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Chapter 6 beginning with the first verse. Listen for the word of God. Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in

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heaven. So whenever you give alms do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they

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have received their reward. But when you give alms , do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. So that your alms may be done in secret, and your father who sees

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in secret will reward you. And whenever you pray , do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners so that they may be seen by

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others. Truly I tell you they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret. And your father who sees

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in secret will reward you. And whenever you fast , do not look somber like the hypocrites, for they mark their faces to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you they have received their

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reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and watch your face. So that your fasting may be seen not by others, but by your father who is in secret. And your father

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who sees in secret will reward you. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal . But store up for yourself treasures in heaven.

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Where neither moth nor rust consumes. And where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The word of the Lord. Please pray with me

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. Oh Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together be acceptable in Your sight, our rock and our redeemer. Amen . Seminary forced me to reconsider the church of my

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childhood. I grew up in a congregation that would have made the ultra iconoclastic wing of the reformed tradition very proud. The sanctuary was plain, white painted walls, straight wooden pews, no decorations to tempt

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the eye apart from a plain cross in front and certainly no stained glass. Communion was served rather infrequently and when it was, we consumed Wonder bread and grape juice. I thought that was funny. We

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celebrated the Lord's supper while seated, drinking the juice from small glasses. I remember Easter services vividly because they usually coincided with the coming of spring in the Pacific Northwest. But Lent was a foreign concept to

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me. I heard my Catholic friends talk about it . But I really could not say that I ever experienced Lent for myself. I never attended an Ash Wednesday service until I started seminary and began exploring other

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liturgical traditions. Anglicanism fascinated me with its smells, bells, and of course it's wine. So I started attending an Episcopal church, became a youth group leader in a congregation and relished the ceremony that seemed

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so different from the church of my childhood. And so one Ash Wednesday during my 2nd year of seminary , a group of friends and I went to a midday service and I received the imposition of ashes on

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my forehead for the first time. Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. I loved it. I really don't remember anything about the sermon. It probably was something about sin. But

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I vividly recall the feeling of smudge as the priest made the sign of the cross on my forehead. And as the service ended, I made a vow to myself that I would not wash my forehead for

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at least one day. But as we were leaving the sanctuary, walking back to campus, one of my friends said something that I will never forget. You know, I don't need the church to tell

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me that I'm garbage. I do a good enough job telling myself that most days of the week. Actually her language is a bit more colorful than that , but you get the point. Those words shocked

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me. All of a sudden these two sentences made me question the ritual that I'd just undergone for the first time. Was there something flawed about this ritual ? Something deeply problematic. Could it be yet another

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example of how the good news of Christian faith can sometimes be twisted into bad news? Needless to say , my momentary fascination with smells, bells, wine and ritual started to shake. So what is Ash

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Wednesday? What is it for? What does it say about the Christian life? Is it a bludgeon that clobbers us with our sin? Or is it something more? I, I think my friend on

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that Ash Wednesday in 1993 was on to something. In fact, her remark might have been a little ahead of its time. Because today we live in a society that thrives on making us and others feel

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like garbage. The US Surgeon General recently noted an epidemic of anxiety, loneliness, and feelings of inadequacy that has swept across the nation. Much of this epidemic it seemed is fueled by social media, the

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near constant bombardment of messages about others' lives, what they are doing, what they are eating, what they are earning, where they are vacationing, and how their lives are better than yours. In this

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atmosphere, we're forced to compare ourselves with others. And usually we look worse by comparison. Others are smarter, better looking, more spiritual, more interesting and more well adjusted than us. And so much

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of the time these online interactions make us feel worse about ourselves, that we somehow fall short. That who we are is not enough. And that we really need to be somebody else. Does Ash Wednesday

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simply give liturgical license to this endlessly destructive cycle of self-loathing and anxiety inducing comparison? I don't think so . It is certainly the case that we can twist the meaning of Ash Wednesday in this way. But

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if we listen to the wisdom of our scriptures today , if we delve more deeply into our traditions surrounding Ash Wednesday, we'll see that it's more than that . Yes, Ash Wednesday reminds us of our sin

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. It calls us to confess our sin anew. But the practices that we take part in today are also practices of connection. The good news of Christian faith is that in confessing sin, We become connected

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to others. In this community and across the globe . And we celebrate our connection to God's good earth . To the dust that formed us and all creatures . And so in contrast to our culture of self-isolation

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and endless comparison, Ash Wednesday actually fosters connection and relationship. Listen again to our reading from Matthew. Jesus says, beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them. Whenever you

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fast, do not look dismal. These don't sound like words that encourage social media posts about pious practice or public showing of one's superior faithfulness. Instead, there are words about simple practices that remind us of

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connection. Giving alms so that others might live more fully. Praying to deepen our relationship with God. Fasting to remind us that we do not live by bread alone and that we are called to share our

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abundance with others. Our sin reminds us that we fall short of God's glory. Our confession of sin shows us that we are not alone. That we belong to each other and to the living God.

