain that they all came to God for his grace on Friday from very different upbringings, experiences, and having made very different moral choices throughout their lives.  Jesus met each of them where they are, and using physical elements transformed by the Holy Spirit bestowed his grace on them, not because they were worthy because of their own merit or success, but because God lavishly bestows his grace and love to those who don’t deserve it at all.

That powerful moment at Trinity Oaks Baptist Church at the young age of 11 was certainly when I realized for the first time that I was a sinner and in need of redemption.  But I had been baptized as a young child at Village Presbyterian Church in Mission, Kansas.  While she may not have had the theological language to explain why, my mother knew that baptism was once and for all and did not want me to get baptized again. I was a persistent and unruly child and ended up wearing her down, so she relented, and I ultimately got dunked by the Baptists. But in hindsight, I don’t think that was the moment I became destined for heaven, nor was my baptism when I was a child for that matter.  When asked now if I’m saved, I respond, “I was saved, I am being saved, I will be saved.” Salvation isn’t a one-time event, but rather the culmination of a continual cycle of death and resurrection – of falling to sin and repenting and returning to the Lord – that begins at baptism and ends at the resurrection of the body at the Last Day, peppered with spiritual highs and lows and everywhere in between, littered with good and bad choices, and continually nourished by God’s grace given to us freely and undeservedly in the Sacraments of the Church.   
​
And now, as we do week after week, we come to the altar of God and ask the Lord to bless and sanctify, by his Word and Holy Spirit, the simple creatures of bread and wine, receiving God’s pardon and peace in our bodies and in our souls, and eating of that foretaste of the heavenly banquet, giving us hope that just as Christ was raised from the dead, so we will be raised at the last day.  Dear friends, let us run with haste to this altar as the wise men did to Bethlehem to greet our Savior Jesus Christ who came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world, confident that he will evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him.  Amen.

Monthly Requiem
Wednesday, March 8, 2023
The Rev’d Charles Everson
1 Thess. 4:13-18

When I was 32-years-old, I began to discern a call to ordained ministry in The Episcopal Church.  The call previously manifested itself in a Southern Baptist context, and it never really left during the time I was Roman Catholic and eventually Episcopalian. During the interview process with the Commission on Ministry in Kansas, I was asked the typical questions: “Why do you feel called to be a priest” and “What excites you most about the thought of leading a parish” and so on.  One question I hadn’t thought about before then was, “What causes you the most fear and anxiety when you envision life as a priest?”  The answer came to me immediately without any additional thought: “I am afraid of dealing with death. The thought of being pastoral with those who are dying, and with their families, is scary to me.”

Death is not something we deal with very well in our day and age.  When this building was built in 1887, life expectancy in the United States was 41.1 years of age and by 2020, it had climbed to 78.81 years of age.  When the average person dies at the age of 40, death is part of human existence from a very early age.  I didn’t experience death of a close family member until my grandmother died when I was 20.

Not long after that Commission on Ministry interview, I was called on to officiate a funeral of the 17-year-old son of a co-worker at the bank who had hung himself from a tree.  Two years later, the bank owner’s son died at the age of 20 of a drug overdose.  My second funeral here at St. Mary’s was for now parishioners Erika and Bryan Atkins’ daughter who died tragically at the age of 18, and just this week, my step-dad’s best friend’s 33-year-old son named Tim died suddenly and I’ve been asked to officiate his funeral.

I no longer fear death.  No matter when death occurs – tragically at a young age, or after a long and fruitful life full of love – fear is no longer part of my experience.  But sadness and grief certainly are.  As Paul says to the Church at Thessalonica, we Christians do not grieve as others do who have no hope.  For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. This isn’t an intangible hope that we just feel in our hearts, it is palpable and manifested perhaps most fully in the gritty elements of bread and wine.  In the Eucharist, we are given a foretaste of the heavenly banquet when we will be united with Jesus and those in Heaven in a way we can’t even begin to fathom.  When we receive the bread and wine, we are given a sure and certain hope that one day, we will be reunited with those we love but see no more. 

Dear friends, as we celebrate this requiem mass, we grieve and mourn our beloved dead, but we do so without fear.  For Christ has conquered death, and through these simple creatures of bread and wine, we have hope that we will feast with them in heaven where there is no death, neither sorrow nor crying, but the fulness of joy with all the saints.

