Ash Wednesday 2016 2 Corinthians 5-6 / Mt 6

What always strikes me most as I confront these familiar readings each year at this season is how radically counter- cultural they are. What we are advised to do, to love God and our neighbor (which is the agenda for every season of the church year) goes about as firmly against what our society advises us to do as can well be imagined. The summary of Jesus’s advice in this chapter of what we call the Sermon on the Mount is at the end: don’t set any stock in the kind of rewards this world can dish out. Make your investments elsewhere – put your trust, your cash, your time, your energy, where it will make a difference to God, and settle your heart to wait for his kind of reward.

Can you just hear what the investment-counselling ‘industry’ (because it is now an industry…) would tell you about that? ‘Well, it’s all very well to make charitable contributions – they're fine (in moderation, of course), and you can write them off on your tax return – but we need to make sure your stocks are up to date, and your IRA is fully funded….’ Jesus’s view is completely opposite: the guy in the 3-piece suit is right that you should put your money where the return is highest – but guess what? That’s where I'm telling you it is, not where he is telling you it is. All the pious acts, all the good deeds you do, are investments, and, in a world of finite resources, making those investments will mean that you don’t have all that time, money, etc. available for other things. But as with all investments, you should be calculating carefully what kind of return they're going to bring you. He doesn’t ask us to do without that return – and here’s where the ‘counter-cultural’ part sort of breaks down. These pieces of advice, at the beginning of a season in which we’re often preoccupied with ‘giving things up’, don’t suggest for a moment that we’re supposed to give up our usual investment expectations.

What he’s suggesting instead is that we take the expectations with great seriousness and place that trust, that cash, that time, that energy where it will bring in the very highest return on our investment. The catch is that that place is not the esteem, the influence, the cash, the power, that this world can dish out. Rather, it’s the Kingdom of God, the real blue-chip, solid gold, guaranteed secure place to put your marbles, because it’s insured not by the FDIC but by God himself. And the returns are terrific – a real bonanza. They may not look like much, as the world counts such things, but they go on and on and they last and last….

The only catch is that God is not in favor of investments that are too diversified. God doesn’t believe that you should spread yourself too thin – trying to invest all over the place. He prefers one-shot allegiances – remember the bit about all your heart and soul and strength (resources) and mind? And he doesn’t approve of doing as our modern fat cats do, trying to claim all the rewards of taking risks while also guaranteeing themselves complete protection from all risk. If you want to invest in the God-economy, you probably aren't going to have a lot left over to put into the world’s, and you can’t expect to draw dividends from both. That’s only fair, after all.

And so Jesus gives us the SEC riules. Notice that he doesn t tell us what to do: he doesn’t have to. He just assumes, as previous ages did assume, that if you’re a good Jew or Chrisian, these are what you were doing anyway: give away your money, pray, fast – just the normal routines. (Imagine if we took those things as ‘normal’ – the obesity epidemic, for one thing, would disappear, at least!) He says ‘When you do the things you're supposed to do to love God and your neighbor, here’s how you do them’ – and that’s where the rules come in, all focused on the idea that you can choose how to take your dividends. Take me for an example (I’m the one in the outfit, after all): if I get up and pray very piously before you all, and if you all say, ‘Oh, she must be such a pious person!’ and give me a lot of that kind of approval, I've been rewarded for what I did – God doesn’t owe me a thing. I made my investment in the approval of all of you, and you gave me my ‘reward’, and the transaction is over. Whereas if I were invested instead in God’s Kingdom, and I came and preached a sermon that was supposed to convert all of you, and you didn’t like it one bit and gave me all kinds of grief for it – well, that leaves my reward for it to God, since I didn’t get it from you; and when God owes you one, you can be sure the debt will be paid, with interest!

So the trick is to make your investments secretly, so you don’t put yourself at risk of getting paid off for them too soon. At risk! – as if getting paid were something to be avoided! Well, you know, sometimes it is. There’s always a risk of ‘cashing out’ before your investments have had time to mature; and that’s what he's telling us to avoid. His advice could be paraphrased as: Go for broke; play for the high stakes; don’t settle for these piddling little returns when there's real gold to be mined – treasure, he calls it, the bonanza that God has in store for those who set their hearts on the values and the rewards of his Kingdom. You just have to be sure that you’re looking for it in the right place, and you can keep the account going for long enough to reap the bonanza.

