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March 1, 2006 - Ash Wednesday
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture:
2 Corinthians 5:20b—6:10, Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”
Ash Wednesday: “O’erlooking the
Wall, O’ertaking the Way”
Welcome to Lent! The most subtle and subterranean growing of spring in the
very harshness and cold of winter! In fact, Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”
is called the playing-off of two basically human attitudes – “one wintry, one spring-like.”
On the one hand, the warm “spring-like” part of us wants all walls down so we might
return to some “original one-ness.” On the other hand (or side of the wall!),
the more “wintry” cautious and standoffish part guards our privacy and our separateness
as the more grownup if harder and colder reality of our being. In other words,
Frost is playing one side of the wall off against the other. We are revealed
as being not only on both sides of the wall, but of being, in fact, both sides of
the wall ourselves! Of being made up of two, at least, if not many more, contrasting,
conflicting, and contradicting sides and parts – inside and out!
Temptation always besets us, and seems especially rampant in our world today – and
sometimes may be fueled by how much our culture is dominated by images of winning
and losing -- games or fights, civilizations or wars – We are tempted to choose
just one side or the other. The Lenten challenge for us this year is to live
on both sides of the wall! To o’erlook the walls as a barriers of separation
– much as we may need boundaries of demarcation – and to o’ertake the way of Jesus
as the Christ – in whom our faith confesses God is seeking to transcend and overcome
walls that divide and conquer, separate and condemn us.
As we look through the biblical NOTINGS of walls on the inside of our yellow Lenten
folders, the last one comes from Ephesians 2 – “You who once were far off have been
brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he
has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the
hostility between us.” As Paul implores all sides in our text for this evening,
“Be reconciled to God!” During Lent our theme is “The Walls in Our Way” –
what comes between us, what blocks us in, what keeps us from seeing each other and
knowing what life is like on “the other side” of whatever has come between us.
Walls in our way may very well be walls within us -- within our most intimate of
relations. Walls may be of our own or the making of others. Some walls
may need to be completely torn down – the faster the better. Others may need
to be slowly and carefully dismantled – less someone get hurt in the fall of the
wall. Others may need to stay as they are – at least for the time being –
until we are fully ready and able to respect and to trust what will happen to us
if we are not at least a little hidden and kept by our walls.
Let me lead us briefly through some other biblical words about walls. God
creates a water-wall to protect the Israelites on their way out of bondage in Egypt.
After years without walls in the wilderness, they approach the walls of Jericho.
Mardi Gras-style, New Orleans-style, the people boogie around the walls for a week
of blowing trumpets! “Then the lamb ram sheep horns began to blow, “the children
began to shout, “And the walls come tumbling down!” Life in the Promised Land,
like life in Lent, turns out to be one long rebuilding of walls that keep getting
dashed and destroyed. Unlike those who remain at home in Jerusalem, those
who come back from exile are determined to repair the ruins. They are seen as dangerous
because in so doing they will restore their sense of belonging to God and no longer
accept the status of slaves.
For them God is seen to be in the walls, and on the walls, God’s self! Verses
of Isaiah include, “See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hand; your walls
are continually before me. . . . Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation
or destruction within your borders; you shall call your walls Salvation, and your
gates Praise. . . . Upon your walls, O Jerusalem, I have posted sentinels; all day
and all night they shall never be silent. . . . Ezekiel says false prophets
try to “whitewash” the wall of the people – claiming. “Peace,’” when there is no
peace – so God destroys both the walls and the whitewashers! I am reminded
of how one observer bemoans that those who designed the interfaith chapel at the
United Nations. They were so afraid to offend anyone that the walls of the
chapel were whitewashed and left that way! Walls are meant to speak for the
people – as in public mural projects and some graffiti walls.
God even writes on the wall in Balthazar’s palace for Daniel to interpret – and
Amos sees God take the plumb line for testing trueness in walls and set it among
the people instead! Thus the bulletin cover tonight invites us to see our
Lenten selves as proverbial “tabulas rasa,” clean slates, empty walls – to be filled
with our very own mural of images and ideas as we go! With the coming of Lent,
the coming of spring, we are invited to make, and make up, ourselves over again.
