2005
You are
invited. You are invited by the holy of
holies to take yourself. Your very
unique and only you self. You are
invited to bring that self before God as sacred offering.
Ash Wednesday is a time
when we mark the entrance into the season of Lent.
It is a time when
we allow ourselves to remember that we are finite creatures full of bumblings
and hopes who know in moments of honesty that we are missing the point of our
lives.
The point of our
lives, as Paul reminds his church is to remember that our lives – the walking
around lives and the sitting lives and the praying lives and the angry lives
and the confused and sometimes so frightened lives that we each live. Our lives are to be lived as offering to
God.
Do you believe you
have something to give? Do you live as
though you believe you have something to give?
I want to share
with you some stories about one of my heroes.
A man who knew that he had something to give. A man who took his every day walking around life – although he
worked largely in stocking feet – and offered it to God as gift.
The man is Fred
Rogers. Tom Junod has written about him
and shares stories I want to share with you on this night when we know
ourselves to be people of such promise who are on this earth for a limited run.
Junod writes: “The first time I met Mister Rogers, he told
me a story of how deeply his simple gestures had been felt, and received. He had just come back from visiting Koko,
the gorilla who has learned American Sign Language. Koko watches television.
Koko watches Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and when Mister Rogers, in his
sweater and sneakers, entered the place where she lives, Koko immediately
folded him in her long, black arms, as though he were a child, and then … ‘She
took my shoes off, Tom,’ Mister Rogers said.”
Once upon a time,
(Junod continues in his story weaving) there was a boy who didn’t like himself
very much. He was born with cerebral
palsy. And while he was yet a little
boy those who were entrusted to care for him hurt him and did things that made
him thnk that he was a very bad little boy, because only a bad little boy would
have such things happen.
And he loved Mister
Rogers. He watched him all the time and
longed to meet him. Through a special
foundation the meeting was set up. On
the day Mr. Rogers was to come, the boy became so overcome he could not contain
himself. He got mad at himself and
began hitting himself. His mother had
to take him to another room. But Mister
Rogers didn’t leave. He waited for the
boy to come back, and when he did, Mister Rogers had a request for him.
He said, “I would
like you to do something for me. Would
you?”
The boy answered
yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers
said, “I would like you to pray for me.
Will you pray for me?” And now
the boy didn’t know how to respond. He
was thunderstruck.
The boy was
thunderstruck because nobody had ever asked him for something like that,
ever. The boy had always been prayed
for. The boy had always been the object
of prayer, and now he was being asked to pray for Mister Rogers, and although
at first he didn’t know if he could do it, he said he would, he said he would
try, and ever since then he keeps Mister Rogers in his prayers and doesn’t talk
about wanting to die anymore, because he figures Mister Rogers is close to God,
and if Mister Rogers likes him, that must mean God likes him too.
One last story.
Once upon a time, Mister
Rogers went to New York City and got caught in the rain. He ducked into a subway and got on one of
the trains. It was late in the day, and
the train was filled with school children going home from school. Though all races, the children were mostly
black and Latino, and they didn’t even approach Mister Rogers and ask him for
his autograph.
They just
sang. They sang, all at once, all
together, the song Mister Rogers sings at the start of his program.
It’s a beautiful
day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighbor could you be mine,
would you be mine… would you be mine,
could you be mine, won’t you be my neighbor?
Won’t you be, won’t you be, please won’t you be my neighbor?
And turned the
clattering train into a single soft, runaway choir.” (The Best Spiritual
Writing, 1999)
Now, Mister Rogers
had a different every day walking around life than you or I have. We have no television show, we have no
national audience.
But we have the
soft and fierce sweetness of our own hearts and hopes.
We have the vision
of our faith to guide us, as it did Fred Rogers. A faith that teaches us that everyone’s special, that we need our
neighbors and we need to tend to the health of our neighborhood.
During this season
of Lent, I invite you to see the power of the choices you make.
Notice and embrace
what God does for you in your everyday walking around life. Be present to the gifts you receive and
share.
Embrace a practice
that will help you to remember that embracing what God does for you is the best
thing you can do for God.
Reading poetry is
one such practice for me, so I end on this night of Ashes with this call to
living intentionally our lives as offering:
(When Death
Comes, Mary Oliver - removed due to copyright restrictions)