Rev. Rachel Lewis Cooley
“Ash Wednesday”
Kensington Community Church UCC, San Diego, CA
March 5, 2025
Luke 9:51-62
51 When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to prepare for his arrival, 53 but they did not receive him because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 54 When his disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” 55 But he turned and rebuked them. 56 Then they went on to another village.
57 As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 59 To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” 60 And Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” 61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” 62 And Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Spirit of the living God, give us new ears, open in this moment, to hear from you what is ours to do. Give us new eyes, to see the ways old habits are holding us back, eyes to vision what could be, what is already breaking in. Give us new hearts, the ones you gave us, but with the walls & chains & guarding around them melting away, that your compassion in us might flow free. May our meditations this night be a first step which inspires another and keeps us walking together with Jesus. Amen.
And so we enter the Lenten season, in that moment when Jesus has set his eyes on Jerusalem. In that moment when Jesus needs commitment. The call was urgent, the need unmistakable.
Is this moment, in our time today, the moment when we need commitment? Is the call urgent, the need unmistakable? I think many of us feel that it is, may be activated like never before. Yet there are divisions that feel so deep, chasms between us so wide & raw, we’re afraid to take any step or we might fall in. And these divisions are not just over what’s happening at the top, who won this election, but over so many things at this point, right in our own neighborhoods, over disagreements where we’ve turned away from one another & drawn another line between us.
What needs to fall into those chasms & between us be melted down, in order to fill them in again? What has to die in order for new life & liberation in God’s kin-dom to break in. Our self-righteousness? Perfectionism? Avoidance? isolation? Self-Righteousness & certainty of our rightness sure are intoxicating drugs. We feel God-like with them, really. “We disagree about this thing,” the Samaritans said, “about where temple should be, thus we can’t receive you at all, have no interest in anything you have to say.” And oh boy did the disciples respond in kind, “oh yeah well, we’re gonna call on God to smite you and our version of God is for sure gonna do it too, for sure, so get ready!” When have you in anger had thoughts like these? | know | have. And I feel assured by a simplifying balm that I am right and they are wrong, black & white, no ability to connect on other things, that | even need to become more hardened in my opinion, take it even further, and only be with those who agree with me.
Now Jesus doesn’t preach self-sacrifice instead, doesn’t grovel with the Samaritans who refuse him. Turning the other cheek is about not letting others deny your dignity, which you are assured of with God’s help. And there may be moments you can’t engage with certain opinions, where you call on others from your community to engage that fight instead. But if the community turns those moments into always, hard-line divisions, where do we wind up? With a false sense of security... which allows folks to harden into separate, unchallenged camps... that eventually clash, perhaps to disastrous effect? We wind up on both sides with dogmatism and a whole swath of people we’re cut off from. We throw the baby out with the bathwater to make a point. Whereas if we stay in community, even say a church, maybe someone who doesn’t understand or even says firmly they disagree with the identities of transgender, maybe they will respond differently when a child beloved in the church says I want to use a different bathroom than you expect. When the issue gets a human face, maybe compassion melts the hardened opinions & hearts, blurs the lines in the sand.
Being in community is never going to be perfect— others aren’t going to think like me & I’m not always going to behave my best either. Maybe perfectionism is another obsession to let die. I know I sometimes think I can’t reach out to someone who’s been on my heart until l’m in some ideal place, not struggling myself. Until I can listen as well as that other person, until I have read another book about pastoral care, until all my anxieties can be assuaged. As if such a moment- that “until” moment— will ever come. I mean maybe someday, but can we afford to wait for someday? God uses imperfect people throughout the scriptures, Jesus calls us to see the kin-dom now. You want hope? Create it. Choose it now, even with a single step.
Now there will be moments where you reach out to others and they say no, as the Samaritans said no we will not host you. That night “the human one had no place to lay his head” as Jesus said, and the disciples didn’t either, and there may be other nights like it. Yet follow. Acknowledge the hurt feeling, the sadness at a line drawn by others, but keep going, try something else.
Let’s not let over identification with our feelings & melodrama drive our car. While driving along the road, when do we treat feelings as places to stop & cling to rather than signs we sea & honor we continue on? Now mental health can be a real challenge for which many of us need the healing of connection & community, most of all as support to keep journeying, keep moving in the direction of our values even when depression or anxiety want us to freeze or run the other way.
Jesus may not be telling the man who says, “but wait, | have to bury my father” to ignore his grief, but maybe gently reminding him not to miss other things, that it’s hard but true that his grief will follow him & show up along the journey whether or not he thinks he’s seen it buried. To seize a moment before he himself is dust, thereby honoring his father’s legacy and the life he gave him. Maybe this man needs some new joy, to taste some new life as one of Jesus’s disciples; maybe like us he needs to keep hope in the possibility of resurrection by continually moving toward it.
Maybe this Lent you need to practice joy, too, keeping your eyes on Easter, marking every Sunday between these 40 days as the mini-easters they are. Practicing hope by bringing it alive and naming the many hopeful signs around you. The kin-dom is on the verge, even already here, Jesus says. Don’t look back, don’t stop walking because here it is, on the road together. In unexpected places when we remind ourselves that God must be here, when we wonder what God might be doing between us and not pretend we always know.
You were dust & you will be dust again, remember?
Maybe all of this will be dust someday. PAUSE We see our fear at that statement, we move through it. We wonder what freedom & invitation is on the other side of that fear. What goodness can we bring about, just for the joy of it now? Even if it doesn’t last forever? What step might we take in the next day, even if we don’t know where it will lead? We might as well. Maybe it doesn’t seem a perfect moment--- like the. right. thing. --- like we feel ready. But what is all that anyway?
Maybe Lent feels hard because we have all these expectations, these long-term visions for what the 40 days “should” be or where we will be at the end of them, Has this approach worked for us before? Or do we feel discouraged because we’ve seen it fall apart.
But those are Lent’s of the past... maybe this time we just think about the next step, and then the next. The disciples sure didn’t know where they were going with Jesus, and probably would have frozen or run away if they did. They were imperfect, we hear about moments where they don’t get it all throughout. But we also hear Jesus invite them again & again, walk beside them at every step.
So maybe your intentions tonight are just for today, just for tomorrow. And then tomorrow you assess them again. And the next day too. And on Sunday you practice remembering the new life that’s coming. And it all builds & builds and I don’t know either where we'll be at the end of April or certainly not beyond. Let’s see, together.
Amen