Living, Yet Still Dying, or Dying to Live?
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.
The fact is we are all going to die, whether we like it or not. The only question is: How are we going to die? By clinging to all that we think is ours, our own life and possessions, our own status or merit? Or by following him on his path to Golgotha, laying down our life in love for him and our neighbors? Living, yet still dying, or dying to live? --Fr. John Behr, “Behold: Dying We Live!”
I’ve often wondered why it is that Ash Wednesday is one of the most cherished services in Western Christendom. People who barely darken the doors of a church the other 51 weeks of the year (even on Christmas and Easter for goodness’ sake!) somehow feel drawn to this day--the day when we pray for new contrite hearts, lament of our sins, and acknowledge our wretchedness that we may obtain from the God of all mercy perfect remission and forgiveness. The priest imposes ashes dragging her thumb across our foreheads while making the sign of the cross and with the words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Strange comfort.
Or perhaps not. It’s not difficult for us to look around and see that there is something off-kilter about the world. Gross economic inequality. Racial injustice. Environmental degradation. Politics--the art of magnanimous dialogue in the midst of passionate disagreement and neighborly negotiation with those who think differently from us--reduced to the most vile mud-slinging and the peddling of outlandish conspiracy theories. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that something is wrong, something is broken. And when we look at our own lives it’s easy to see we’ve fallen short of the Glory of God. We see hard-heartedness and unforgiveness. We see blindness to the plight of our neighbor--those whom we’ve left bleeding and freezing in the ditch while we crossed to the other side of the road for fear we might get mud or blood on our trousers. We see sins of commission and sins of omission. From where is our help to come?
In a culture of hype and spin, endless reality-denying optimism, and addiction to limitless growth, in a culture where the reality of death is something shuttered away, perhaps the hard truth of our unvarnished human condition that we hear on Ash Wednesday is one of the only times someone is speaking to us with unflinching honesty. Perhaps Ash Wednesday is one of the few times we are not being sold a bill of goods. Perhaps Ash Wednesday cuts through the noise, the chatter, the spin, and reminds us most powerfully of our true human situation--that we are but dust, a flowering field that when the wind goes over it is gone, a place that will be known no more.
Perhaps Ash Wednesday is that moment when the Doctor sits us down and gives it to us straight--the world’s not the way God intends it to be. You’re not yet the person God intends you to be. The world is sick. You’re sick. But there is a way, to wholeness, healing, soundness of body, mind and spirit. There is a way to a more peaceful and equitable world. There is a way to repair the breach, to bridge the great chasm. The Church is a hospital whose doors are always open whether you have insurance or not. The Master Physician is always on call. What’s more, he’s already paid for your treatment with his very life. He lives only that we might have life and have it more abundantly.
Ash Wednesday speaks this truth with uncommon bluntness, but every Sunday reminds us of the same thing. Self-sufficiency, the consumer-driven illusion of radical independence, of a life lived with our wants, desires, requirements at the center, brings only suffering for ourselves and others. Power, prestige, possessions… they are but dust as well. Our true riches, riches that, “[N]either moth or rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal,” are to be found in living relationship with the Risen Christ, in God and God alone. Paul is the one who shows us that the “death” he experienced on the Road to Damascus was an experience in which all the ways he’d previously pursued with prosecutorial zeal came to nought. He died. When Paul says, “[I]t is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” he is speaking of that process of transformation, of radical reorientation, from the controlling Pharisaical ego self at the center of the universe, to Jesus at the center, the cross standing still while world turns. That, brothers and sisters, is the true Copernican revolution, the process of discovery and recognition, that we are each called to undergo this Lenten season.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor and martyr under the Nazis writes in his classic The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a [person], he bids [them] come and die.” Life with our ego self at the center of the picture, needs to fall like a seed to the ground, go under the waters of Baptism, that we might rise in Him, discover the peace, freedom, joy, that comes from waking up to find ourselves “hidden in Christ,” partakers of the divine nature, an open space in and through which God lives God’s life. We die in order to rise. The ashes imposed on our foreheads are the narrow gate to deeper union and communion with God. The cross is never experienced in isolation from the resurrection. We kneel and hear that we are but dust, and then we receive the body and blood of the one who lays down his life for us, who feeds us with food for journey into his Risen, transfigured life.
