Note: This is a slightly adapted version of the Ash Wednesday sermon for 2024.
Ummm…Happy Lent?
It’s Ash Wednesday which means that we are starting Lent, the season of the church year where we start a journey on the road to Christ’s death on the cross. When I think about Ash Wednesday, I will think about death and that makes me think of Ash Wednesday of 2002. I was doing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education at a Transitional Care Unit in Minneapolis. After the midweek worship service ended, the chaplain and I took ashes and went around the facility placing ashes on people. I can remember going up to the memory care unit where people seemed at death’s edge. I remember placing the ashes on people and saying those words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Placing the ashes on people so near to death struck me.
It’s striking me again as I deal with my mother. She has officially entered hospice. She’s not near death, the hope is to focus on more pain management, but the fact of the matter is no matter when my mother dies, we know how this all ends. It’s how it ends for all of us. It might be days away or decades away, but we will die. We are finite and we will die.
This Ash Wednesday is also one of those weird accidents of history where Valentine's Day, a day of love and romance, coincides with Ash Wednesday, a day of penitence and mortality.
This Lent we will focus on joy which seems kind of weird. We do not think of joy when we think of Lent or Ash Wednesday. This is supposed to be a time of reflection and humility. Where in the world does joy fit into all of this?
A pastor friend of mine may have summed it up by saying on Facebook “Roses are red, ashes are grey, you are going to die. Happy Valentine’s Day!”
Writing in the Atlantic, Anglican priest Esau McCaulley is fascinated by this juxtaposition. He talks about his first Valentine’s Day with his wife some 20 years ago and the joy that he has felt in his relationship. But it is all finite. “This story will have an ending,” he writes. “Humanity’s great enemy cannot be put off forever. Death will intrude into our narrative, taking one from the other. When we are at our frailest and most in need of companionship, death will separate lifelong friends. Then the depth of love will be revealed in the abyss of grief. Valentine’s Day will be swallowed up by Ash Wednesday.”
In our world, we like to think we are the king of our destiny. We think we will live forever and that we are enough. But Ash Wednesday reminds us that we are finite and imperfect. We mess up. Or as British theologian Francis Spufford says, “We have the propensity to mess things up.” Except he didn’t say mess.
So where is the joy in all of this? Where can you find joy in our coming death or in our ability to always, always fall short?
In the sixth chapter of Matthew, Jesus is teaches people how they should act. He tells the crowd how they should act in the world and it should not be like the people that want to show off their faith. There is no joy in trying to show off how holy you are because that’s what it is: a show. The joy comes from those who pray secretly to God because they are really praying to God. They give in secret because they are more interested in helping their neighbor than in looking good. The joy comes from wanting to serve God and others and that lasts longer than just having the fleeting feeling of performance.
Esau McCaulley notes that as much of a downer that Ash Wednesday might seem to be, there is hope and I would add, joy. “Ash Wednesday does not simply tell us that we might die,” he says. “It suggests that through the power of God, death might not have the final word. It is bold enough to maintain that all our temporal affections are echoes and hints of a divine love that can bear the weight romantic love cannot.”
Ash Wednesday reminds us of our finitude. But that is not the end of the story. There is something beyond our romantic love and our limited lives. That gives us hope and joy.
Death is present and we can’t escape that. But joy comes in knowing that God’s love for us persists beyond our limits and that joy allows us to serve God and each other.