Journey into Healing

Clare L. Hickman

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale

February 26, 2023—Lent 1A

Gen 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Matt 4:1-11

Rend Your Heart A Blessing for Ash Wednesday

To receive this blessing,
all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so that you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go.

Your entire life
is here, inscribed whole
upon your heart’s walls:
every path taken
or left behind,
every face you turned toward
or turned away,
every word spoken in love
or in rage,
every line of your life
you would prefer to leave
in shadow,
every story that shimmers
with treasures known
and those you have yet
to find.

It could take you days
to wander these rooms.
Forty, at least.

And so let this be
a season for wandering,
for trusting the breaking,
for tracing the rupture
that will return you

to the One who waits,
who watches,
who works within
the rending
to make your heart
whole.

—Jan Richardson

Lent invites us to journey into the wilderness. There, we walk into this story about the temptation of Jesus, in which the devil offers Jesus a variety of ways to improve himself: to be more fruitful, to be stronger and more confident, to be bigger and better and more well-known.  Just like Adam and Eve in the garden, he was invited to become God-like. But unlike Adam and Eve, the one who was in fact God-incarnate chose to remain human.

Throughout the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus re-lives parts of the salvation story, and does it right this time. Mending the damage. Showing a better way. And as we enter our own wildernesses, Lent invites us to continue the healing of humanity that Jesus began; to claim and embrace our own humanness.

We can see the pathway of this healing journey laid out on Ash Wednesday.  It begins with the Litany of Penitence, honestly admitting the ways in which we have sinned, the ways in which we have hurt ourselves, each other and the world. And then we receive the mark of ashes on our foreheads, with the words: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. This is not a reminder of our wretched nothingness: It is simply a reminder that we are not God, that we are mortal. And perhaps just as importantly, it is a reminder that God formed us out of the earth, and in the end, we will return to that earth, and to God.

We close the Ash Wednesday service with the Eucharist. We are reminded that we are broken like the bread, but somehow mysteriously brought back together at the altar rail. That we are loved, chosen, and fed; forgiven, strengthened and bound together with Christ and one another. This is the gift we can receive. This is the way we can become part of something larger, something amazing, if we can stop trying to make ourselves large and amazing. This is what we can be filled with, if we have the courage to stop trying to puff ourselves up.

Which is why we often have broken pots on the altar during Lent. The openness of a pot invites our openness, calls out to us to empty ourselves, to become receptive, to stop and to wait and to allow.

And their brokenness speaks to the sinfulness with which the Ash Wednesday service began. All of us are sinners in one way or another. And all of us are broken. A friend of mine, who was an engineer and is now a yoga teacher, said what amazed him, once he started paying attention, was how much pain and struggle everyone carries around inside. No matter how good or easy their life seemed to be, everyone’s heart and life was broken in some way.

In many places of our lives, we are encouraged to hide our struggle. Here, in this place, we are invited to tell the whole truth. Placing it in the context of the story of a Creator God who formed us out of clay. And then in the book of Jeremiah, we hear that this same great potter gathers up the broken pieces of our lives and re-forms them, making them into something new. Making us into someone new.  

We bring our sinfulness here not to remind ourselves that we are unworthy, but to invite this healing. We offer our failings and our heartbreak, and place them in God’s hands to be re-made.

That’s the point of penitence. It’s not about crawling and denigrating yourself. It’s about being open to healing. If you listen to the stories we hear during Lent this year, you’ll find that they are all about healing: About finally being able to see, about regaining community, and about being given new life.

But to get the healing, you first have to acknowledge that you are unwell. And you have to know, really deep down inside, that you can’t fix it all yourself. You have to fight back against those twin devils of self-preservation and self-reliance that are whispering in your ear. You have to allow the hard, protected places inside you to be broken open.

We open ourselves up to God, unguarded and vulnerable. Acknowledging our sins, admitting our mortality and our frailty, we throw ourselves at God’s feet. Trusting in God’s mercy, God’s acceptance, and God’s healing.

This is the journey of Lent. Having traveled to the very heart of our hunger, our yearning, and our emptiness, we receive the gift: the promise that lies at the heart of the Eucharistic feast.

Unashamed to say that we are hungry, we will be filled! Unafraid to say that we are broken, we will be remade. Unable to deny our weakness, we will be made strong. God will make us strong.

Let us journey on. Let us seek the healing and the strength that God offers us in this time. Let us do it together. Amen.