Assigned Scripture Readings: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17 | 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 | Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA
Lent has just begun and oh, how Lent-ey this year has already been. Weâve recently lost three of our own dearest long-time members. Others among us are sick, or sitting with someone who is. And the world outside these walls feels... Kind of like a dumpster fire.
So we come here tonight to get ash rubbed on our forehead. Which is a strange thing to do. But here we are.
Our Lenten devotional this year draws from the writing of Madeleine LâEngle â many of you know her as the author of A Wrinkle in Time, (the movie version of which stars the one and only Oprah Winfrey). But LâEngle also wrote beautifully and seriously about the spiritual life too. This weekâs reflection begins with a scene she witnessed: an eighteen-month-old lying on her stomach in the grass, watching a colony of ants. Completely still. Completely absorbed. And then LâEngle describes playing ring-around-the-rosy with her â grandparents, parents, teenagers, all of them skipping in a circle and falling down laughing. The childâs self-forgetfulness was contagious. LâEngle says (this is beautiful): we were outside self... and outside time.
Thatâs the image she keeps returning to. The child at play. The artist at work. The person so concentrated on something outside themselves that the self-watching simply stops.
LâEngle was also a pianist; not a very good one, she admits. But she describes sitting at the keyboard working through a piece of Bach, fumbling through it, and finding that it doesnât matter. She describes how when she plays (as âbadâ as it may be): the music is all there is. I am outside time, outside self, in play, in joy.
She calls this humility. (Seems like a Lenten theme!) Which surprised her when she first thought it. We tend to think of humility as a kind of shrinking: speaking carefully, holding back, making yourself small. But LâEngle says thatâs actually its opposite. She uses the Greek word hubris (pride, self-centeredness) and she means it precisely: hubris is the self... installed at the center... watching itself perform... judging itself. Which, as you can imagine, is even a bigger problem when so many of us have turned our cameras on ourselves. Judging ourselves.
Jesus diagnosed this human malady a couple thousand years agoâŠ
Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
Thatâs an odd instruction. Itâs one of those Yoda-like Jesus riddles. It seems like what Jesus calls the left hand is exactly what LâEngle names: the part of you that judges. The inner accuser, the critic, the one who measures how youâre doing. And heâs saying: in the practice of prayer, of fasting, of giving (and of living) â let it go. Not so that you disappear, but so that you actually show up.
(Has anyone here NOT used Zoom?) Thereâs a feature on Zoom (that not many people know about) where you can turn off your self-view. Stop seeing yourself in the corner of the screen. And if youâve ever done it, you knowâwell, oneâitâs TERRIFYING. But after the initial fear, you suddenly realize... Youâre just in the conversation. Youâre looking at the other person. Youâre actually there.
Thereâs a way of thinking about God as a kind of infinite music â and you and I as participants IN IT, not performers OF IT. We donât generate the music. We receive it. Weâre in it before we do anything.
When LâEngle is at the piano fumbling through Bach, she keeps playing because the music is more real than her performance of it. Thatâs not just a psychological observation. Itâs a metaphysical one. The music doesnât depend on her skill. Sheâs already in it. The only question is whether sheâll let herself play. Or will her inner accuser (her inner left hand) silence her?
I want to say something gently here, because I know some of you are living closely with loss right now â or even watching someone you love move toward death.
One of the cruelest things the self-watching voice does in those moments is fill the space with regret and self-judgement. What I should have done. What I didnât say. What they deserved that I couldnât give. And for those facing their own mortality, sometimes itâs a kind of audit... Everything seems left undone, unfinished.
That voice is the left hand. And the gospel says: you donât need its permission.
The right hand is free to just... be... right now. To love. To receive help. To laugh. To lend a hand without the crippling effects of self-interest.
The grace is already there. Lent is just learning to believe it in the depths of our own deepest valleys.
This is what the cross is. Jesus taking the whole weight of the judging, the performing, the hubris â all of it â into death. So that what rises is just the music. The right hand, finally free.
You are, right now, a note in the music God is playing. Dust, yes. Finite, yes. Grieving, maybe. Terrified, perhaps.
And held, completely. In something and someone that does not run out.
The ashes are real ashes. We donât pretend otherwise. And they get smeared on your forehead in the shape of a cross, the same sign that was made over you at your baptism.
You are dust, and you are claimed. You are a dirt creature filled with the breath of God. From the eternal melody you came and to it you will return. We walk out into the world as people who have stopped watching ourselves long enough to see everything else.
Return to me with all your heart. (Thatâs Joel.) Come home. Stop performing the return and just... come. Play. Dance.
The music is already playing.
And so it is. Amen.