Considering our one wild and precious life

A sermon for Ash Wednesday.

The late great Marcus Borg once wrote that Ash Wednesday is the most honest day in the church year. It gets down to business. We are born, we die, and there’s this thing we call life in between. Every year our liturgy holds before us these essential facts.  And God seems to standing over us and asking us—what have you done with this life I have given you? 

Ash Wednesday is an honest day because it deals so frankly with life and death, and unlike our baptism, or our rite of burial, which are discrete events, it unites them. It connects them. Nadia Bolz-Weber used the image of life as a scarf; birth is at one end—our death at the other. Ash Wednesday pinches the scarf to bring the two closer together.

The ashes we will receive are the “sign” of the day, representing the dust we came from, and the dust to which we will return. I always imagine these words to be coming out of God’s own mouth to us. The meaning of the day, however, is to remember, and to consider, that time in between—our very lives. These 40 days -- a little more than 1/10 of our year—are like a tithe God asks of us to commit to this work. To spend time in a sacred wandering through the desert, through the ashes and detritus of the year past, and to find our way back to God.

In Lent, we are walking our brokenness.

In our beautiful opening collect we acknowledge our “wretchedness.” The word sounds self-hating, but it just means broken-hearted, or unfortunate. Life can break our hearts. But God made our hearts, and God hates nothing God has made. God has given us hearts that break because if we had hard, unbreakable hearts, we could not love with them. God also gives us God’s power and grace to begin where we are, in our wretchedness and lost-ness and broken-heartedness, and to be healed, to be made whole, to receive a new heart.  On Ash Wednesday we begin our walk.

Lent is a time to remember and to confess to what we have forgotten—that we are made as beloved ones of God, in God’s image. That we are made to need God, and to need each other. That we break under the illusion that we can find our true selves through following our wills alone. And if that were not so, we would have no need for forgiveness or redemption.

You see, we are not adequate to the task of self-salvation. The Lenten ashes remind us of our limitedness; the fleetingness of our lives: a mere minute in God’s time, which is all eternity. We do not choose how or when we come into this world: our life is given to us, for we do not make ourselves. But we do have choices to make about this life. The blessing of Lent is that even amidst the messes we have made, God’s grace is still there, amidst the ashes. It’s a harrowing path at first. We confront disappointment and failure and betrayal along the way. But if we dedicate this Lent to God, God walks it with us, even through the darkest days, toward Resurrection, where something new emerges out of those ashes and we are reconciled once again to God.    

Lent is deliberately minimalist. We move into somber colors; we eliminate the “A” word; we minimize or eliminate flowers, for, while Lent is not joyless, it is a solemn journey. We are meant to be humbled by it. Lent invites us to be brought gently down, down to earth, the very earth from which we came. It is not a time to be puffed up. The liturgy of Lent is heavy, and penitent, but there is no need to beat on ourselves. Lent is not, in fact, a time to focus on our own self-worth at all, but on what we are worth to God—the God who gave us life and who will welcome us back one day to God’s own embrace. It invites us to respond by calling to mind the ways we have failed to live into this truth. And because we should not accept the grace of God in vain, as Paul says to the Corinthians, we make Lent a time of prayer and introspection about the lives we lead, and we are given the opportunity to face where we have missed the mark, forgive ourselves with God’s help, and rededicate our lives once again to God.

image by Ansel Adams

How should we live out our Lent? Our Scriptures remind us that there is no formula or practice to follow. This is work of the heart. This is our private walk with God, for only God knows our brokenness intimately. So we take this time to name our griefs, the griefs we feel for our inaction or actions, our failure to love, or to remember the poor; the complicity we have in sinful institutions of the world. As we pray our litany, you will find the lines that you know are yours to pray.    

You don’t have to tell anyone what you are doing, what you give up, or what practice you add. You can wash off your ashes when you get home. The work you need to do is between you and God

But on Ash Wednesday, we are given this day to begin. This day tells us—life is short. Life is precious. And now is the time to take stock of it. It asks us--for at least these 40 days--to make this work a priority. It’s work that’s easy to put off until tomorrow. But the Church is saying, nope, it’s Ash Wednesday. Today is the day. “See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!” 

The good news is that our service today is a beautiful beginning. The good news is that, as the prophet Isaiah tells us,

The Lord will guide us continually,
            and satisfy our needs in parched places,
            and make our bones strong;
and we shall be like a watered garden,

          like a spring of water,
  whose waters never fail.

I wish you a blessed Lent. And I leave you with the essential questions that Ash Wednesday poses to us as we begin. They are the closing words of Mary Oliver’s poem, Summer Day:  

              Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

              Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Preached March 6, 2019 at St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland, OR

Lectionary readings:  Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 103; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21