You Will Die, Beloved—A Sermon on Ash Wednesday

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Here we are again, Ash Wednesday. For several hundred years now, Christians have been marking this season with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes, practices our Jewish siblings undertook for thousands of years before. This first of 40 holy days, leading to Easter, is a time for reflection, renewal, and repentance. You’re invited, as you feel moved, to mark this season on a daily basis or a weekly basis with something old or new. With prayer, learning, and listening. But first, we’re going to talk about death.

As you’ve noticed already from the words we’ve said together, and as you’ll notice as we continue, Ash Wednesday is a day of remembering our mortality. We live in a death-denying world full of death. If you access news on any given day, you will hear about death somewhere in the world, or impending doom somewhere in the world. It’s a big world. Ash Wednesday does not exist to rain down more horror on your already harried soul. It’s an attempt to reframe our relationship to our own guaranteed deaths.

If you’ve participated in Ash Wednesday before, you know that you will soon have the opportunity to receive ashes mixed with oil in the shape of a cross on your forehead.

As each person receives these ashes, I will say “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Your baptism, perhaps many years ago now, also included a cross on your forehead, made with oil, without ashes. A pastor or priest probably said that you were “sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” In your baptism, you were ceremonially introduced to the Christian life, welcomed into the family of God. Today, we bring your life’s beginning and your life’s eventual ending full circle into one sacred moment.

You were born beloved, you will die beloved.

You may not hear that as good news, because you may be young and you may be healthy, but it is one of best things I know to be true. God loves you. God created you just as you are, perfect and holy and full of life. And God created you mortal; you will, like all of God’s beloved creatures, die.

On this holy day, we are simply going to notice that. We are not going to lament our eventual deaths, we are not going to prevent our eventual deaths, and we are not going to lie about our eventual deaths. We are simply going to sit.

This, dear ones, is a radical act. Our world is full of more people now than have ever lived and died—can you even conceive of such a number?—and we are caught up, constantly, in trying to evade death. We have anti-aging face creams, and we have cosmetic surgery, and we have vitamins and supplements and crash diets and all manner of strategies for lying to ourselves.

But not tonight. Tonight, we have ashes and oil, and we have bread and wine. Tonight, we will remember that we are dust, and remember that Jesus lived and died.

Tomorrow, we will begin our season of presence and practice. Throughout the season of Lent, we have the opportunity to notice the presence of God in our lives more acutely—not because God is more present but because we are more present.

Starting next Tuesday, you can try a new thing for this season by saying Morning Prayer with Emily at 8:30am. It’s not a thing you usually do, I know, and that’s part of why you’re invited to do it. How might your day be shaped if you started it with 20 minutes of praying, reading, and listening? If you have class or work at that time, or really just cannot bear to be here that early in the morning—which I do not hold against you for even one minute—what other way might you mark these six weeks? If you joined us for rosary-making on Monday, you can practice using that. If you didn’t, we have extras and you can borrow one any time; we can teach you how it works.

Maybe, for the next 40 days, you’ll start your day with reading or journaling or music, instead of scrolling on Instagram before dragging yourself out of bed. Maybe you’ll end your day with reading or journaling or music instead of scrolling on Instagram until you fall asleep.

Maybe you’ll go for some walks in the arboretum, if it’s not raining. Maybe you’ll learn to cook some new recipes at home. Maybe you’ll notice the time you spend each day doing things you don’t want to be doing—whatever those are—and you’ll try replacing those things with things that make you feel whole, and peaceful, and good.

You may have grown up in a church community that focused heavily on Lenten fasting, or perhaps not. If you did, and if this season calls to mind shame and scarcity, I hope you will enter this season this year with a clean slate. The practice of sacrifice, of “giving up” something for this season, has perhaps done more harm than good to us, in our modern American culture, in particular.

These 40 days are not an exercise in perfectionism. These 40 days are not a do-over on a new year’s resolution diet. These 40 days can be an exercise in shedding that which causes us pain and harm, and putting on that which brings us hope and peace and freedom. Because the God who loves you, dear ones, desires your devotion, not your depletion.

Whatever practices you might add, whatever activities you might drop, the goal is closeness to God. The goal is to get rid of all the stuff that gets in the way. It is important, as we routinely confess, to “repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.”

