February 26, 2020
/Ash Wednesday
Joel 2: 1-2, 12-17; Psalm 103; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
The Rev. James M.L. Grace
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.
I begin this sermon with words from Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist and author. You might be thinking to yourself "Richard Dawkins - isn't he that atheist who wrote "The God Delusion"? Yes, he is. While I would part ways with Dawkins on that book, I am in alignment with much of his work, including a book he wrote in 1998 entitled "Unweaving the Rainbow" which begins with these words:
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here, we privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
What a gift our lives are. What honor there is in acknowledging that our lives are fleeting - momentary blips on a cosmic scale. And yet - here we are today, on Ash Wednesday, pausing during our busy lives to ponder the curious fact that we are mortal. Today is one of my favorite days of the year, which probably sounds odd, or morbid. I love this day because of its simple acknowledgement of a truth many of us deny - which is that none of us are getting out of this alive!
As a follower of Christ for the last thirty years, death no longer frightens me in ways it used to. I am at a point in my own faith journey where if tomorrow someone was able to prove unquestionably that the resurrection of Jesus never occurred - that it was, for example, a simple legend told after Jesus' death to inspire his followers, I would probably say: "Well, I guess that means we lose Easter, but could we still have Ash Wednesday?"
Jesus embraced and honored his living, and his dying. I cannot think of anyone other than Jesus who not only once lived a beautiful life but continues to live in a very real way. Jesus is alive. but even so, I would not miss Easter, because we live in a culture that seeks to anesthetize itself to the natural process of dying. As an American society, we have outsourced much of the dying process to hospitals and elderly care facilities. We have enabled a multi-billion-dollar funeral industry to handle our dead. All of this has produced a result where we are a death denying culture. In our culture which denies death in so many ways, we need Ash Wednesday. We need Good Friday, though attendance at both pales in comparison to Easter.
I am guilty of this same denial of death. To be honest with you all, I still struggle with the Latin phrase "memento mori," which means "remember you must die." For a long time, whenever I was asked if I wanted to be an organ donor when I would renew my driver's license, I would answer "no." Why? The answer is simple. I would not permit myself to think about my body on a table being opened. Gross! Like I would even be aware of it! Of course, I wouldn't - I would be dead. Perhaps I thought that if I would say no to being an organ donor in some way I could postpone death or deny its inevitability. At some point, I don't know when, I went to the DPS to renew my driver's license. I was asked if I would consider being an organ donor, again. That time, I said yes. I grew up.
Mortality is a part of living. When we gather for a funeral service, we are gathering to do a couple of things. We are giving thanks to God for the life the person lived. We are gathering to grieve. But more importantly at a funeral we gather to express our trust in God that death is not the end. That God has a purpose for all of us, in our living and in our dying, and that purpose is holy. You have a purpose, even if your life seems purpose-less. God has a purpose for you.
I was reminded of God's purpose in living and in dying nineteen years ago when my brother in law died from a virulent form of leukemia. His name was Granger. Granger’s father is a Methodist pastor. As the funeral plans were coming together, the family decided that they wanted to have Granger cremated. I will never forget one day getting the call from Granger's father, asking me if I would accompany him to the crematorium to stand beside Granger's body in its final moments before entering the crematorium.
I stood there beside Granger and his father in that crematorium. His father said a few prayers. While I don't remember the words, I remember the intent. They were gentle prayers. They were kind prayers. In them were the words only a parent can say at a time such as that. He entrusted Granger to God. He believed that even at the moment before the body of his son was to be cremated, that Christ was present.
I will never forget that day. I will never forget how even in those final moments; Granger's father saw so clearly the purpose of his son's life. I will never forget the trust his father had that God's grace was fully present in that room, and that there would be a day when he would see his son again. In that crematorium, beside the furnace which would soon consume his body, turning it to ash, I saw the resurrection. At the end of life, I saw it begin again.
All of us go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. AMEN.