Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Ash Wednesday: March 1, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
It was my first Christmas as a married woman. My husband Brad and I were poor as proverbial church mice and had agreed to get each other frugal (which is to say cheap) gifts. And so on Christmas Eve when we opened up presents with my family, what we each unwrapped were things like a book a scarf, a box of chocolate—small things—you know the list.
But after we’d opened all of these and everyone else had opened all of theirs, I noticed one small oblong box left under the tree.
“It’s for you,” Brad said.
And so I opened it.
And inside was a perfect string of pearls, a treasure beyond all my imagining, a gift that not only expressed love but said something about the future: about anniversaries and birthdays and holidays, special occasions on which a string of pearls would be just the thing to wear.
Later that night, though we weren’t regular churchgoers, we got dressed to go to midnight mass. And as I put on my new, perfect pearls for the occasion, something happened. Right near the clasp they began to come unknotted, unstrung. Not enough to make them fall apart, but enough that they would need to be repaired.
I wore those pearls to church that night. And what I remember was sitting in the candlelit church listening to the story of the birth and periodically reaching my hand back behind my neck to touch the place where the pearls were coming apart. And I remember something in me saying, “Remember, remember this.”
Remember that beautiful things come apart even as you reach out to touch them for the first time, remember that treasures turn to dust as you hold them in your hand.
Now this may sound quite somber for a twenty-something to be saying to herself on Christmas Eve with her new husband beside her. But, to tell you the truth, I didn’t feel sad at the time. Instead, I felt as if I had come to something real and true about life.
Just listening to the end of our gospel for tonight, you could get the impression that this same insight is at the center of our Lenten season. But tonight, the beginning of Lent, is not about this as much as it is about another treasure that we need to pay attention to, a treasure that is also living on borrowed time. That treasure, dear friends, the string of pearls that will come unstrung, the gold that will corrode, that treasure is you, is me.
And all that we’re doing tonight: putting the sooty smudge on our foreheads, repeating many uncomfortable and hard words—words like sin, evil, and wickedness; words like fasting, self-examination and penitence—are all about having the courage to look for that treasure and having the patience to clear away some of the muck that can surround and obscure it.
Having the courage to search for the treasure, having the patience to clear away some of the muck that can surround and obscure it: what can help us do such a difficult thing?
Our passage from Matthew mentions three spiritual disciplines that can be used as ways of looking at ourselves and noticing where the muck might be and what might need to be cleared away. These three things are: fasting, almsgiving and prayer.
First, fasting. Fasting, I’d like to suggest, is all about what we do and do not permit ourselves. Do we permit ourselves the satisfaction of any appetite? Do we permit ourselves the indulgence of any whim? Do we permit ourselves acting on every feeling we have? Fasting is about flexing our freedom, getting practice with our ability to choose different things than we normally choose. Fasting is about saying no to a pattern of behavior we’re aware of or one that may be so knee-jerk that it may be almost invisible to us, a pattern of behavior that doesn’t lead to our becoming our best selves.
What do you need to stop permitting yourself this Lent? What do you need to say no to in order to protect your best self or to renew your experience of something?
Which brings us to almsgiving. Almsgiving is what you permit others to have, what you’re willing to let go of and send in another direction with no thought of pay back or how deserving you think the other is. Almsgiving is cultivating the habit of letting go and sharing what we have with others.
Who or what could you do with being more generous toward during this Lenten season?
Finally, there’s prayer—listening to God or to listening to those things that are of God. Do we spend any time in silence? Do we pray the Scriptures? Do we engage in spiritual reading, slowing the reading down so that we can take it into ourselves for our own soul’s nourishment? Coming out of our Foundations course in Benedictine thought I’ve finally adopted a pattern of spiritual reading that is prayer for me. I read for twenty minutes a day in the early morning and it is doing more for me than I could have ever hoped.
What or who do you listen to? What do you let soak into your mind and your heart? What do you need to listen to to feed your spirit, to feed your compassion for others?
Fasting, almsgiving, and prayer—three approaches to observing a Holy Lent, a time of clearing away what can obscure our best selves of becoming who we are meant to be as God’s own treasures, treasures, to come full circle, who will not live forever, who will not come again.
Episcopal poet, Mary Oliver said it well in her poem entitled “When Death Comes”. Perhaps you know it.
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Works Consulted or Cited
Mary Oliver’s poem “When Death Comes” from The Collected Poems