The Second Sunday in Lent
Text: Genesis 12:1-8
Sean C. Kim
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church
5 March 2023
 
When I read today’s Old Testament lesson about Abraham and his family leaving behind their home to journey to a foreign land, I find myself drawing parallels with the story of my own family. Like Abraham, my parents left behind their native, ancestral land – in our case, Korea – to move to the United States in 1971. At the time, I was only a little kid, so I didn’t fully appreciate the challenges and sacrifices that my parents experienced as they became immigrants. Like Abraham, my parents left behind not only their family and friends but also a life of comfort and privilege. From our history books, we read about the European immigrants who fled poverty, hunger, political unrest, and religious persecution to arrive on crowded, dirty ships to Ellis Island. In contrast, our family traveled by jumbo jet with layovers in Hawaii and Los Angeles. And where is the first place we went when we landed in the continental U.S.? Disneyland, of course.

My parents left Korea for two major reasons. The first was education. For all its faults, the American educational system, especially higher education, is the best in the world. Just look at all the foreign students on our college campuses today. The second reason was security. Having been refugees during the Korean War, my parents didn’t want us kids to suffer what they had to go through in the case of another war. As you know, even today, North Korea poses a major threat not only to South Korea but to the world. So, in short, it was for us kids that my parents made the move.

As I get older, I realize more and more what a bold, risky move it was for them to pull up their roots and move to a foreign country. But like Abraham, my parents turned to their faith in God for strength and guidance. And in all the years that they lived in their new, adopted land, never once did they have any regrets or complaints.

If I had been my parents, I’m not so sure that I would have had the courage to do what they did. It would have been so much easier for them to stay in Korea. Being risk-averse and a creature of habit, I avoid situations that pose unknown risks and challenges. I need a sense of control and don’t want to leave anything to chance. Sound familiar? I’m sure that I’m not alone in having this kind of personality. This past week, I just found out that I might be moving to a different part of town, and it unleashed all sorts of anxieties. I can’t imagine moving to a different country. So, I feel a bit hypocritical preaching this sermon. Of course, you know that it is always easier to preach than to practice what you preach.

In today’s text from Genesis, we read “The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing” (Genesis 12:1-2). We have no record of Abraham questioning or doubting the Lord’s command; he simply trusts and obeys. He gathers his entire family, packs up all his possessions, and heads to Canaan, the Land of Promise.

Abraham’s journeys will many twists and turns, but whatever challenges and problems he encounters, he trusts and obeys God. We read in today’s Epistle reading that “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3). It is his faith – his willingness to trust and obey – that made him just and right with God. It is for his faith that we remember and honor Abraham. And it is not just us Christians; Jews and Muslims also look up to him as their progenitor. In fact, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are known as the Abrahamic religions.

But Abraham was far from perfect. In fact, by our standards, he falls short in many ways. For instance, when he is in Egypt during a famine, he becomes afraid that because his wife Sarah is so beautiful that the people there will kill him to take her. So, what does he do? He lies and says that she is his sister (Genesis 12:10-20). And he does this not just once but a second time, when he is the land of the Philistines (Genesis 20:1-16). Like almost all the heroes in scripture, Abraham is flawed. He is human, just like us.

And yet whatever his failures and shortcomings, Abraham had a deep and abiding faith in God. He trusted God to safely lead him to the Promised Land. He trusted God to be with him every step of the way. He trusted God to grant him courage, strength, and guidance.

Abraham holds up for us the kind of life we are to live as Christians. There’s an old hymn that some of you may know. It goes like this:

When we walk with the Lord in the light of his Word
What a glory he sheds on our way!
While we do his good will, he abides with us still,
And with all who will trust and obey.
Trust and obey, there is no other way
To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
Trust and obey. That is the life of faith in a nutshell. Trust in God, not in ourselves.
Obey his calling, wherever that may lead us. And he will be with us every step of the way.

Where is God calling you today? He may not be calling you to pack up your bags and move to a foreign land, as he did Abraham. Or perhaps he is. What are the areas in your life in which God is calling you to something new and different? Where in your life is God calling you out of your comfort zone and into uncertain territory? Perhaps a new job. A new ministry. A new relationship. A new community. God may be calling you with an inspiring vision or perhaps a gentle nudge. Take the risk. Let go of the need to control. Open yourself to God. Trust and obey. The Promised Land awaits.