Lent is a time for recognizing where we have sinned, and committing ourselves to knowing better and doing better. The goal is a change of heart, perhaps visible only to you. Our scripture tonight is somewhat ironic, as it chides us, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them,” on the day where we are literally wearing our piety on our faces.

Please do not worry about creating Lenten content for your Facebook friends to consume; “But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your [God] who is in secret; and your [God] who sees in secret will reward you.” These 40 days are yours, dear ones. Repent when you have caused harm to others, and turn and face your God, who loves you.

You were born beloved, you will die beloved. Thanks be to God.

Get Good and Dusty—A Sermon on Ash Wednesday

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

When Rob Lee was here two weeks ago for the St. Augustine lecture, we had dinner with some of our board members and local faith leaders. It’s important to know that Rob is severely allergic to peanuts and to shellfish. As we were about to order dinner, I double-checked with him about how other folks’ orders could affect him, and he said shellfish was just his problem, but he needed us to all abstain from peanuts. Our server stepped in and said that the restaurant was actually a peanut-free establishment. We were delighted! She then said, matter-of-factly, “you will live one more day.” We all laughed at her frankness, and Rob thanked her for the reminder.

We have a cultural saying, don’t we, about taking things “one day at a time”? It’s sort of questionable advice, right, because there are things we need to plan ahead for. If you never looked at a calendar, you would be unprepared all the time, and never accomplish anything that took more than one day’s advance planning. Usually, though, we err too far from this “one day at a time” plan. We are always counting the weeks of the quarter, or checking the calendar for when our friends are coming to town, or perhaps looking ahead to our next birthday, or even the impending anniversary of a personal tragedy. We are so occupied by what’s next, what’s next, what’s next that we rarely live in this moment, here, and now. We are so busy living that we rarely stop to consider if we like the lives we’re leading.

Frankly, we are so busy living that we rarely even notice that we are all dying. We know, intellectually, that we are on this earth for a limited time, and that our death is eventual. Most of us are healthy enough to be fairly confident that our own deaths are in the distant future. And most of us are fairly uncomfortable with that fact, anyway. We just go on living like it will always be this way. Even though we know that can’t be true!

Our friend Martin Luther, instigator of the Protestant Reformation, had a habit of theological paradox. (We reflected on this in LEVN this week, doing some reading about feminist and womanist theologies.) For Luther, it is perfectly sound to say that we are all simultaneous saints and sinners. You’ve heard that one before? What about that we’re simultaneously empowered and humbled? What about that we’re simultaneously bound and free? What about that we’re simultaneously living and dying? We’ll skip that last one, thankyouverymuch. Death-denying is one of our favorite activities.

Except tonight. Tonight, in observance of Ash Wednesday, we’re intentionally reflecting on the inescapable truth that we all will die.

As surely as you live and breathe, you will surely die. It’s okay! It doesn’t always feel okay. The death of a loved one earlier than expected is one of the worst human experiences. The tradition of Ash Wednesday is not to trivialize the pain of death. It serves as an annual reminder, an occasional familiarization, a slow softening.

In our world of 24-hour news, we are no stranger to violence and death. We see images and read headlines of natural disaster, gun violence, police violence, domestic violence, car accidents, mass shootings, war, terrorism...we are nearly desensitized to mass deaths of innocent people. It’s unjust. We cry out to God, wondering why any of this is happening. We cry out to God, wondering if God has noticed that God’s people are dying. God has noticed. The deaths of thousands of people every day to hunger, disease, war, famine—God sees those lives and those deaths. The long, quiet goodbye of an elderly family member—God sees those lives and those deaths. The devastation of overdose and suicide—God sees those lives and those deaths. Each life and each death is precious to the God who created each and every person, each and every creature.

If pressed, we would say “of course, we know that.” But as it’s happening, we don’t always remember. Tonight, we remember. We remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. We remember that just like every person who has lived and died in the generations before us, we are made of the same substance, the same mud into which God has breathed life. The same bundle of cells that somehow become the miracle of humanness. The paradox here, dear ones, is that you are made of the same stuff that everyone has ever been made of, and you are the only you there has ever been. You were created by a God who loves you, and you live each day in that belovedness.

I know this to be true about me and about each of you, and about every human who has ever lived and died and will ever live and die.

