ISIS—50—ASHES

ASH WEDNESDAY 2015

This blog for the season of Lent is taking its cues from Lent for Everyone by NT Wright as he takes us through the Gospel of Mark. I will try and summarize of bit of what Bishop Wrights says, and then offer some other comments with regards to how I am thinking about each day’s theme. Today’s theme, as it is Ash Wednesday, is to “get ready” and to “repent.”

The text is the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, chapter 1 verses 1-20. Today Bishop Wright has a wonderful story about how a new restaurant is using locusts in its salad. In an interview with the chef, he points out that people eat prawns, so why not locusts. This is one of the reasons I enjoy Bishop Wright, he has wonderful modern connections to these 2,000 year old texts—modern day locusts eaters, who would have thought, it seems rather odd?

His point is even in the first century eating locusts would have struck people as odd, gotten their attention you might say. It, or rather he, John the Baptist did get people’s attention and the text notes that they heard his message: get ready—repent. Why? Because the long awaited Messiah is coming! The imagery in Mark’s Gospel are people in large numbers being plunged into the waters of baptism because they have taken to heart the message. Bishop Wright posits that if the message was Victoria Beckham is coming to your house, you would get ready! Victoria Beckham—really Bishop Wright—are you trying to get my attention? He skillfully gets you into the text, all the while making some of the classic points of Ash Wednesday. John the Baptist is announcing that something new, or rather someone new, is coming. Get ready; what “rooms in your personal house” need cleaning for the new guest? 

And indeed Mark’s Gospel rockets out of the starting gate with Jesus as the Messiah. Skeptical readers will need to stick with Mark to see if they buy his story—but he certainly does not keep you waiting until the last page to announce his radical news—and many find this idea of God coming to earth in human form, well rather odd news.

My mind is stuck with other odd, even disturbing news. As Fifty Shades of Gray broke Box Office records this past weekend, apparently ISIS beheaded 21 Christians. Please do not misunderstand. ISIS’s actions are not connected to the movie debut. These two headline grabbing events are simply merged in my mind. As I grind the ashes, burnt from last year’s Palm Sunday palms, I find myself simultaneously thinking about this week’s events and asking, “Do people believe they need to repent?” While we seemingly live in a world far from Thomas Anthony Harris’ 1969 best seller “I’m OK, You’re OK, we nonetheless generally believe that we are not the problem.

How can I find a voice that invites people to even consider the need to “repent?” To what am I asking them to repent of? It is quite frankly easy to look at the atrocities being committed in the name of God and demand those people repent. It is even easy to point out how the latest movie craze is something that, if you are on your way to go see, well turnaround. Yet pointing out how others should turnaround, should repent, seems as if I have somehow appointed myself the self-righteous already-repentant one who knows best.

The air of self-righteousness has a decided stench to it. It usually elicits from our world the classic complaint that the church for too long has wagged its judging finger at people, keeping them downtrodden as it, the church, goes about indulging in its own sins. The post-Enlightenment world has long since shaken off sin for a new ideal of self-confidence and self-esteem. My mind comes back to the question, “In this world, is there room for, and can I articulate, a real need not for ISIS or Hollywood, but for me and the several hundred people I will administer ashes to, to really repent?”  

And this is where I return to this weekend’s headlines. Most people are outraged by the beheadings, and some people are disappointed that a carefully created narrative, with some very gifted marketing, has made millions of people at least curious about a type of relationship that is ultimately about power of one person over another. Without getting any higher on my high-horse, it is my reaction to this weekend’s odd disturbing news that points me back to the odd news of John the Baptist. ISIS, Fifty Shades of Gray, and the like, make us less human. For me these two events are some deep low points of what plagues all of us…that we all tend to make others and ourselves, less than God created us to be.

Jesus’ coming to our world is, as Bishop Wright is fond of saying, to put the world right. To make us more fully human. He did not come so that we could create some utopian world on earth, but he did come to set things right. Turning and following Jesus, seeking to live like Jesus, is to seek to walk a path where each and every day we are more and more human—each and every day we try and treat others like they are humans created in the Imago Dei. Dare I look in the mirror with enough confidence in God’s love, with enough sense of self, with enough courage, and admit that there are attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in me that are off? It seems to me that this is one of the key issues as I seek to engage the world. And here I must tread lightly and think carefully because I am dangerously close to appearing as if I am communicating that I, the self-righteous repentant one, am wagging my finger at you. Please know that I am looking in the mirror, and inside I am shaking my head, all too aware of my besetting foibles, my persistent behaviors that de-humanize me, that de-humanize others...you might say my sin. Ash Wednesday is not about sitting on the sidelines of life moralizing about others. Ash Wednesday is about entering life. So this Ash Wednesday I will kneel and have a different shade of gray placed on my forehead that tells me to remember that between my starting as dust and returning to dust, is a life that Jesus came for, and that he invites me again to turn, follow, and live in his grace and love.