[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the Collective Table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties Scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast. So we're glad your here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm going to tell you a secret. The secret is the more time you have to speak, the easier it is.
So I teach classes often for 3 hours, easy.
I can win bag for 3 hours no problem. Anytime.
Teaching a class for an hour, no problem. Preaching a sermon in 25 minutes or less, it's harder.
It's harder on Ash Wednesday.
I get 10 minutes to do this, no more.
So that means I got to write it all out, because if I don't, I'll just talk and talk and talk.
Also, Janelle and I often take gatherings like Ash Wednesday and Good Friday to try to embody a more reflective energy.
And so I hope you'll bear with me as this isn't my usual style.
But Ash Wednesday, of course, as I've already said, marks the first day of Lent. This is a traditional 40 day period of reflection and repentance that leads us to the great mystery in our tradition of Easter.
The traditional text for Ash Wednesday is Genesis, chapter three, verse 19, where after Adam and Eve's foolish behavior begins to erode the good order of paradise.
God says this to them, by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you are taken, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes said something very similar to this when he wrote that left to our natural state, human life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Or, as anyone who grew up in the 1980s learned from a popular bumper sticker, life sucks, then you die.
That is very Ash Wednesday.
Incidentally, I think this is why Easter Sunday is better attended.
If Ash Wednesday is a bit of a downer, Easter Sunday is the springtime super bloom of the Christian year, the bright, showy revelation of life in all its abundance.
And that makes sense. Easter represents the culmination of our faith, the long anticipated arrival of actual good news for the poor, recovery of sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed. That is what we're waiting for.
And if all that sounds too good to be true, if it sounds rare or even unlikely to you, consider for a moment that the image of Easter is resurrection.
You know that day When a dead man rose from the dead after three whole days in the grave.
That doesn't happen very often.
Not nearly as often as, you know, dead people staying dead.
Have you seen the super bloom, by the way?
This is a thing that happens occasionally in the California deserts when an unusually high number of wildflowers all germinate at once in places like Death Valley. It paints the entire landscape in vibrant colors as far as the eye can see.
And for this to happen, a kind of perfect storm of events must occur. First, we need high levels of rain in the winter, and that alone is unusual in California, which is a land of perpetual drought.
But then, after that very wet winter must be followed by an unusually warm spring.
This is what triggers a mass germination of wildflower seeds across the landscape.
Did I mention, by the way, this rare, sudden, spectacular burst of life happens in a place called Death Valley?
The super bloom, of course, makes Death Valley a much more popular place to visit, at least for a few weeks.
Normally it gets a steady trickle of morbidly curious visitors, but during a super bloom, it draws massive crowds of tourists and photographers and social media influencers. It causes traffic jams and overcrowded hiking trails and sold out motel rooms in otherwise dusty little towns.
There's a commercial opportunity here, too, of course, if you want to take advantage of it.
All those tourists stop at roadside stands to buy wildflower cocktails and super bloom trinkets and $50 T shirts with skulls on them and little flowers poking out of the eye sockets that say things like, I went to the super bloom in Death Valley and all I got was this lousy T shirt.
All this opportunistic capitalism is really a super bloom of another kind.
And we, I think, as humans, love this.
It makes us feel alive.
We like life.
We like flowers, deserts, and death, not so much.
But what if there's no super bloom without a desert?
What if there's no resurrection without death?
What if our insistence on the perpetual, unceasing, eternal super blooms of health and wealth and happiness and conspicuous success on display moment by moment in our social media feeds are symptoms of sickness, not the cure?
What if, having grown sick on the consumer fantasy that pretends to be abundant life, we carved out time and space for honest reflection on our own deserts?
And by this I mean, of course, our failures, our weaknesses, our grief, and ultimately our inescapable death.
What if we can't know the truth of existence, including all of life's joys and celebrations, until we reckon with our darkest fears of non existence, a 20th century Christian monk, One of my favorites, Thomas Merton once observed on the streets of Southeast Asia, his Buddhist counterparts were begging every single day on the street.
After a while, he came to understand that this practice was for them a religious act, not strictly speaking, an economic necessity.
From this he came to believe that the essence of faith is the beggar's bowl.
What he meant is that faith is like a bowl, empty until someone fills it.
By living this way, the Buddhist monks were enacting a message that every human being ultimately depends on the goodwill of others.
If that's true, it means, among other things, that the things behind the things that we attempt to earn by the sweat of our brows, things like happiness and peace and joy, are better understood as gifts of grace bestowed by others in the midst of hardship.
In other words, flowers in the desert.
I don't know where this reflection might be taking you at this moment, but here's where it led me.
If the very best parts of life, including life itself, are gifts of grace, that is occasional, unpredictable, unearned drops of charity that we receive over and over in a dance of love with each other and with God, then why do we settle for consumer counterfeit so often?
What if, instead of trying to commodify the production of life to guarantee a never ending supply of grace, we gave in to the regular rhythm of birth and death and resurrection, knowing that by embracing this divine order, it produces authentic super blooms from time to time in our own lives?
That, by a way, by the way would be an act of repentance.
That's what repentance means.
Not shame or control at the hands of abusive leaders or an abusive God.
Certainly not the vain indulgence of spiritual self pity.
No, repentance is the clear eyed, often painful recognition that we have fallen short.
In other words, it's the experience of death, the experience of the cross.
It's embracing that we are in fact human fallible, that each of us contains within us whole deserts of dust from which occasionally something might bloom.
Faced with this sober and even sorrowful reality, we can change our minds.
We go in a different direction.
We make good on our mistakes.
Repentance then is not spiritual abuse or self loathing. It's the embrace of our inner desert.
As the great prophet Moses wrote, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
One half of the truth about life then, is death.
The other half is of course, resurrection. But that can wait until Easter.
In the meantime, for the next 40 days, we reflect on our fallibility, our frailty, our mortality, and the road to resurrection. Which first goes through the cross of death.
We do that on Ash Wednesday, by the way, by receiving the sign of ashes on our foreheads.
Janelle and I invite you now to come forward as the music plays to receive that sign, if you're willing.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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