At the heart of our story this season lies not the immortality of all that is but
the death of that which must be crucified before resurrection takes place.
Limits must be tested and tried and transcended before liberation takes place.
And if we see this bulletin cover as being a mirror as well, so much the better!
Such a powerful wall of our times as the Vietnam Memorial allows us to find ourselves
in the names of those who are lost to war. It is our Wailing Wall.
As we enter the Fellowship Hall this season, a wall of manzanita branches invites
us to name our own walls, our own separations and barriers, and to hang them up
on the branches. Each time we worship this season, beginning and ending with
words from “Mending Wall,” we are asked to imagine a growing wall between the communion
table and us – to ask ourselves where such walls come from and how they grow – so
thick, so high, to hard, so impenetrable or impermeable? How it is that we
“wall off” God, the Bible, Christ, the church, our faith from our day-to-day lives?
And what might it take for us to start taking walls down – even if not all the way,
even if we continue to need some semblance of the safety and the security walls
may provide. Might we at least take them down to the point where we and they,
whoever “they” are in any particular walled-situation – Israelis and Palestinians,
Mexicans and North Americans – the walls of all ghettos, all camps – where we and
they are not completely obscure to and ignorant of one another?
We have so far to go today to dismantle some of the walls between and among us as
faiths, as nations, as colors, as classes, as genders, as orientations, as ages,
as languages, and as conditions of life. You name it, we can divide it!
We can divide ourselves, we can divide one another. The error, as I see it,
is to think that the walls somehow how can do the work, the work of reconciliation,
the work of Christ, which can only be done by us, by the peoples who live on both
sides of the walls. It is so important that this poem is called “Mending
Wall” – implying both that the wall itself may contain mending qualities, and
that our work is the mending of walls. The walls themselves are important
to call our attention, our care and compassion, to the work that is to be done there.
The Romans even celebrated a god of boundaries named “Terminus” with a festival
called “Terminalia!” There is something festive about the winter-to-spring
ritual of walking the walls, one of us one either side, to examine the common damage
to them and determine the common solution. It may not even matter that one
of us does so mischievously and imaginatively, looking for ways to release us from
walls – while the other does so more stiffly, more traditionally, even as ordered
to do so by one’s parents, looking only to honor the wall’s necessity. The
point is we are engaged in common action and even in some seasonal conversation.
The point is we are not hiding or fighting. We are not winning or losing.
In other words, there are walls, and there are walls. The problem with walls
lies in choosing sides of them and getting locked into our choices. They say
we cannot be on both sides at once. They say that “fence straddler” is a dirty
name. But what are “they” doing to stop violence and war?
We will come back to “the walls in our way” again and again this season. For
a closing moment, let’s catch a glimpse of the Easter theme – “The Way Past Our
Walls.” Christian Peacemaker Teams – many of Mennonite, Brethren, and Quaker
faith – call it their work to “get in the way” of violence and war – to bring nonviolent
witness to and solidarity with the victims of violence and war. They stand
with and accompany civilians, often children and the elderly. They use conversation,
video, photography, journalism to discourage violent action. They live in
the thick of conflict, willing to stand on both sides, or in the “gap” between sides,
but to die before they will kill. They talk to governments in behalf of individuals
most at risk. They relay stories from wherever they are in the world to their
communities and to officials back home.
Four of them – James, Tom, Harmeet, and Norman – as pictured on the wall mural of
our yellow cover – are “Missing in Iraq.” They have been since November 26.
And yet, so many, so much, is “missing in Iraq” – as it is, as they are in so many
parts of the world. We are all missing a way past the walls of our lives.
It’s hard to imagine the walls behind which these four are held captive. It
is hard to imagine so many walls. But let us try. For the sake of the
One who makes both and all sides one, breaking down every wall, every hostility
between us, and inviting us all to follow – this season and beyond -- in the way,
the truth, and the life for all peoples.
Amen.
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