First Sunday in Lent
Matthew 4:1-11
The Rev’d Charles Everson
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church
February 25, 2023

​As we begin our forty days and forty nights in the wilderness of Lent, we hear Matthew’s account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.  But first is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden.  They are in paradise, and all is well in the world.  Along comes a serpent with cunning words, and the next thing you know, Adam and Eve fall for his lies and treachery and paradise is lost, seemingly forever.

Then we hear the story of Jesus’s temptation by the devil.  While Adam and Eve are in garden with all of the sustenance they need and all the beautiful weather they could ask for, Jesus is famished in the wilderness left to struggle with his temptation alone.

In the first temptation, the tempter quotes Scripture and encourages Jesus to satisfy his physical hunger by turning stones into bread.  He says, “If you are the Son of God,” but this doesn’t mean that he’s expressing doubt about who Jesus is.  The word “if” could be translated from the Greek as “since” – “since you are the Son of God.” He’s rather trying to deceive Jesus into using his power to satisfy his own physical needs rather than trusting God the Father for them.  Jesus responds not with his own words, but by quoting Scripture, affirming that life is sustained by more than physical food; it is sustained by every word that comes from the mouth of God.  Jesus will not misuse his power to satisfy his own physical needs.

The second test focuses on the need for security and safety.  The devil quotes Scripture again, and this time, he tempts Jesus to make himself safe from injury or even death. Jesus recognizes once again that the devil is taking Scripture out of context: the Hebrew Bible does not endorse testing God’s protective grace for the sake of self-protection.   Jesus will not misuse his power to make himself safe and secure.

In the third temptation, the devil tries to seduce Jesus with prestige.  He offers him control over all the kingdoms of the world, along with the glory and splendor that comes with that, if he will only swear allegiance to the devil.  Jesus rejects the tempter’s deception and quotes Scripture again in context saying, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”  Jesus will not misuse his power to gain earthly power and prestige.[1]

Just as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, so we will be this Lent.  Jesus didn’t respond to temptation as Adam did by succumbing to it, or fleeing to another selfish vice to escape, or by complaining to God, or by wondering what he may have done wrong to deserve it.  He responded by deepening his dependence on God.  The very temptations he experienced – materialism, false security, and prestige – are not foreign to us.  We experience them every day.  Consumerism is ubiquitous in our culture, something I’m reminded of when I look at my Amazon purchase history.  In the richest country in the world, we often misuse our vast resources to try to make ourselves safer at the expense of the vulnerable and marginalized.  And as Fr. Sean mentioned last week, Christianity isn’t looked upon favorably by many in our culture.  We are regularly subjected to temptations to compromise our faith or values in order to gain prestige before others.  We learn from our Lord that the appropriate response in resisting these and all temptations is to turn to God for help instead of relying on our own power.

Unlike the other accounts of Jesus’ temptation in Mark and Luke, Matthew’s account tells us Jesus being tempted after having fasted for forty days and forty nights. For Matthew, Jesus’ time of fasting was a time of preparation for temptation, not the means by which it happens.  It was his intentional forty days and forty nights of fasting that prepared him to endure and ultimately overcome these temptations by the devil.   

Intentional self-denial is helpful in the spiritual life because it reveals the things that control us.  We cover up what is inside us with food and other good things, but by denying ourselves, the things that control us come to the surface.  If pride controls us, it will be revealed.  Anger, bitterness, jealousy, strife, fear – if they are within us, they will surface during intentional periods of fasting and self-denial.  When they surface, we will be tempted not only to stop denying ourselves, but also to sin.  If we’re properly prepared and watching for these things to surface, we can then respond as Jesus did: we can turn to God for help and rely on his grace to strengthen our will to choose to overcome all assaults and temptations of the devil.  Self-denial reminds us that we are sustained “by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (v. 4).  Whatever it is that we’re giving up – that is not what sustains us; God sustains us.  When we give something up during Lent, we are learning to rely on God to give us everything that we need and more. [2]

During the coming weeks, our fasting and self-denial will engage the dark places in our hearts, giving us an opportunity to come face to face with them, name them, understand them, and seek forgiveness for them. We will be tempted to rely on our own strength rather than the grace of God to overcome temptation. We will fall into sin and then be further tempted to allow the guilt we feel to hold us captive.  Rather than being about guilt, Lent is about freedom from the control that our fears and insecurities have over us.  It is about the amendment of life and new beginnings.[3]

…new beginnings which are possible because as we will sing in our offertory hymn, in the “loving wisdom of our God, when all was sin and shame, a second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came.”[4]  Friends, paradise was not lost forever when Adam and Eve sinned.  Human flesh and blood failed in Adam, but we strive afresh against that ancient foe, again and again, knowing that we will ultimately prevail not because of anything we’ve done, but because God’s free gift of grace redeems our flesh and blood through the one man Jesus Christ.

