Wednesday, February 6, 2008
2 Corinthians 5:20b – 6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Permit me to begin with one absolutely incontrovertible truth.
That is, you are going to die. We all are.
There will come a moment, in time, when our hearts will stop beating, when our lungs will no longer fill with air, when the synapses and cells of our brain will cease functioning, and when life, for us, will end. We are all going to die.
And, as much as we dread contemplating this reality, it is as true for every one of our loved ones as it is for us. As Jim Morrison once stated, no one gets out of here alive. Or, as Shakespeare stated in Hamlet, every one of us will one day shuffle off this mortal coil.
None of us know when, where, or how our death will come. Some of us may be old, some of us may still be young; for some, death may come at the end of a long struggle or illness; for others, death will come quickly and unexpectedly. For some, today might be their last day on earth; for others, there may still be many decades of life yet to live. But death will come.
The Bible is not particularly shy about this topic. To the contrary, death is fully and completely acknowledged throughout the pages of Scripture. From Ecclesiastes reminding us that there is a time to be born and a time to die, through the sadness of death that is acknowledged in the Bible’s shortest verse—Jesus wept—when Jesus was standing at the graveside of Lazarus, to the promise that death will not be overcome until, as John’s grand vision in Revelation attested, a new heaven and a new earth have come; the presence and the power of death are woven through the pages of Scripture.
But the Bible is not only intended to serve as a reminder about our inevitable end; it is also intended to ask us probing questions about how we are choosing to live our lives.
What are the priorities of our lives? How are we using this precious and irreplaceable gift, called life, this gift that we have done nothing to deserve, that we do not know how long will last, and that we can do nothing to control? How are we embracing our power and using our passion as we journey, ever closer, to the moment of our death?
In the great traditions of the church, the season of Lent—which is that period of time which leads us towards the mournful remembrances of Good Friday and the joyful celebrations of Easter—begins with a day called Ash Wednesday.
Our ancestors in the faith would take this day as a time of fasting, a time of remembering our mortality and the inevitability of death. One of the ways that they would mark this occasion was that they would be ‘anointed’ with ashes, and the Latin words--memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris—would be spoken. Remember, mortal, that you are dust and to dust you shall return.
To contemplate such a notion, at first, seems somewhat morbid. But I think that there is a tremendous power in such times of intentional reflection, in naming our mortality, in acknowledging and accepting that we are going to die.
After all, we live in a culture that too often tries to encourage us to forget death all together. We pay exorbitant amounts of money to make ourselves look young; we place the most elderly and infirm members of our society in homes in which they are, too often, out of sight and out of mind. We eat certain foods, and avoid other foods, in an attempt to prolong our lives. And, when things go wrong, we question why such difficulties happen to us—a question that, at some level, reflects our lack of acceptance that such is the nature of the cycle of existence.
Most of us spend far more time contemplating our RRSP contributions – which we have no guarantee that we will ever get to enjoy – than we do our funeral arrangements – about which there is as iron-clad a guarantee as we have about anything. There are those who don’t even like going to visit people in hospital or attending funerals or funeral visitations, at least in part because there is something, deep within us, that does not want to be reminded that we all will one day die.
Our avoidance of this topic leads us, too often, to become preoccupied with other matters, to set other priorities for our lives, to allow other things to consume our time, our attention, our energy. We spend our lives doing other things, living by strange priorities, so often motivated by a deep and sometimes even unconscious desire not to face our own mortality.
The readings that are suggested for Ash Wednesday all, in their own way, invite us to examine our priorities, to reconsider what we hold to be of ultimate importance in life—and to be transformed by those examinations.
Our reading from Joel invites the people to pay solemn—even urgent—attention to the ways that they had ignored God and had allowed other concerns and other priorities to crowd God out of their lives and out of their minds. Joel’s fiery prophetic call was a call to remember that a day of reckoning would come, a day when they would be held accountable for their lives would arrive. And, in recognition of that fact, Joel’s words invite a transformation, a change, a repentance, a re-prioritizing of their lives.
But the transformation to which those people were called was not to be simply marked by some outward form of religiosity. To the contrary, we read, “rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love”. In other words, allow yourself to be transformed from the inside out. Let your heart be changed; return to God.
In a similar vein, our reading from Psalm 51 calls us to this internal change that will inevitably have external effects. “Create in me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew a right spirit within me.”
Our reading from the Gospel sets this same theme out even more clearly. Jesus commanded his followers not to allow their outward appearance to be the extent of their devotion and their spirituality. Rather, the priorities of their lives were to be shaped through an internal transformation that would have external consequences. “…where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”. The question that he was posing, and the challenge that he was presenting, were both realistic and powerful. What treasures are we seeking in this life? And how does an acknowledgement—and an acceptance—of our mortality help us to realize that the treasures that we spend so much time and energy pursuing are just as transient, just as fleeting, just as temporary as we are.
Which leads us back to this pondering of our mortality. After all, if the priorities that we have embraced, in our lives, are meaningless, fleeting and transient, then really what is the point? Why bother with things that have no lasting or ultimate consequence whatsoever? Is there not a better way to use these few years of our mortality before we return to the dust from which we came? What priorities are we embracing as we live out our days upon this earth?
And how would our perspectives on those priorities and those treasures change if we embrace a different perspective—a perspective that suggests that these mortal lives are only one small part of a much larger reality? How would our perspectives on the priorities that we set and the treasures that we set change if it is true that we are eternal beings whose destiny goes far beyond the confines of mortal time?
As we gather together today, we name the fact that we are dust, that we are finite, that we are limited, that we are mortal, that we will die—but we do not do so in order to be morbid. Rather, we do so in order to remind ourselves, to set ourselves free to remember that our true identity, our true reality is that we are eternal beings, that our lives will continue even when these mortal bodies have gone the way of all flesh.
And we do so at the beginning of Lent. The season of Lent will invite us to take a difficult journey; it is a journey which will remind us that there is pain in this world; there is humiliation, brutality, abandonment and suffering; it is a journey that will remind us that there is death. But it is also a journey that will not, ultimately, end in death. It is a journey that will not, ultimately, end on the cross or in the grave. To the contrary, it is a journey that will set the stage for an empty tomb—and for a resurrection to eternal life.
There is an old saying that the only one who is truly prepared to live is the one who is ready to die. Today gives us a wonderful opportunity to ponder – and to accept – our death, so that we can embrace life in all its wonder and in all its fullness.
We accept our death, but not out of a desire to be morbid.
Rather, we do so in order that, even for a few brief moments, we can be set free to contemplate life on both sides of death – both our mortal lives and the eternal life that we offered through Jesus Christ our Lord.