Sermon

Ash Wednesday, March 1, 2006

A Homily Delivered at St. Stephen’s Church on Ash Wednesday, March 01, 2006,

by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

In the first act of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, Thomas à Becket returns to England from exile to confront his childhood friend the king. As he wrestles with what to say to the king, he is visited by three tempters. They tempt him first to be loyal to the king for the sake of their old friendship, then to be loyal because of the tremendous temporal power he would gain, then finally the third tempts him to oppose the king and thereby win sainthood. Becket’s response is a rhyming couplet that is easy to remember:

“The last temptation is the greatest treason/To do the right thing for the wrong reason.”

That line summarizes Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel. Jesus gives warnings about giving alms, prayer and fasting. Jesus is in favor of doing these things, but he is concerned about HOW they are done. To do these good things for the wrong reason would be a form of treason: the purpose of our Lenten observances is not to win us the good opinions of others or even to win the good opinion of ourselves. The purpose is to “store up for ourselves treasures in heaven.” The purpose is to do them because they are good for our souls. Here are some examples:

In my first Lent in my first parish I conducted what I called a Lenten “fat-a-thon” in which I volunteered to publicly lose weight. I weighed in at coffee hour on the first Sunday of Lent and promised to do it again on Palm Sunday, and I asked members of the parish to pledge a donation to social outreach of a certain dollar amount per pound that I might lose. Many—especially those who pledged as much as $5 or $10 per pound—were astounded when I lost 27 pounds in six weeks. What they didn’t know was that I was and am a sick weight-loss junkie, an expert at yo-yo dieting. My fasting that Lent could have been an opportunity to come to grips with an unhealthy lifestyle of which extreme short term dieting was a part. Instead my fasting was just grandstanding.

In my second parish in New Hampshire , I had a wonderful curmudgeon of a parishioner. For years he kept a small country church alive almost single-handedly. When I got there, he was the warden, sexton and the altar guild. He showed up every Sunday morning, opened the door, shoveled the walk, swept the church, set up the altar and greeted people as they came to church. Only trouble with his Sunday devotions was that they fed his sense of piety, but didn’t encourage him to grow. As the little church grew, new people began coming to church, many of whom this man did not approve of, some of whom wanted to share some of his duties. The changes disturbed him and he resolved to leave the church. When I went to try to talk him into staying he was adamant:

“Coming to church used to make me feel clean and holy, now with all these new people doing things wrong, it just makes me feel dirty.” One line from our prayer book puts a finger on the problem here: “Deliver us from the presumption” we pray at the Eucharist, “of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only and not for renewal.” By looking only for a sense of spiritual harmony in his prayers, my parishioner missed a chance for spiritual growth.

Finally, when I was a teenager, I was invited to visit a very wealthy woman in her Park Avenue mansion. On the paneled walls were priceless oil paintings—and to my surprise--some framed pieces of lined paper with the careful lettering of children written on them. I asked if they were homework assignments done by her children, but with great pride the woman explained that they were thank-you notes written by children she’d supported through a relief agency. Her choice of mementos is revealing. She had access to photographs of these children going to school where once they had begged on the streets, for example. These might have reminded her of the strides the children had made with her help. Instead she chose to remind herself of their gratitude to her. She missed the opportunity to let her alms be an occasion for doing good in the world and chose instead to let her alms be an occasion of reminding her of what a great person she was.

You would not be here if you did not place an unusual value on keeping a holy Lent. It takes unusual devotion to come out to church in the cold for the purpose of marking our foreheads with ashes. Our prayer for all of us this day is that God might give us strength and courage to do social outreach work, to pray and study, and to fast and amend our lives. Keeping Jesus’ warnings in mind, I have one more prayer for us: that we might do the right things this Lent, and do them for the right reason. Let us do good in the world because it is the right thing to do. Let us pray and study because it helps us to grow. Let us amend our lives in a humble attempt to be the people God wants us to be.

Let us mark our foreheads with ashes, not to show how pious we are, but to remind ourselves to “store up for ourselves treasures in heaven."

AMEN