Ash Wednesday Sermon
I remember an autumn day. It was perfectly still, with a chill autumn sky. A chestnut tree grew outside my home. And, however it is that trees make up their minds, it chose that day, as I watched, to let go its leaves. Without a breath of wind, all the day long, the leaves cascaded. The tree had been dense with russet foliage in the morning. By evening, it was bare – its foliage now carpeting the lawn, soon, in the winter rains, to become the soil for another generation of life.
We are those leaves. The tree of life from which we grew will choose its day to let us go – each of us, all of us – to fall, to join the earth, to become the earth.
This is certain. It is the way of the earth – this humus and clay, this womb of our being – which God molds with his hands, then lifts to his lips to breathe life into what he has made. It is who we are – made, as we are, of both earth and God.
Of God we were born.
To God, we will die.
With God, we are one.
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Soon we’ll process, down this aisle, to wait our turn to receive the mark of Christ’s cross on our brows. It’s a sign we make on ourselves by our own finger each time we hear the gospel read: “God, be in my mind.” It was a sign made by a priest at our baptisms with holy chrism: “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ own for ever.” It is a sign made with holy oil when we are sick: “I anoint you with oil in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” And now it is a sign made now with ashes: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Death itself is such a solitary act. Even when surrounded by loved ones, the dying one dies alone, their journey must be a solo one, from this life to the next.
And yet, as first declared upon us at our baptisms, with the sign of the chrism and cross, our faith proclaims just the opposite: our death is not a solo one, for we are one with Christ. His death becomes ours, and ours becomes his. “I am in you and you are in me.” Such intimacy. The intimacy of this motion, of another’s finger, touching us tenderly on our face, is itself but a sign of that deeper intimacy of our union – our oneness – with God through Christ, a oneness made all the more spectacular in God’s union with us in dying with us through Christ. That ultimate end, that forever enemy, “death,” now robbed of its threat. For there – in our dying, on our crosses, in our tombs – is our Christ, dying with us. We are not alone. Ever.
And, as Christ shown us, neither do we remain dead. It is not yet time to know what life means on the other side. It is sufficient to know that Christ is risen, changed but familiar, and our union with him will continue, changed but familiar.
But for this time, we live here, in this life, in this world, in these circumstances. And the gift of faith is ours – that all that is true of God and God’s Kingdom is already true. God is one, and we are one. God is love, and we are love. God is forgiving, and we are forgiving.
Our faith tradition has often been handed down to us with such a spirit of severity. And Lent, with all its disciplines – self-denial, study, prayer, alms-giving – comes particularly packaged in tones both severe and ominous. And yet the gift of faith is quite the opposite. It is the gift of opening a door and walking through to that room where God is, to that room that is God, to that room where we are already welcomed and where we already belong.
But be aware, that it’s never just you and God alone in that room, intimate though it may be. Everyone else is there, too. Everyone else is also God’s beloved. And so, they become our beloved, too.
This morning, while leading the weekly Loving Kindness Meditations, I held at one point two people – one each in each of my hands. In one hand was an immigrant fleeing from ICE. In the other was the ICE agent himself from whom he fled. And in one voice, I spoke to each, a message jointly given:
“Just like me…”
- you want to be happy
- you want to be safe
- you want loving relationships
- you want a meaningful life
“May you…”
- be filled with loving kindness
- be well in body and soul
- have what you need for today
Later in the meditations, I spoke the same words to Donald Trump. As always, when I pray for him, I held my hand to my chest, a gesture (for me) that always means, in touching my own body, I am touching his – praying as Christ, “I am in you, and you are in me.” I looked at my hand at that moment, and saw upon it (in my mind’s eye) the same bruised and blotchy skin the press has been reporting of Donald’s hand. The bruising was now my own, a perverse, reversed stigmata (if you will) of Christ’s suffering with us in this broken and breaking humanity. After all, it was precisely for our brokenness and failure to live as the image of God, that Christ – the pure image of God – aligned himself with us, in love, his now pierced and bloodied hands grasping hold of our own blood-stained hands.
And so, in seeking to align ourselves with God and with the work of God, we do so in God’s spirit of love. And, in love, we are free. We are free from enmity. We are free from outrage and fear. We are free from war and the apparatus of war – be that the warfare between nations, the warfare within families, and even the warfare waging in own souls, embattled as they are by shame and self-condemnation. We are free to open the door to where God is, and where condemnation is not.
And should that door seemed locked to you, or its hinges rusted and unyielding, may this Lent be for you as an antechamber just beside the room – neither outside in the storm, nor yet in the room itself, but a quiet place just beside, a place where you may safely stand and pray, with your bruised hand upon the doorknob: “God, I want to come in. I want to dwell in your love and to share in your love and to be in this world you love, now as your sacrament of love.” Amen.
I wish you a holy Lent.