ASH WEDNESDAY
March 5, 2012
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Pastor David Tryggestad
Concordia Evangelical
Lutheran Church
Duluth, Minnesota
“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by
them . . .”
In Mark Twain’s novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,
the protagonist, a successful nineteenth-century industrialist from New England
finds himself suddenly and unexpectedly in sixth-century England. On one
of his forays into the country to meet ordinary folks, he comes across a band
of pilgrims on a spiritual journey to a celebrated collection of monks whose
fame has spread because of their extraordinary rigorous religious disciplines.
Our protagonist inquires of one of the pilgrims about the destination.
“Tell me about it. Is it a celebrated
place?”
“Oh, of a truth, yes. There
be none more so. Of old time there lived there an abbot and his monks. Belike
were none in the world more holy than these; for they gave themselves to study
of pious books, and spoke not the one to the other, or indeed to any, and ate
decayed herbs and nought thereto, and slept hard, and prayed much, and washed
never; also they wore the same garment until it fell from their bodies through
age and decay. Right so came they to be known of all the world by reason of
these holy austerities, and visited by rich and poor, and reverenced.”[1]
It happened that in this
dry desert place a stream of water miraculously appeared—or so it was told by the
pious folk. Even more pilgrims flocked to witness the miracle of unending
water. But none ever bathed. It seems that, some time after the water first
appeared, the monks built a bath, and immediately after enjoying their first
baths of a lifetime, the miraculous water mysteriously stopped flowing. It was
taken as a rebuke from God, causing the water to cease because of the sin of
washing.
“Belike; but it was their
first sin; and they had been of perfect life for long, and differing in naught
from the angels. Prayers, tears, torturings of the flesh, all was vain to
beguile that water to flow again. Even processions; even burnt offering; even
votive candles to the Virgin, did fail every each of them; and all in the land
did marvel.”
After a year and a day, the
abbot had the bath destroyed, and, again, miraculously, the waters began
flowing again. It was taken as divine confirmation that they should never
bathe, but wear the layers of dirt and grime of a lifetime upon their bodies.
And the pilgrims came by
the thousands to see.
At the end of February,
Black History Month, I read Frederick Douglass’ first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
an American Slave, written in 1845. Douglass had been a slave in Maryland. The book is a
stark and graphic narrative of the grim and brutal realities of slave life, and
Maryland is
not “down river,” as Mark Twain described as the place where life as a slave
was a living hell. Frederick Douglass describes the annual allotment of
clothing for the slave: hardly anything, such that children usually went around
naked when the weather permitted. Squalor and filth were the living conditions
of the slave. I thought about this in relation to the description of the
religious monks in A Connecticut Yankee,
who never washed and who “wore the same garment until if fell from their bodies
through age and decay.”
Danette Kealy, our office
secretary, and I were pondering over our Ash Wednesday bulletin when we first
saw it depicted in a catalogue. It seemed the opposite of what we might expect.
We might expect a blackened cross marked by ashes. Our cover depicts the
opposite: a white cross on a darkened background. It’s rather like a
photographic negative, where the white shows up black, and the black white. I
was drawn to the image because I thought there might be a story there—there
might be a sermon there (though, at the time, not knowing what that story might
be).
In the March issue of The Lutheran, the journal of the ELCA,
our Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton shares a story told her by Stephen Bouman,
former Bishop of the Metropolitan New York Synod. The story is about one of the
events of September 11, 2001:
A pastor in the synod also
served as a chaplain to the fire department. The pastor saw the first plane hit
and ran to the site. When he arrived the firefighters were putting on their
gear. The pastor gathered them together, marked the cross on their foreheads
with oil and prayed. Then the firefighters ran into the building. The people
who survived said they could see the crosses shining on the firefighters’
foreheads. The firefighters were transfigured. In that great darkness and
suffering the light of Christ appeared.[2]
Through the filth and grime
of smoke and soot, the crosses shone on the foreheads of those firefighters.
I thought about those
sixth-century monks in England
in the time of King Arthur’s Court, wearing a lifetime of dirt and grime, never
washing. Like those firefighters marked with the cross of Christ, so too these
ancient monks, perhaps misguided as they were, wore the cross of Christ on
their foreheads, the cross marked there with water at their baptism, even if
those crosses were smudged with filth and grime.
Unlike Mark Twain’s monks
of King Arthur’s England,
we have the luxury of frequent bathing. We do not come to the rail tonight
covered with a lifetime of dirt and grime, as they would. Nor do we come
covered in the filth and grime of smoke and soot, like those firefighters on
9/ll. But we do come with a lifetime of burdens, a lifetime of cares, a
lifetime of broken promises, a lifetime of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, a
lifetime of griefs, and a lifetime of having missed the mark. We come as
creatures created of the dust, longing to be refreshed and renewed. We come to
receive the mark of the cross in ashes, as we are dust, but we do so in the
full confidence that beneath that mark of dust there lies the same cross that
shone through the filth and grime of smoke and soot of those firefighters, on
whose foreheads and in whose lives the radiant cross of Christ shone through.
Thanks be to God!
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