where do I see honesty?

Homily

Ash Wednesday

17 February 2021

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +JMJ +m

Free dirt.  Free insults.

It's the best marketing strategy the Catholic Church has ever come up with.  Give free dirt, and free insults, and watch people line up.  Nothing else works quite like it.

We've tried other strategies.  Free food, and even free beer, attract a few of you.  Yet you seem to still prefer Mass St for these things instead of coming to Mass.  We're good at selling guilt.  Yet you don't need a Church for that.  Most of us are quite capable of feeling badly about ourselves on our own.

So what gives?  Why does free dirt and free insults work better than anything else?  I can't answer for you, only for me.  It's on this day, Ash Wednesday, that I see what I most want to see from my church.  On this day I see honesty, and the more brutal it is the better.

The brutal truth is that I pretend to be better than I am.  You do too.  It's something we all have in common, and something Jesus calls out especially today.  I want to live my life from the deepest questions.  Why do I exist?  Does my life matter?  Does my story have a happy ending?  Yet I always end up finding a way to avoid these questions.

But not today.  Today I let a stranger throw dirt on me and tell me I'm gonna die.  It's a huge does of reality.  It's brutal honesty.  It's what I most need.

Jesus invites his disciples to live only one kind of life.  It's a life of honesty, simplicity, vulnerability and humility.  He says this is the only way, and the easiest way.  When I look at His cross, I wonder what He is smoking.  Yet in the cross is truth.  The truth stings, but it is easier than keeping up the sham of pretending to be better than I am.

364 days a year I'm afraid to live as He asks.  But not today.  Today I let a stranger throw dirt on me and call me a fake.  I do this so I can embrace both the gift and the responsibility of my life.  Today I say publicly, in front of all of you, that I know I get one shot to write a great story with my life.  I say that my time is now, and that I'm still in the game.

I'm glad you're here.  I want to build a Church that is tired of pretending, one that is done with the labels, price tags and timers we stick on each other.  The Church I want to belong to isn't afraid to get honest, and to have conversations that bring real and lasting change.

Help me make St. Lawrence this kind of Church, unafraid to live the way Jesus invites us to.

This day is different.  Our time is now.  Let's begin again to make all things new.