ASH WEDNESDAY

ASH WEDNESDAY
by Paul A. Tidemann, Pastor (retired - sort of)

I attended an Ash Wednesday service this week at the church where I am a member. I sang in the choir. Pastor Lois preached a fine sermon and in it she reflected on why so many people show up for such a service. She got some laughs from the congregation. That was good. She had some helpful things to say about how we might live in Lent as we anticipate in 40 days the glory and wonder of the new life proclaimed in the Christ resurrection at Easter. In fact, her sermon seemed like one good thing that came from that hour-and-a-half experience of Ash Wednesday.

I should add at this point that Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I am a member, is a really fine church with a great mission that includes being Reconciling in Christ (welcoming of GLBT people), open and involved in interfaith activities, a global mission vision and involvement (especially in Guatemala), concern for justice issues, including racism, and a fine tradition of worship and superb music. It has great pastors and lay leaders. It is also Lutheran and so it follows the Lutheran liturgical year which brings me back to Ash Wednesday.

The service began with the choir singing a choral version of Psalm 51. The music of that Psalm was beautiful, but the words of that Psalm are hard to take.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless in your judgment. Behold, I was brought forth in sin, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Did you know that this Psalm was written after King David was confronted by the prophet Nathan for having committed adultery with Bathsheba?

A week or so ago I began working on a memoir of my experience in ministry with gay and lesbian people which culminated in the decision of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in August 2009 to allow gay and lesbian persons to be ordained and serve as pastors and rostered lay leaders in the church.

As I began that work I dug out a tape recording of a speech which my mother gave to a regional conference on sexuality which was sponsored by the then Lutheran Church in America. It was held at the San Jose Retreat Center in San Antonio, Texas. My mother, Bernice “Bee” Tidemann, was asked to reflect on her experience as a mother of gay sons. I transcribed that speech. She focused primarily on what happened with my brother, James, who died at age 31 in 1973 having drank himself to death. The issue was that James was living at a time when few of us understood homosexuality (I hate that word - it was a word that was devised in the 19th century to describe the “condition” of those with same-gender orientation). James knew he had these feelings and attempted to try them out and felt very ashamed about his sexual encounters.

My mother quoted from a diary that James kept, which we did not discover until after he died. In one place he wrote: “I developed a DEEP feeling of guilt, and a fear that my parents, my friends, teachers, or employers would find out my sin. The result, of course, would be their shock and distaste, resulting of course in my ostracism. Yet I have seemingly done all my own punishing all these years. I didn’t feel I deserved the love of my parents, nor did I feel I deserved the recognition as a child that my brothers did.”

I’ll go on about that whole matter in another place, but I raise it here because having listened to my mother talk about all of this back in 1985 was brought back to me in March, 2011 as I listened to her and then, a few days later, attended the Ash Wednesday service.

“I was brought forth in sin, and in sin did my mother conceive me,” says King David. Was my brother, James, brought forth in sin, conceived in sin by my mother (and father)? Good God - no! James was a wonderful person who wanted to spend his life helping others and graduated from college with a degree in social work. But he could not get beyond what he thought God (and people, even us in his family) perceived about him.

I was asked by the Chicago police to come to the bar where he died and identify him. It was a lousy experience. I suppose that my experience at the March 9, 2011 Ash Wednesday service would not have been so stark for me had I not listened to my mother speak, via a recording, just ten days before.

There was another part of the service that bugged me. We had a reading from the prophet Joel chapter 2, which read, in part,

“Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near – a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.

Having served a congregation which had a significant number of African American members I thought again about how our translations of Scripture must sound to the ears of those who are called “black people.” “A day of darkness and gloom” – “Like blackness spread upon the mountains ...”

These people, too, have been oppressed with the attitudes of society, and the church, that have declared that they are not fully human and maybe, too, that they were conceived in sin. In fact, if you go back to the story of Noah in the Hebrew Scriptures in Genesis 9, you read:

“The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled. Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, "Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers." He also said, "Blessed by the LORD my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave." After the flood Noah lived three hundred and fifty years. All the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died.” (Genesis 9:18-29)

Did you know that Christian preachers declared that this was the reason that black people were placed in slavery because their ancestor, Ham, was black and was banished into slavery by his father and that the whole black African race was descended from Ham?

It was for this reason that I used to offer translations of Scripture, like the one from Joel, that attended to the issue of racism and the used of words like “black” and “darkness” which were framed in a pejorative light. I would have offered the Joel passage this way:

“Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near – a day of shadows and gloom, a day of clouds and thick shadows. Like gloom spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.”

I have one other set of feelings that arose from my experience with the Ash Wednesday service. It has to do with the history of patriarchy. I have come to understand that the patriarchal system in society was devised to keep the poor people, the working people, and women in a subservient role. Part of this is present in the whole history of slavery, but it is broader than that.

The history of the church has had its moments in which the use of Scripture and the preaching of the preachers was devised to “keep people in their place,” to keep people from rising up against their leaders, who were few in number, but powerful. Preachers sought to convince their listeners that they were sinful, awful people and needed to bow down before God and keep their place in this world as working-class types, being thankful for what crumbs came their way.

What I have called the over-emphasis on sin in the theology of the church has been devised to keep the oppressed in place. We are living in a time of great upheaval in the Middle East and even next door to us in Wisconsin. The young people, the working people, are rising up and saying “we will not take this oppression any longer. Down with dictatorship and with the few who hold power over the many.”

We need to be mindful of all of this as we frame our worship and our teaching in the church. I continually asked myself what my friends in the pews were feeling and experiencing as they came to the church. I sought to listen to the whole of the Biblical message which far more emphasizes the goodness of God’s creation, the original blessing (thank you, Fr. Matthew Fox) of humanity, the love and grace of God which never ends and which is constantly present to list us up out of our gloom and hopelessness.

I love the whole sermon which Paul Tillich preached, titled “You Are Accepted,” but I quote just this portion of it:

“Sometimes, at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted! If that happens to us, we experience grace.”

Do I deny the reality of sin? No. But I find help words, again, from Tillich, in which he said,

“I should like to suggest another word to you, not as a substitute for the word "sin", but as a useful clue in the interpretation of the word "sin", "separation." Separation is an aspect of the experience of everyone. Perhaps the word "sin" has the same root as the word "asunder". In any case, sin is separation. To be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation. And separation is threefold: there is separation among individual lives, separation of a man from himself, and separation of all men from the Ground of Being.”

We need to stop beating people over the head for what the church perceives to be their individual acts of sin and work, instead on how we can use God’s grace to help us overcome our separation from ourselves, from others, and from God.

That could be a wonderful gift of Ash Wednesday.