Dear friends, as we are tempted this Lent, let us ask the Lord to come quickly to help us, and as he knows the weaknesses of each of us, let each of us find him mighty to save.  Amen.

[1] David Lyon Bartlett, and Barbara Brown Taylor. Feasting on the Word. Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009, 47-49.

[2] Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, pp. 54-55.

[3] Feasting 48.

[4] “Praise to the holiest in the height” by John Henry Newman.

Fr. Sean C. Kim
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church
Ash Wednesday
Text: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
22 February 2023
  
Today, we mark the beginning of the Season of Lent with the Imposition of Ashes. This is an ancient custom dating back more than a thousand years in the history of the Church. The ashes are rich in symbolism. For one, they are a powerful reminder of our mortality. We will soon receive the ashes on our foreheads with the words: “Remember that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” Being reminded of our mortality puts life into perspective. We realize how short life is. We reflect on how best to live the life that we are given. We focus on what truly matters in life.

The ashes also represent sorrow and repentance. In the Old Testament, we read of the tradition of wearing sackcloth and sitting in ashes as an expression of mourning and repentance. For instance, in the Book of Jonah, the entire city of Nineveh – not just the people but even the animals – are covered in sackcloth and sitting in ashes (Jon 3:6) in a collective act of repentance. In the Early Church, Christians borrowed this custom and began putting ashes on their heads as a sign of sorrow for their sins. Then, in the Middles Ages, about the tenth and eleventh centuries, the tradition developed of beginning the penitential Season of Lent with the imposition of ashes.

This is a beautiful and powerful ritual with which to begin our season of repentance and reflection. But what do we make of the Gospel reading for today? In the passage from Matthew, Jesus warns his disciples: “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven” (Mathew 6:1). You may be wondering: “Why then are we putting ashes on our forehead and going out in public?” There is a certain paradox between this passage and wearing ashes on our forehead for others to see. But, these days, I don’t think there is much danger of wearing ashes to show off our piety. To begin with, piety is not respected in our society, as it has been in other times. Indeed, in our culture, religiosity is often looked upon with suspicion and even contempt. It is even subject to mockery and ridicule. Remember the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live? So, far from impressing others, we actually make ourselves vulnerable when we wear the ashes on our forehead. We risk being seen as weird.

And, quite frankly, a lot of people won’t even know what to make of the ashes. Living in the Bible Belt, even many Protestants won’t know their significance. I’ve had many cases of people thinking that I just got dirty. Several years ago, the Office Professional in our department at school, a devout church-goer, came running down to my office with a Kleenex to try to wipe it off. And, believe it or not, I even had a professor of religious studies who mistook the ashes for grime on my face. So, considering the society in which we live, wearing ashes can hardly be a source of spiritual pride and arrogance for us. On the contrary, they humble us, reminding us of our mortality and of our sins and shortcomings.

Moreover, the ashes can even be an opportunity to witness to our faith. I don’t know about you, but it’s not easy to talk about my faith with others – and I’m a priest. I remember several years ago in graduate school, one of my colleagues was shocked when I told him that I was a Christian. It’s not that I was leading an especially decadent life; it’s because I rarely talked about my faith. But when we wear the ashes on our forehead, those who know what that means will know we are Christians, and those who don’t know, may ask, providing us a chance to witness and tell the world that we belong to Christ.

​Dear friends, we gather today to begin the journey of Lent together. With the ashes on our foreheads, we commit ourselves to the spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We do these things throughout the year, but they take on a special intensity during Lent. We pray more, we fast more, we give more to those in need. And we rigorously examine our lives in the light of our faith. As Jesus entered the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by Satan and to prepare for his ministry, we, too, enter a spiritual wilderness to confront our sins and shortcomings, to repent and reflect, and to prepare ourselves to follow Jesus in his Passion, Death, and Resurrection. I pray that you will have a Most Holy Lent. Amen.