Ash Wednesday • Joel 2:1–2, 12–17 • 2 Cor 5:20–6:10 • Mt 6:1–6, 16–21 • March 2, 2022
Barry Lopez has written with great clarity and beauty about nature, human exploitation, and—most meaningfully to me—the irreducibility of mystery. I was lucky enough to attend a talk and book-signing, in which someone asked him about the magical realism in some of his short stories. Refusing to analyze the magic, he built more of it into his response. I was in awe of his ability to find those words on the spot. I stood in a long line afterward, finally reaching his table and thanking him for the inspiration his work had brought me over the years.
He was visibly moved that someone had waited in line just to tell him what his work had meant. I felt the connection we were making—but I had in fact brought a book in my pocket, and I didn’t really want to leave without the memento, the trophy, of his signature. Somehow, I told myself it wouldn’t spoil the moment. As soon as I handed it to him, though, I could see him deflate, could sense his resignation and even despair. He had barely begun to accept something rare and precious when I’d robbed him of it, treating him as a commodity instead of a person, and it seemed as if that particular flavor of loss was all too familiar to him. Twenty years later, I read that he had died, and despite the depth of my regret, it had never occurred to me to write him a letter of apology.
We could have shared a shining moment and treasured its memory, but I traded it for a bit of ink in a book, which I can’t even find now. Truly, Jesus would say, I have received my reward. In trying to store up an earthly treasure, I betrayed a trust and left us both with nothing. The one thing I did take away is a lesson in trying to have it both ways. I wanted both the intangible moment of grace and the tangible, permanent sign of it, and by grasping at the tangible sign I lost hold of the intangible essence. That, I think, is what Jesus is driving at when he says not to let tangible, visible signs influence how we conduct our private relationships with God or each other as we pray and respond to each other’s needs. He’s reminding us that our relationships are private, that they’re for the participants, not for show. Once we compromise the authenticity of a relationship for the sake of a visible sign, we may not be able to undo the damage.
The qualities I allowed to lapse in that ill-judged moment are reverence and respect—full respect for the human being in front of me and reverence for the emerging moment of shared grace. These qualities are easily undervalued and misunderstood, precisely because when we lose them, the value of whoever or whatever we’d been honoring recedes into the background. Competing values claim priority. Then any action or restraint that is motivated by reverence or respect can, from the outside, appear silly, naïve, or just stubborn, to the point of inviting the kind of mistreatment Paul’s letter describes. The irony, as Paul recognizes, is that the people inflicting this judgment are missing something of much greater value. They’ve lost sight of the irreducible mystery that only the eyes of reverence and respect can see. “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true… as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” Yet keeping the mystery in sight, in the face of competing pressures and temptations, can demand endurance and patience on the scale Paul describes, a scale that seems superhuman. How do we accomplish this?
I wonder if it’s providential that I recently preached on Jesus’ baptism. What struck me this year was that Jesus received the Holy Spirit’s blessing before his forty days in the desert—not as a reward for accomplishment but as food for the journey, to sustain him and give him the strength to choose well. He did not have to live on bread alone, because he actually had words from the mouth of God. He did not have to prove with power or spectacle that he was beloved of God; being possessed of the reality of that love, he had no need to make a show of it. Maybe we can let go more easily of external signs of our worth—a signed book or a public act calculated to make us look good—if we remember that we are already beloved of God.
Let’s reflect on the nature of God’s love. Paul writes that “for our sake God made Christ to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Christ we might become the righteousness of God.” What intrigues me here is that he says, not that God made Christ to be a sinner, but that God made Christ to be sin itself. With that in mind, I want to offer a new spin on sin, or rather recycle an old spin from Julian of Norwich.
Julian said she could find no anger in God. She compared sin to the kinds of mistakes we make when we are trying too hard and trip and fall. She believed that, out of great compassion, God would even honor us for all the shame and pain our sins have brought us.
Surely God never stopped loving Christ. So if Christ, on our behalf, did in some way become what we call sin or Julian called our falling, God must have loved him even then, when he was sin itself. This is radical love, far beyond “love the sinner, hate the sin” (which is, after all, not a biblical quote). Without endorsing the wisdom of acts that cause pain, God still might regard them with compassion and understanding beyond our imagining. Perhaps the word here is vulnerability: our sins, our falling, express our fallible human vulnerability—and Jesus himself embodied that human vulnerability and saw it all the way through. If God then so fully embraces our vulnerability in the person of Christ, that same vulnerability that’s expressed in our sinning, then God fully loves us even when we sin. As a friend of mine likes to say, you can’t fall out of God.
If Christ shares with us in the experience of being as far from God’s love as it is possible to get, and it turns out that that is no distance at all, then we share with Christ in the reality of being at one with God the whole time, whether we know it or not. In the words of Psalm 139, even here we are held in God’s hand … right where Julian, in another vision, saw our hazelnut-sized world.
So, no matter what we’ve done or how it appears to us, in reality we share with Christ in being fully lovable, an expression of God’s goodness—the righteousness of God. The love of God is fully available to draw on when appearances tempt us astray. As Rex said on Sunday, we can “move forward with a little help on the way.” In the words of the prophet Joel, we can return with all our heart, even now. The shining moment, the irreducible mystery of grace, still and always awaits us as we open ourselves to the love of the One who calls us back to reverence, respect, and authenticity in our relationships with each creature and with God.