Elsewhere in the Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus tells the parable of the Rich Man: “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Robert Capon, with characteristically caustic, grace-saturated wit paraphrases it this way--
[J]ust as you can’t stuff a camel through an opening designed to take only a thread, so you can’t get someone who has a great, fat successful life to volunteer to go through the narrow eye of lastness and death…. Jesus’ plan of salvation works only with the last, the lost, the least, the little, and the dead.
When the ashes are imposed on our heads, it’s our “great, fat, successful life” that is declared unworkable. It is our “great, fat, successful life” lived with power, prestige, and possessions as our God that falls to the ground. Those ashes remind us of our lastness, our lostness, our leastness, our littleness… we accept the Divine Physician’s diagnosis of our illness and put ourselves in his care. We accept our need for help, healing, mercy, love, and forgiveness. We sit in the sackcloth and ashes of a life lived under our own steam and confess our need for someone greater than ourselves, our need for a Savior. From where is my help to come? It comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. We set down our burdensome yoke and take up the yoke of freedom and ease.
That humble acknowledgement of our littleness and need is actually the mechanism of grace. It’s what it means to become like a little child. Safe in Jesus’ lap, we find ourselves threaded through the needle, waltzed right through the narrow gate. Entering the narrow gate is not something we do. It is something Jesus did, and does, for us. Through his death and resurrection, through that spear in his side, Jesus has stitched us into the tapestry of his Kingdom. As Capon says, “all we have to do is let go--let go of everything that is not the slim thread of our leastness and lostness, and let go of every effort to walk the easy road of winning--and upon that letting go, he will draw us home.” Remember that you are dust, and dust you shall return. In weakness is our strength. Living, yet still dying, or dying to live?
Yes, perhaps that’s what accounts for the strange magnetism of Ash Wednesday. Human beings are made for union and communion with God. The human being is, properly speaking, a capacity for God (capax dei), a capacity that only finds its fullness, its flourishing, its flowering in God and God alone. Jesus shows us what it is to be a truly human human being and it is in surrender to him in all things, at all times and times places, that we discover who we truly are. Not our reputation or our looks. Not our bank account. Not our carefully curated legacy. Deep down, whether we’re religious or not, we know this. Flannery O’Connor used to speak of the “Christ-haunted” South, but it’s true of all of us. Somewhere deep deep down we know we’re sick. We’re tired. We can’t do it alone. “Lord, save us! We are perishing” (Matt 8:25)! Tossed in the ditch of self-sufficiency we’ve become a byword to all but the one who stretches out his hand and takes us to his Hospital, the Church, free of charge.
Once a year we admit this, or let the liturgy of the day admit it for us. Then, often, we go back to pretending to be perfect little peaches, we go back to our “great, fat, successful life.” We sound the trumpet of our ashes and then return to business as usual. But what if this Lent, we didn’t go back? What if this Lent we took the medicine offered for our sickness? What if this Lent we stayed little, stayed lost, stayed least, and last? What if this Lent, seated his lap, we let ourselves be threaded through the needle’s eye? What if those ashes, mixed with healing oil, anointed not just our foreheads, but our entire being, our entire community? What if this Lent we trusted not in our own efforts, our own strength, but in God’s strength? What if we let weakness be our strength, God’s strength working in us? Maybe it would sound like Paul--the very sign of beaten, bedraggled, scandalous weakness to the puffed up, oh so knowledgeable and powerful Corinthians--when he says, when he sings, when he hymns:
We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see-- we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.
Living, yet still dying, or dying to live? Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Strange comfort. Strange comfort indeed. Amen.