A Season of Giving and Prayer

Meditation on Matthew 6:1–6, 16–21

First Presbyterian Church of Smithtown, NY

Pastor Karen Crawford

Ash Wednesday

Feb. 14, 2024

A few nights ago, I received the shocking news of an unexpected death of a friend.

She had served as a Sunday School teacher for the youngest class at my congregation in Coshocton, Ohio, since her son, Lukas, now a young adult, was small.  Janice started work at the town’s public library in 2013 as a page shelving books and transporting materials between the main and branch libraries. The library’s Facebook page says, “Janice’s work ethic, customer service skills, and ambition led her to work her way to becoming Page Supervisor and Youth Services Coordinator.” One of the things she did was teach early literacy Lapsit classes for parents to bring their infants. “She was the face behind the children’s desk, and the staff member of many other programs. Her decorations in the children’s room often drew compliments from those visiting the space. She prepared StoryWalk books and visited preschools, daycares, and other schools throughout the county each month.” [1]  

The Coshocton County Library system was closed on Monday for the staff to process their grief and attend the funeral.

Janice and her husband, Jeff, served as videographers for our worship. She was ordained and installed as a brand new elder on the Session during my pastorate there. I remember a lunch we shared at Bob Evans and how we talked about our vision for ministry. She was all about children and youth. She served as the elder for Faith Formation, formerly Christian Education.

In her work for the church and her Lord, she led an awesome evening Summer Vacation Bible School during the pandemic. She empowered volunteers to use their gifts and talents and created an evening program on a water/beach theme. Every child brought their favorite beach towel. They ate snacks and listened to Bible stories sitting on their towels under a shade tree in the front yard of our downtown church. I read to the children, at her invitation, a picture book of Moses leading God’s people across the parted sea on dry land, with the Egyptian armies behind them, their chariot wheels getting stuck in the mud. We made crafts on tables on the church lawn and played games with balls across the street on the Courthouse lawn. A volunteer, a retired teacher who sang in the choir, taught them songs.

At the end of VBS, Janice wrote thank you notes to every volunteer and gave gift cards to a local ice cream shop. She used her own money. She made other people feel appreciated.

Yesterday, I found a video that Janice made with her husband, Jeff, and son, Lukas. It was one of the first in a series of family features that we did during the pandemic. We were trying everything to bring one another joy and the feeling of closeness and intimacy when the church was fragmented. People felt lonely, isolated, and depressed. We showed the video clips in the worship space and at my blog for others to watch at home. Here is a link to that 2020 video. (Click on Meet Our Church Family: The Sycks)

Meet Our Church Family: The Sycks

Other things that I appreciated about Janice were her intelligence and her prophetic gift. She always spoke the truth, no matter how hard it was for others to hear. She was bold. She stood up for what she believed was right, even if it meant that other people might not agree with her or be happy with her opinion. At the same time, kindness ruled with Janice. She taught her son to be kind and loving, as she herself was kind and accepting to all people. I believe that her faith shaped her into the person that she became. She was always loyal to the ones she loved, including her family, her community, her Lord, and Christ’s church.

On this day, when we read, once again, about Jesus holding up an example of bad behaviors by certain people–telling a crowd of would-be disciples how NOT to be, I am offering to you, my brothers and sisters in the Lord, a contemporary model of faithfulness. Janice would be embarrassed if she heard me hold her up as a model! She was one of the most unassuming but, at the same time, expressive and sensitive people I have ever met. She was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get person—no pretenses. She had no need to be the center of attention. She was down to earth, pretty, vivacious, creative, and feminine. She was human in every way. She had a quirky sense of humor. I suspect that that her sense of humor and the love of family and friends gave her strength to persevere through the hard times that she experienced.

Janice wasn’t at all like the Pharisees, who seemed to have impure motives for their religiosity and did many attention-seeking things to impress people of their holiness and perhaps superiority.

The one thing that has always troubled me about this passage in Matthew is how we interpret it to be angry at or mock a group of people whom Jesus asks us NOT to be like. We put our focus in the wrong place—on this group rather than on ourselves and doing the good things that Jesus urges us to do. Jesus never tells his disciples to dislike the Pharisees or to be unkind. He crossed many societal boundaries to reach out to people, often those who were marginalized and despised. He sought to heal and encourage them in their faith. The motive of our Savior, for all his teachings, all his acts of sacrifice and self-giving, was always to convey God’s love for the whole world. Jesus says in Matthew 5:43-48, in the passage immediately preceding today’s reading,

 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

One word in this passage that has caused confusion is the word we translate “hypocrites.” It doesn’t mean in English exactly what the more ambiguous Greek word, hypokrites meant. In English, it “generally refers to people who say one thing but do another, whether the inconsistency is conscious or unconscious.” [2]   “In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, it means a godless or wicked person,” says Lawrence Wills, a professor of biblical studies at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA. “But in the larger Greek world it meant the actor in a play, and therefore the sense of pretense or acting and the two-part personality of an actor who plays a part come to the fore.” [3] Therefore, Matthew could have meant, with his use of this word, “one who is godless and wicked,” one who “pretends to be one thing but consciously acts contrary to that,” or one “who pretends to be one thing but unconsciously acts contrary to that.” [4] Wills challenges us to look inside ourselves with his question, “Does the sin of hypocrisy in Matthew consist in consciously deceiving others or in being in denial about one’s own sin?”

The news of Janice’s death came late at night, from a friend traveling in Thailand. After hearing the news, I was up for hours with my memories and my grief. I can still hear her voice and her sweet laugh! What makes me so sad now is imagining the grief of her family—her husband, Jeff, and son, Lukas—and all her good friends in Coshocton, including her church family. One of her closest friends, Judy Addy, had been planning to take Janice out and celebrate her birthday with her on the very night that Janice suddenly went home to be with her Lord. She was just 42.

My grief for losing a friend and sister in the Lord and knowing the grief of her family, church family, and friends, leads me to be bold, like Janice, and encourage us to see the Ash Wednesday message in a positive light. Don’t waste a single day in regret. God loves you with an unconditional love! Today! You are FORGIVEN, in Jesus Christ.

So what will you do now, in this Holy Season of Lent, to live into your forgiven self? I pray that you will be generous in this season of prayer, giving, and forgiving! This is a time to be reconciled with your neighbor and to seek to heal brokenness in your relationships. Where will you get your strength and wisdom? Go into that inner room—all by yourself—and don’t be afraid to be completely yourself and let the Spirit do its work.

We may have started out as dust but look what God can do with dust! Look what God can do with human beings who humbly turn away from their fallings and failings and see only the perfect, sinless life of God’s Son, Jesus Christ! He is our highest model! Look at what God’s unconditional love and forgiveness has done for all of us! I close my message for Ash Wednesday with the words of Jan Richardson in her poem, “Blessing the Dust”: [5]

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff

of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

Amen!

---

     [1] Coshocton County Library Facebook site. Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024 at https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fphoto.php%3Ffbid%3D799178308906410%26set%3Da.455660839924827%26type%3D3&show_text=true&width=500

     [2]Lawrence M. Wills, “Scribes and Pharisees, Hypocrites! In the Gospel of Matthew” in Not God’s People: Insiders and Outsiders in the Biblical World (NY: Roman and Littlefield, 2008) 115.

    [3] Lawrence Wills, 115

    [4] Lawrence Wills, 115.

     [5] Jan Richardson, “Blessing the Dust, for Ash Wednesday” in Circle of Grace (Orlando, FL: Wanton Gospeller Press, 2015) 89.