Shout Out

Ash Wednesday: Isaiah 58:1-12; 103:8-14

2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

March 5, 2025

A few weeks ago I logged onto a Zoom meeting for a committee on which I serve in a wider church setting. It had been a rough morning. Because of something I needed to write, I had finally read the specific language of some of the executive orders that had been issued since January 20th regarding trans people. I had known these orders were demeaning and dehumanizing before then – various trustworthy news sources had summarized them. But actually reading this deliberately malicious, antagonistic language had taken my breath away. In an instant I was filled with anger. Anger that was a cover for other emotions, as anger can so often be – sadness, betrayal, vulnerability. I finished what I needed to do and then jumped onto the meeting, my mind still reeling. The meeting started with a check-in. Particularly since this meeting was with people who I knew shared my outlook on these orders, I was honest about how I was feeling in that moment. There was (what felt like) a significant pause before anyone else spoke. Immediately, I thought, Cameron, you shouldn’t have been so honest. After all, I thought, this person on this call, and their congregation, just lived through the L.A. fires. And that person on the call was dealing with tremendous uncertainty in their job. Other difficult contexts abounded around the Zoom room. What right did I have to be so upset?

Somewhere along the line I realized I had internalized something Nadia Bolz-Weber described catching in herself recently: a posture of “presuming to know the exact right amount of attention to pay, the exact right amount of fear to feel and outrage to express.” This “magical exact right amount” can then enable one to “stand in judgment of those who are freaking out MORE than me (just get off the internet and stop reading the hot-takes!), AND those who are freaking out less (why don’t you CARE about []?! filling the blank).” I had violated that supposed all-knowing posture in my honest sharing of how I felt in that moment. Imagine. It sounds ridiculous, I realize. Because frankly it is. There clearly is no “magical right amount.” As Bolz-Webber continued, “you get to feel what you are feeling right now. It's going to be more than some people and less than others. (Also it is OK to find joy in the world right now).”[1] Indeed! This “magical right amount” strikes me as a form of “practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). It is a form of expected emotional “piety,” if you will.

This Ash Wednesday is meeting us in the midst of an emotional conundrum, friends. We are not all impacted by what that is happening in our country in the same ways – some of us have more vulnerabilities and some less. Some of us are carrying more anxiety and fear, some less. Whatever our emotional combination may be, it is likely to fluctuate day by day, depending on external and internal factors. We may be impacted by the news, but we may also be impacted by how much sleep we are getting, what we are eating, by our physical and emotional health, by how isolated we may be or how connected in community. Whatever our particular emotional mix may be, as Nadia wrote, we get to feel what we are feeling right now. We also get to lift it up to God.

The prophet Isaiah in fact invites us to do just that this evening. Isaiah has no qualms about expressing the strong emotions of the God who called him into speech: “Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet!” (Isaiah 58:1a) And not just as a general principle of internal temperature, either. Isaiah expresses trenchant critique of God’s people: “Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins” (58:1b). Do not presume to fast and pray with solemn faces when at the same moment “you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist” (58:4). The fast that God proclaims in and through Isaiah’s voice is “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke…” (58:6). The practices of fasting are meant to remove the barriers that we humans place between one another, barriers that oppress those on the margins and keep those who have historically had the most power safely ensconced in the centers of our world. God demands an end to the “pointing of the finger and the speaking of evil” (58:9)  – exactly what the executive orders I read that morning do. Isaiah is very clear. God does not abide such action. Nor does God does want us to keep quiet about it when and as we see injustices unfold in our world. Speech requires recognition. Spoken or written recognition is part of a larger project: the work of repairing our world, of participating in God’s own liberation of it. If we remove the yoke of oppression, Isaiah says, if we feed those who are hungry, clothe those without warm covering, “satisfy the needs of the afflicted” (58:10), then we begin to collaborate with God, creating space for something new to break through.

“Behold, I am doing a new thing,” God speaks in Isaiah’s voice elsewhere in the prophetic text. “Now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19). This turn of phrase unexpectedly popped up in our vestry retreat several weeks ago. Susan Spencer had drawn from it in a Morning Prayer service she put together. Then I had happened to choose it for a prayer service later that day. We marveled at the coincidence – it was not coordinated.  In my case the phrase choice was inspired by the theologian and champion of lay leadership, Verna Dozier. Dozier, whose book The Dream of God: a Call to Return I draw from all the time, wrote about the call of institutions of all sorts – including the church – to change over time to enact God’s dream for this world, a world of justice and peace, of community and nourishment, of newness of life emerging on the other side of death. In a passage I shared with the vestry, Dozier wrote, “One hears people wailing because society’s institutions are breaking down. They find that fact very threatening. They have never heard, ‘behold, I am doing a new thing.’ Christianity should be troubling: it should threaten every institution.”[2] God is the Holy One who created all things and makes all things new. God in Jesus Christ came among us to call us to embody a new way, a way of liberation and healing, of compassion and transformation. That way was deeply threatening to the institutions of this world. But even when that world – in the form of the Roman Empire – arrested and stigmatized Jesus, tortured and executed him, and terrorized his followers, even then, death did not have the last word. Resurrection life emerged. Resurrection makes a way out of no way. As Isaiah’s text continues, “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (49:19).

This is the way we are re-entering this evening, friends. The way of the wilderness, of the desert. The way that does not avoid trouble but looks it in the eye. The way that acknowledges pain and suffering as realities of mortal life in which God in Jesus Christ accompanies us. As Paul wrote in our passage from Second Corinthians, we must remember: we may well be treated as imposters in the wilderness of this world, but we are true. We may well seem unknown, but we are in fact well known to God. We may sorrow, we may be impoverished, we may be punished, we may suffer, we may be subject to death (2 Cor. 8-10). For we are ultimately of dust, and to dust we shall indeed return, as we will soon hear and receive in the form of ashes. Yet Christ walked this dusty path with us, showing us that nothing can finally separate us from God’s love and from God’s resurrection life. We shall – and somehow with God’s help and our participation, this dusty world shall, as Isaiah proclaims – "become a watered garden; like a spring whose waters never fail" (Isaiah 58:11).

As we step through this threshold and enter the season of Lent, may we know that this path is hallowed ground. May we feel the solidarity of divine accompaniment. May we discern how we are called to share in that accompaniment – with each other, with communities intersecting with and beyond who we happen to be in this moment. May our hearts be opened to feel how we feel and know that God shares and encourages our emotion. May we know that joy can and will also be a companion on this way, and that hope abides. For truly, though we know not how, as Isaiah proclaims, “ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in” (58:12). May we trust in God’s dream as we walk this Lenten path.

[1] Nadia Bolz-Weber, “How Dare You?” March 1, 2025: https://thecorners.substack.com/p/how-dare-you

[2] Verna Dozier, Confronted By God: The Essential Verna Dozier, eds. Cynthia Shattuck and Fredrica Harris Thompsett (New York: Church Publishing, 2006), 53-54.