Ash Wednesday Sermon

You only are immortal, creator and maker of all. We are mortal - formed of the earth and to the earth we shall return. This you ordain when you created us saying you are dust  and to the dust, you shall return. Yet even at the grave, we make our song.

Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

Give rest o Christ to your servant where there is neither pain nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting.

Into your hands, O merciful savior, we commend to you, your servant. Acknowledge we humbly pray a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive them into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace and into the glorious company of the saints of light. May their soul and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

And now lord, you let your servant go in peace. Your word has been fulfilled. My own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in front of every people. A light to reveal you to the nations and to the glory of your people. Israel,

I've said these words at the graveside of more people than I can even count now. Some of them I didn't know at all. Some of them were as close to me as family. Some of them actually were family.

All of us go down to the dust. Yet even at the grave, we make our song. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Hallelujah.

Beautiful words spoken among tears that remind us of our hope, our faith, that there's something bigger to all of this. Something beyond all of this. That while death has something to say to us, it isn't the final word. And yet what it is or what it could be, what this could all mean is entirely a mystery.

You know, as a culture somewhere along the way, I think we became suspicious of mystery. And then we became skeptical of it.  And now it seems like we fear it these days. We want things like proofs and facts, we want certainty and when we don't get that, a lot of times we refuse to believe in or have faith in whatever it is that we were looking for in these things. But - what's crazy to me is that it seems like both life and death are a mystery - at least to me.

You know, it's so hard sometimes to understand life or what's happening or why it's happening to us. And while I'm getting better at pretending, there are a lot of days where I don't even feel like I really know who I am. Some days I find the whole thing, this whole life just utterly fascinating - this planet, the fact that there are other planets, how crazy it is that there are all these different kinds of life that have emerged here or just how vastly different people are from one another.

Or I mean think about the fact that we have the ability to create, to make stunning and beautiful and brilliant things from music to buildings to the phone I have in my pocket that allows me nearly instant access to anything I could ever want to know or see and it gives me instant access to anyone I could even think of talking to or wanting to connect with. We've come up with brilliance and imaginative ways to understand ourselves and others and stunning concepts about this world and beyond and our relationship to it. And while we have the ability to create and engineer this beautiful, amazing and wonderful life and world and time that we're living in, we've also refined and nearly perfected our ability to destroy life and inflict immeasurable pain and hardship on each other.

We can be so selfless as to lay down our lives to protect another person. And yet at the same time, we can be so selfish that we cling to whatever we have while we watch another person starve to death. And for the life of me, I can't figure that mystery out.  Or like why are there days that I can feel so faithful that I feel like I'm losing myself or any concept of who I am in the divine. And yet there are other days I feel so faithless that I insist on my own ways and that I know better than God. I mean it's a mystery to me.

And if life which I'm experiencing right now at this very moment is such a mystery to me, How can I possibly think that I could pull back the curtain or understand something like death or what comes after this life? If the mysteries of life can sometimes scare me, it's no wonder that the mysteries of death could seem terrifying to me.

This might be a little weird, but my son Isaac and I were talking about it the other week and I told him that sometimes what I do is I try and remember or imagine what it was like before I was born in the hopes that it might shed some insight into what it might be like when I die. But I can't do it. It's so weird. Like I know there is this whole history, this whole time that the world existed where I didn't exist and yet I can't wrap my mind around what it would be like to not exist. I can't conceive of or conceptualize nonexistence. Honestly, it feels like a giant abyss.

And I think my father must have messed me up by leaving books of Frederick Nietzsche within reach of a middle schooler. Because when I read in Nietzsche  beware of when you're fighting monsters, that you yourself do not become a monster. For when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.  I suddenly found myself at a young age, becoming really cautious anytime I was around an abyss. To stare into the face of non-existence means that non-existence will stare back. And that can be terrifying.

But as uncertain as I am about everything dealing with my own death - like when it'll happen or where I'll be, or the circumstances of it or what will really happen to me when death is over; the one thing, one of the only things I'm absolutely certain of is -  one day my death will come -  no matter what I do or how much I try and rail and fight against it,  one day I’m going to wake up and that's going to be my last day alive on this planet.  I'll one day have to face this great mystery and I can either be afraid of that mystery or I can embrace it and treat it with the same curiosity and fascination that I try and embrace the mystery of life with.

When I was a chaplain in my late twenties for my seminary education, I saw so many - too many people - literally take their last breath in this life. I can remember going home after particularly rough days where I'd seen it happen more than once. And at first I would get so mad and frustrated with Beverly when she would complain about her day at work or complain about something the kids did. It felt trivial and meaningless in the face of what I felt I was doing and dealing with. But it's funny, a strange thing happened, the more I was with people at the moment of their death, the more comfortable I became with it because… because the more convinced I was becoming that there was something more to all this, something beyond this, something unexplainable. There was a mystery.

How could it be in one moment there was a person in front of me and then yet in the next it was if their body became a part of the furniture? I'm not sure I'll ever be able to really explain that. It wasn't anything supernatural, but you could feel the person leave their body in the room. It's not like I saw their ghost or they're soul, like I said, it's not anything supernatural, but it felt super… natural.

The letting go of life in those moments just seemed like the natural, most organic thing to do. I didn't understand it then. I don't claim to understand it any better now. But what I noticed is that somehow the more I embraced and accepted both life and death as mysteries that I might not ever understand, the less trivial and petty things seem to bother me. It even got to the point where I truly looked forward to going home and hearing about Beverly's annoying coworkers and which kid did what. I was grateful that I was there to hear it because that day wasn't my day to take my last breath, even though I know that day is coming.

You know, I'm realizing that mystery isn't something to be feared or avoided or explained away, but it's something to be accepted and embraced and wondered about. I mean, in many ways Ash Wednesday is a practice run for all of this. Right? It's a day where we try to really remember and contemplate the fact that for each of us, for every single one of us, one day will be our final day in this life and that it isn't something we should be scared of or try to pretend isn't going to happen or try to put off thinking about because it makes us uncomfortable or scared. Or we think people might think we're morbid. But rather it should inspire us to greater heights to evaluate what's truly important to us and what we need to hang on to and also what we need to let go of. Ash Wednesday is a day and it begins a season where we should be thinking about if this day were going to be our last day here, what would we do?

What would we hold on to? Who would we call or spend time with? How would we treat those we love? Or just strangers that we met out in the world that day? Is there someone we would feel that we need to call and apologize to? I mean, how much do our grudges and resentments really mean to us? What would we like the statement or the mark, the imprint of our life to be? What do we need to do this day in order for our lives to make that mark? And we can't think through those questions and let go into new life if we're too afraid to embrace that mystery. And so what we're remembering tonight  as we begin our journey through the wilderness is that the mysteries of life … and the mysteries of death, they aren't something to be feared or avoided, but they're the very things I think we need to embrace and cherish.