Remember how Martin Luther liked paradoxes? And that one of them is that we are simultaneously bound and free? As created beings, we are bound to our God—we depend on God for our very existence. And, at the same time, because of the grace we have received, we are free. We are free to be fully human. It is not hard to see, as we look around at our fellow full, free humans, that we do not always do what is right with our freedom. We sometimes use our freedom to inhibit the freedom of others, to directly oppress others, to indirectly allow someone else to use their freedom to oppress others. The scripture that we read on this Ash Wednesday reminds us of the connection between our bondage and our freedom.

The prophet Isaiah basically mocks the community, saying that their fasting is empty because they do it only for show. They cover their faces in ash, they wear sackcloth, they writhe about in performative anguish. After everyone has seen them behave in this most holy of ways, they return to their wicked ways: oppressing their workers, quarreling, and fighting. The prophet tells them that he has seen—and God has seen—right through them. Their fast is false until they fast from oppression. Until they fast from injustice. Until they fast from unchecked power. They must change their ways. They must share their food with the hungry, and clothe the naked, and invite the homeless into their families.

Jesus, too, goes down this same path. “Do not be like the hypocrites,” he says. Do not come here to this place of holiness and perform your sacrifices. Do not come here to this refuge and make false promises to your God. Come here and put this ash on your face and feel the scratch of this sackcloth on your skin only if you mean it.

It may seem like a very odd choice for us to hear these words and then proceed to mark ourselves with the sign of the cross, and then walk out the door into the world. It may seem like we are doing exactly what these prophets have told us not to do. When you walk back out into the world with a cross of ashes on your forehead, someone is definitely going to look at you funny. Maybe you’ve gotten used to that over the years. Or maybe this is going to be your first time receiving ashes, and you’re sort of worried about it. Wherever you are, God is there.

When you receive these ashes tonight, listen to the blessing that accompanies them. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Remember your fellow creatures, and treat them well. You are made of the same stuff. You are bound to the God who loves you, free to love and serve your neighbor. Free to do as the prophet Isaiah challenges: loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke, let the oppressed go free, break every yoke. Untangle yourself from the things that hold you back from being your best self, from treating everyone like their best self. You are made of good stuff. Remember yourself.

My friend Emily, who is a Lutheran pastor in Iowa, writes a blog from a queer perspective. They sometimes write re-imaginings of stories from scripture, or traditional prayers, to reflect queer identities and the true vastness of God’s family. They wrote the most beautiful blessing for Ash Wednesday, and so I will close this homily by blessing you with it:

“Blessed gift of God’s good creation, it is true:

You are dust, made from the rich, dark matter of the earth, a human from Earth’s hummus.
You are from this life-giving ground and one day you also will return to the earth.
    Nourishing it as it has nourished you.
    Nourishing others as they have nourished you.
But, beloved one of God, it is not just dust and soil that make you up.
You are made of stardust, scattered like infinite glitter, sparking and sparkling throughout the universe.

As you journey through Lent this year, return to who you are.

May the Creator bless the dust in you and around you.
May the Word made flesh, who crossed boundaries and borders, affirm your humanity.
May the Spirit spark imagination and wonder in the stardust that lives in you.
You are dust and stardust, and to the cosmos you will return.”

Quick and Dirty or Fasting and Dusty—A Sermon on Ash Wednesday

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but, you are dying. Every day, as you live, you also die. Cells are reproducing rapidly, and you’re sloughing off unneeded ones all the while. You inhale deep luscious oxygen, and exhale that which your body does not need, cannot use. In the moments after your every exhale, it could be that you never inhale again. Life and death are like that.

You and I, by most standards, are very young. We have our whole lives ahead of us. We are, God willing, going to live out our full, lengthy, natural lives in freedom and fullness. That is what God desires for us. To talk about our impending death, then, feels jarring. But for those who have lived a long, hard life, it can be a comfort to know that God awaits us beyond this life. And as the great sage Albus Dumbledore once said, “to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

Most days, though, we don’t talk about such things. I don’t usually remind you of your mortality. But today is not most days. Today is Ash Wednesday. On Ash Wednesday, we mark the entrance of the season of Lent, in preparation for the holiest of days, Easter Sunday. We’ll spend the next six weeks praying, reflecting, fasting, reading, learning, growing, repenting.