And so Jesus gives us startling advice: if you want to be sure not to cash out too soon, for inferior rewards, you have to be cagey about it – you can’t go blabbing your investment strategy all over the place, and you can’t let your own natural impatience cause you to do dumb things (any investment counselor will tell you that). Keep what you're doing quiet, for heaven’s sake (it really is for heaven’s sake, after all!) – and that means be insincere if necessary. What? Insincere? Christians? A lot is made these days of sincerity. Sometimes it seems as if it’s the only criterion for evaluating people’s beliefs – as in, ‘well, it’s strange, but he’s very sincere in his belief….’ It also seems to excuse the most appalling kinds of interpersonal behavior – as in, ‘well, I’m the kind of person who just calls it like I see it…’ while they're saying things that tear people down and wreck them.

And when it comes to the behavior of nations, or organisations – well, that’s terrifying: lots of Nazis were very sincere; most of the religious wars (including the ones this nation is fighting as we speak) have been started and upheld by people who were sincere; the so-called ‘religious right’ active in our age, although its leadership is as cynical and deceitful as despotic forces always are, is supported by millions of sincere people. Using ‘sincerity’ as the criterion for approval means simply giving up trying to find truth or justice or even common sense in what someone believes, and avoiding criticism of even the most destructive actions – it’s not a good standard to apply to the quality of either beliefs or actions. God’s word tells us every Ash Wednesday that we are to practice the very opposite of sincerity – to be, in fact, positively deceitful toward the world in order to do what the Kingdom of God requires.

Jesus recognises, as Paul does, and we do, that we can’t expect the world to judge us correctly – that’s where the deceit comes in. The nub of his advice is, simply: do these good things, these essential things, as if you weren't doing them. Do them, in St. Paul’s phrase, ‘as if not’. All of our Christian life, Paul would say, has that character about it. Here we are, getting beaten on and beaten up, put in jail, getting killed, even, but it makes no difference to us. We live in victory, in happiness, in perfect security, despite all the bad things that happen to us, because we walk in the footsteps of God’s Messiah, to whom all those things happened too. The sinless one was made to be sin, in God’s economy, so that we– sinners to the max– could be made into God’s righteousness. If you can imagine anything that unlikely, you won't have too much trouble with the other end. You just have to be prepared for things to be a little crazy, a little surprising, in this new world. They think we’re phonies, but we’re true; they think we’re dying, punished, sad, poor, even destitute – but we’re really living and thriving and able to make people rich because we are so rich ourselves. We’ve got the treasure, you see, of God’s presence and purpose in our lives right now, and the promise of life in that presence forever. We take this season of the year to meditate on all that because it is a little counter-intuitive – we are creatures of this world, after all, and take a little convincing that things are not always what they seem.

So you’ve got to laugh in this season of Lent; you’ve got to have a sense of humor about us and our predicament – especially as we sit here being told not to let anybody know how pious we are, with these smudges on our forehead that are bound to – let everybody know how pious we are! We can’t really do anything right – we have to start with that. But somehow, God in his mercy knows it all and sees our predicament – sees it, in Jesus, from the inside, and loves us anyway. This day is for us to hear, again, his counsel: get busy, do the best you can to do the best you know, place your heart where the real riches are to be found, and trust me for the outcome. You’re supposed to pray – well, let’s learn in this season to pray that secret prayer of the heart in silence (every Monday evening…). You’re supposed to give alms – well, let’s give as much as we can, and maybe learn in this season to dare to give more than we can, turning our abundance to the needs of others. You’re supposed to fast – well, let’s learn in this season how to give some things up so that we leave space for God in the midst of that abundance, and do with less so that we can be enriched with more. The economy of the Kingdom is all on our side, and God is just waiting to hand out his rewards – that’s the paradox of Lent. To live as if the Kingdom were right here, right now, that’s the lesson we hope to learn as we enter on this new season, this new phase of our life together.