Homily: Ash Wednesday [February 17, 2010] Christ Church Cranbrook

There are certain sermons you hear or read that determine how you’re going to understand a passage of scripture for the rest of your life. For me, one such sermon is Reinhold Niebuhr’s homily on today’s reading from 2 Corinthians, “As Deceivers, Yet True” published in his 1937 collection, Beyond Tragedy. In the passage we just heard read, Paul talks about the contradictory ways in which the early Christians were seen by the outside world.

In honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true [2 Corinthians 6.8]

Reinhold Niebuhr was using the King James Version of the Bible, hence his slightly different language: “By honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet true.” [2 Corinthians 6.8] Here is what Niebuhr says about this passage, or what he calls Paul’s description of “the character, the vicissitudes, and the faith of the Christian ministry”. He says:

[W]hat is true in the Christian religion can be expressed in symbols which contain a certain degree of provisional and superficial deception. Every apologist of the Christian faith might well, therefore, make the Pauline phrase his own. We do teach the truth by deception. We are deceivers, yet true.” [Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy¸ p. 3]

In the same way that a visual artist misrepresents three-dimensional reality in order to portray it on a two-dimensional canvas, so the Christian church has had to talk in partial truths in order to represent a larger, paradoxical truth. In Niebuhr’s words, “It must be made into a symbol of something beyond itself.” [Beyond Tragedy, p.6] In my way of putting it: the truth of the Gospel so far transcends our understanding of it that we can only talk about it in half truths. So all preachers are, in one way or another, liars. But we lie to tell the truth.
In the same way that a visual artist misrepresents three-dimensional reality in order to portray it on a two-dimensional canvas, so the Christian church has had to talk in partial truths in order to represent a larger, paradoxical truth. In Niebuhr’s words, “It must be made into a symbol of something beyond itself.” [Beyond Tragedy, p.6] In my way of putting it: the truth of the Gospel so far transcends our understanding of it that we can only talk about it in half truths. So all preachers are, in one way or another, liars. But we lie to tell the truth.
This is the way it is with Ash Wednesday. As the first day in the 40-day season of Lent, this is a penitential occasion, a day on which we reflect on our sinfulness. It is true that we are sinners, that we are selfish, that we are limited and mortal, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” [Isaiah 53.6] We cannot give a full account of ourselves without acknowledging that we each see the world from a limited and partial point of view which places ourselves at the center and everyone else on the periphery. The focus of Ash Wednesday is very much on our limitations.
But to say only this does not do justice to the fullness of the paradox. So we are deceivers, yet true. Because the other side of this equation is Easter and resurrection and what they say about our goodness and worth. God’s raising of Jesus from the death to which we put him is a profound sign of how important we are to God. We are made in God’s image, endowed with God’s blessing and purpose. As fallen and sinful and selfish as we are, there is more to our story than our sin. So we need to keep the other side of this paradox in mind as we observe the first side of it. All we like sheep have gone astray. And Christ is risen as the promise of our resurrection. Two things that seem contradictory are true at once. Ash Wednesday makes no sense without Easter. Easter makes no sense without Ash Wednesday.
All of the great ideas of Christian faith and life stand in tension with what look to us like their opposites: justice and mercy, faith and works, judgment and forgiveness. It is a perversion of the fullness of the Gospel to emphasize one over the other. Some traditions exclusively emphasize God’s judgment and so turn Christianity into a stern, merciless and joyless enterprise. Others over-emphasize God’s mercy and so become purveyors of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”. Only the Christian communities that try to hold on to both sides of the equation even begin to get it right. You and I are sinners. And God loves us. Both things are true at the same time. Today we concentrate on the sinful part. But hold on, because even in this Lenten period we will see evidence of God’s deep and abiding love for us. And then there will be Easter, which will put everything in its proper perspective.
We come soon to the part of the service where ashes are imposed on our foreheads and the priest says, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” When I was younger I heard that sentence as exclusively bad news. I heard that sentence telling me I was nothing, that I was dirt, that I was going to die. As I have gotten older, I hear it telling me something else. It tells me that I am of the earth and so good. Like all living creatures, I am subject to the limits of time and space. All of us are “but flesh, a breath that goes forth and does not return.” [Psalm 78.39] The sentence that imposes ashes on my forehead tells me that as a mortal, finite creature, I stand in the middle of a tension that is too big and complex for me to take in all at once. It tells me that all, finally, will be well.
We, all of us Christian folk, are deceivers yet true. Over the course of our lives we navigate contradictions that confuse us. To help us in that work we have been given this forty-day period of Lent in which we are asked by God to look inward, past our exterior deception, toward our inner truth. If you think you have no sin you deceive yourself. And if you think your sin is the most important thing about you, you deceive yourself yet again. Lent is a time of self-examination, of repentance, of fasting. But we do those things not for their own sake but in the service of the divine love that calls us forward toward Easter. Lent is a time when we are given the opportunity to peel back our masks and see ourselves as God sees us: as limited, mortal, often selfish and lost creatures who nevertheless are unique and precious to God. Both things are true. And we can’t really see them without a bit of smoke and mirrors.
We are deceivers, yet true. God knows you as you are and loves you as you are. May this Lent be a season when you come, if only a glimpse at a time, to know and see yourself as God does. Amen.