Perhaps like you, I got smudged this last Wednesday.
The 18th, as you may recall, was Ash Wednesday, the first day in the season of Lent. It’s a day that dares us think about this thing called life, but also about this thing called death – a day in which we are reminded of the dust from which we were created and the dust to which we shall return. Perhaps more than anything, though, it’s a day that reminds us of our humanness, that in the midst of being real, fleshy, messy human beings, a need for the Holy still exists. Maybe that’s why, for a whole lot of folks, the Lenten journey becomes one of turning around and changing directions and sometimes even showing a little repentance too.
But on Wednesday, just as I got smudged, I also did a fair amount of smudging, at a local hospital no less.
Over the last five months, I’ve spent every Tuesday and Friday, and this last week, Wednesday, earning clinical hours at a hospital outside of Oakland, California, where I live. We called ourselves chaplain interns, for ours was a CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) unit to complete, some for purposes of ordination, some because they want to be hospital chaplains when they grew up, some because they just wanted the 20-hour-a-week volunteer experience.
And I’ll tell you what, Ash Wednesday hit differently this year, perhaps because life and death and the stark reality of what it means to find a home in a human body couldn’t be avoided. To patients and babies, families and staff, I looked them in the eyes and invited them to take a deep breath and think about this thing called life. To all of them, including those who had only been breathing for less than 24 hours and to those who only had another 24 hours left to breathe, I put a thumb to forehead and said, “Remember you are God’s beloved dust, and to God’s beloved dust you shall return.”
It was beautiful and raw and holy and precious and haunting, in so many different ways – the stark reality of humanness more real than ever before.
Now, lest you think I’m simply offering another Ash Wednesday reflection instead of a sermon on the first Sunday in Lent, hold those initial musings for a moment as we return to this morning’s Gospel reading – because in Matthew 4, the humanity of Jesus, and subsequently, the dichotomy of life and death and then of two things both being true at once, takes center stage.
Perhaps the passage is familiar to you: the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. For 40 days and nights the God-man does not eat. Afterward, Matthew notes, he is quite famished. Well, yes, of course the Son of Man is famished, and at the end of his strength – at the end of nearly seven weeks, as one writer notes, he feels “socially alone and friendless … spiritually struggling to hang onto his identity as the glow of his baptism recedes into a hazy, pre-wilderness past.”1 Jesus, the human, the man, is in a state of vulnerability, and it is in such a state that the tempter tries to pull him away from his belovedness, his vocation, his identity – because prior to this encounter in the wilderness, Jesus had been baptized by his cousin, John the Baptist. A voice from heaven had said, “This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”2 Even in the wilderness, Jesus knew who he was – that he was God’s beloved son – and still, he was at the end of his rope physically, spiritually, socially.
As one theologian says, “Is it no accident that Jesus ends up in the wilderness after his baptism,”3 for it is here that like bait thrown to a hungry animal and the devil tosses out a number of “if” statements: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you.’” “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” To each of these temptations, Jesus quotes the ancient words written on his heart; he is taken from one location to another and to another still. It is not until after the third, unsuccessful “iffy” attempt, that the devil flees from him and a flock of angels swoop in.
Now, it’s often at this point in the reading that I can find myself utterly grateful: well, thank God, God, you got through that utterly human obstacle and can go back to being your full God self now. Perhaps this stems from the tradition in which I was raised, a tradition that sometimes seems far from the smells and bells of the Episcopal Church. There, we tended to want our Jesus human …but not too human.4 We were fine with him experiencing his human side for a little while there, but couldn’t he just get back to turning water into wine and calming the storms and healing the sick already? Couldn’t he get back to doing the really real God stuff? There, we called Jesus, “God in the bod, 100% God and 100% man.” His was a math equation we didn’t always know how to explain, a story problem that still somehow always seemed to err on the side of divinity when all was said and done.
But if this reading and the season of Lent and a day marked by smudged ashes on foreheads have anything to show us, perhaps we are invited to “grapple with the appalling messiness of humanity,”5 both of Jesus and of ourselves, just a little while longer.
What are we to say of our human selves that “can be loved and hungry at the same time,” that “can hope and hurt at the same time”? What can we say of a “trust that when God nourishes, it won’t be by magic?”6
Calling yourself a Christian, or more specifically to our context, an Episcopalian, doesn’t mean that you get a holy get-out-of-jail-free card, that bad things aren’t then going to happen to you now that you have accepted the cloak of belovedness placed upon your shoulders. Wilderness is still going to come into our lives – to us and to those we love, to our neighbors here in Eugene, but also halfway across the country in Minneapolis and in other cities here in the U.S. affected by a surge of federal detentions and deportations, and around the world in countries like Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, and Gaza where war is ongoing.
Perhaps the invitation in these inevitable wilderness places, during this season of Lent when we confront life face-on and “embrace all that it means to be human,” is to chew on what it means to be “human and hungry, human and vulnerable, human and beloved,”7 at the very same time. We think of Emmanuel, God With Us, who is “with you always, even to the end of the age,”8 who “has already gone ahead of his followers, even to the most forsaken places of the wilderness,”9 even here, even now.
As writer Debie Thomas says of this tension, and perhaps of the invitation that arises from this passage specifically, “we can be beloved and uncomfortable at the same time. We can be beloved and unsafe at the same time. [Because] In the wilderness, the love that survives is flinty, not soft. Salvific, not sentimental. [And} learning to trust it takes time.”10
So learning to trust we will, as we cling to our identities as beloved children of God, beside and through and with one another, in this holy communion of saints.
Amen.
[1] Debie Thomas, Journey With Jesus: https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2541-tempted
[2] Matthew 3:17
[3] Audrey West, Working Preacher: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-matthew-41-11-3
[4] Thomas
[5] Thomas
[6] Thomas
[7] Thomas
[8] Matthew 28:20
[9] West
[10] Thomas