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Confessing our sin does not in the end make us feel like garbage. It reorients our life. It centers us in God's abundance, where there is always more than enough to go around. More than enough

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to share, more than enough to draw us toward our siblings across the street and across the world. Confessing sin causes us to connect. This is what we remember on Ash Wednesday, and that, my

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friends, is good news. But there is something more as well. Listen to the words we are about to hear when we receive the ashes. Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return

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. These words recall the creation stories of Genesis, that we are earth creatures, God's beloved children molded from the dust. And not just the dust of the earth, but the dust of exploding stars forged

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in our galaxy and in other galaxies, millions of light years away. Our reading from Isaiah this morning connects our obligations to others with the bounty of creation . The planet that gives us life, the earth

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that is sustained by the hand of the living God . Listen again. If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted. Then your light shall rise in the darkness, and

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your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places and make your bones strong. And you shall be like a watered garden. Like a spring of water

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whose waters never fail. We shall be like a watered garden. Consider that I believe our practices on Ash Wednesday are earthy practices. They connect us to the wonder, beauty and life sustaining presence of the

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earth in all of its bounty. And yet this is a connection that we in the West have often missed, as if our true home were somewhere other than this planet. As if the earth were a

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temporary way station along a heavenly journey. But Ash Wednesday says something different. We earth creatures belong to the earth, and our well-being is bound up with its well-being. Native American theologian Clara Sue Kidwell puts

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it this way. All of creation is filled with our relatives. Thus all of creation is alive. We take whatever we need from the plenty of creation around us, but we always give something back in

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return to remind us that what we have taken. Was taken at a cost to our relatives in the world around us. Ash Wednesday reminds us of these connections. And remembers the ways that we break those

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connections. Our lives, you see, are bound up with others' lives. We need to confess the ways in which we violate other creatures' lives. Ash Wednesday reminds us that we have a home, a

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place. And all of us are connected to the land and our fellow creaturely travelers. Disconnection to land is one dimension of sin. In modern American life , especially in urban areas, fosters disconnection by treating

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land as a commodity, something to own, something to exploit, something to extract. But when we disconnect in this way, we forget our place in the scheme of things, our fundamental nature as earth

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creatures who receive the breath of life from the Holy Spirit. And Ash Wednesday invites us to discover again our true place. Where is your place? What part of this beautiful creation is significant to you?

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What place is calling your name? Wendell Berry is a farmer who writes beautifully about place. About the human connection to land and community. And he's lived most of his life on a small piece of land

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. Alongside the Kentucky River. Land that's too hilly to be claimed and colonized by industrial agribusiness, land too distant from the big city to be gobbled up by housing developments. And his writing encourages us to

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find our place. And to recognize the sin of disconnection when we slowly lose our place. Listen to his lament. My part of rural America is a colony. Like every other part. Uh, of

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rural America, almost the entire landscape of the country . From the exhausted cotton fields of the plantation south to the eroding wheat lands of the pauses, from the strip mines of Appalachia. To the clear cuts

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To the clear cuts of the Pacific slope. is in the power of an absentee economy. Once national and now increasingly international. That is without limit in its greed and without mercy in its exploitation of land

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and people. Now that's those are that's what he says. And he writes that one way of countering this disconnection, this insatiable greed, is to find our place, to put down roots, to dig

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deeply in the community where we find ourselves, and even to play in the dirt. Now we all can't be Wendell Berry. We all aren't destined to be small scale farmers. The world needs teachers and

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shopkeepers, physicians and mechanics, parents and grandparents, and yes, even preachers. But we can all find our place. We can all seek community, forging relationships with each other and with the land.

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Nearly all of us like to play in the dirt as children before we were told by some well-meaning adult that we needed to clean up. And maybe Ash Wednesday is calling us back to some of that joy

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. Because when we play in the dirt, when we plant a tree, when we tend a garden , or even sit under the shade of a tree , we are called back to connection. To our

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fundamental nature as earth creatures, to each other and to the God who created us from dust. The point of Ash Wednesday, friends, is not to make us feel like garbage. The point is to

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connect. And so on this Ash Wednesday, remember your dust and to dust you shall return. Remember and confess your sin. And in confessing, connect . Find your place, play in the dirt.