We come to this holy season from many different places. Sure, we’re all sitting in the Ranstrom Chapel, but we got here by a variety of roads. Y’all grew up in different cities across the United States, in different religious communities or not-so-religious communities. Did you grow up in a family that marked the season of Lent at all? Did you grow up “giving up” stuff for Lent? Did you learn that that fast—and these six weeks—were for the experience of sadness, and self-flagellation, and shame? You may have. Or you may have learned that these six weeks were for getting rid of the garbage that got in the way of your closeness to God.

What do we routinely consume that is harmful? Sometimes we know it’s harmful—like eating food that’s bad for us—or its harm is a little sneakier—like only reading news articles that confirm our biases. Two years ago, I kept a holy Lent by fasting from white media. Like, I unfollowed white people on twitter and didn’t watch cable news and only read books or watched movies made by people of color. It was hard, because I am white and our world is targeted toward whiteness and so you have to go out of your way to get information that isn’t white. Last year, I committed for the whole year to only read books written by women, and during Lent I only read books written by women of color. I did these things and continue to critically assess my reading list and twitter timeline and podcast listening and information intake because it is harmful to me—and to my understanding of the body of Christ—to live in the falseness of a white world.

I read a blog post last night by Candice Benbow, a black woman theologian I started following on twitter during my aforementioned whiteness fast. The blog post is called “For Sisters With Nothing Left to Give Up For Lent.” She writes about entering into Lent from a state of exhaustion and emptiness, and not knowing what else there is to fast from. You may feel this way. You may feel overrun. You may feel overwhelmed by the onslaught of political news every day. You may feel paralyzed by the sheer number of directions from which danger is managing to come at you. You may feel overwhelmed by responsibilities at home and at work and at school and in your family, which would be enough to stress you out even the calmest of political realities. You may have recently suffered an awful loss. And so coming up with something in your life to “give up” seems like a joke.

Candice writes that “Some of us are being asked to give up things and activities during Lent that are literally keeping us alive during seasons of great loss and deep pain.” God does not desire your suffering. God desires your life, your abundant life. God desires your wholeness and your wellness. “Perhaps this Lenten season will not be about fasting,” Candice says, “but giving ourselves permission to be refueled in the pursuit of joy. Could it be possible that, instead of ‘dying to ourselves’, we find ways to live into the abundant life Jesus came to give?”

If you want to fast in this season, do it. I do not mean to suggest that you shouldn’t. I mean to tell you that you do not have to if you feel you cannot. You can give up eating meat in order to learn more about what the best foods are to feed your body. You can give up drinking alcohol in order to focus on the fullness of life without substances that cause you pain and regret. You can give up gossip in order to reflect on the ways that words hurt. You can give up swearing in order to cogitate about the plethora of other locutions in the vernacular that you might utilize. You cannot, I regret to inform you, give up homework or going to work for Lent.

In this Lenten season, I am going to be fasting. I am going to be fasting from frenzy. I am going to spend the next six weeks doing fewer, better things. I am going to resist the urge to get whipped into a panic about things that do not need to be panicked about. I am going to read more poetry and more scripture and pray more prayers because, the truth is, I have time. I have always had time. I run out of time because I waste time. During this season, I am going to resist the false narrative that I must do everything and do it now. I am going to be present—to myself, to you, and to God.

This is my new phone background, for at least the next 40 days.

That’s what this season is about. Returning to God. Wherever you’ve gotten away to, you can turn around and come back. Ash Wednesday is, in this way, about remembering that you are human. You are not a superhuman; you are not expected to do anything perfectly, or even correctly the first time. You are human. And you are beloved.

You are dust of the earth, dear ones! God our Creator breathed life into you! Jesus, our Redeemer, put on this flesh and liberated you! The Spirit moves in and among you! You, and all the beloved, are alive in the grace of God—and you will die in it.

This season of Lent can be a dreary one, if you so choose. Dwelling for 40 days in the muck of your sin is a righteous discipline. But telling the truth about who and whose you are is a radical act in this world. We live in a culture of lies and half-truths and "alternative facts" and miracle cures and self-help and self-loathing. We do that every day. That’s not a Lenten discipline.

For these six weeks, permit yourself to be fully human. Listen quietly to the voice of God. Make a joyful noise to the Lord! Fast and pray and give alms. Rejoice in the the truth of your salvation.

Amen.