Ash Wednesday

This is the meditation I gave at our Ash Wednesday service last night. It struck me as more a blog post than a sermon, so I share it with you.

Lent has a reputation for being the grimmest season of the church year. What positive things can you say about a season that begins by bringing the partying of Mardi Gras to a crashing halt at midnight on Tuesday by sending everyone to church to get ashes on their foreheads? That continues through forty days of giving up chocolate or something equally desirable, and builds to a crescendo on Good Friday as we are asked to contemplate the torture of Jesus, who had nails pounded through his flesh and who hung by those nails on a cross? And then, thank goodness, we come to Easter. Easter, yes, Easter is great, but getting through those forty days of Lent is another story. Does it all have to be, so, well, depressing?

Let's hope not. The key word here is "hope." The season of Lent -- and the Christian life, for that matter, could be seen as just one depressing event after another if we didn't look at it through that prism called hope: hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. We have to begin at the end in order for the whole thing to make sense: Jesus Christ is raised from the dead, and it is in him and him alone that we have our hope.

What we do here tonight -- the imposition of ashes on the forehead as a recognition of our own mortality -- would be the most depressing thing in the world were it not for that hope. "Hey, forget it, life has no meaning, you are just dust, and to dust you shall return." No, we have hope in spite of the fact that all of us, at our own appointed times, will face death. Jesus himself has given us that hope by his death and resurrection. Because he lives, we shall live also.

In Genesis we are told that God created a human being from the dust of the ground -- the Hebrew word "adam" is a play on the words for "earth" and "human" -- and breathed the human creature into a living being. Human beings weren't created out of gold and silver, sorry to say, just plain old dirt, lest anyone get too enamored of themselves. And at the end of our earthly lives, we return to that earth from which we were created. There's a symmetry to it, humbling though it may be.

When we read the New Testament, we need to keep in mind that the people of the early Christian church lived each day in the stark realization that it might be their last. They were being persecuted by the religious and civil authorities for their faith in Jesus Christ and their refusal to worship the Roman emperor. Also, they expected that Christ would return at any time; the apostle Paul recommended that people not marry if possible, because the time was so short. So for them, hope in Christ was what they lived for.

All of this can seem very remote to us, something that was written down centuries ago in the world of the Roman empire, among people whose lives and expectations were very different from ours today. And then, something can happen and it all seems a whole lot closer, a whole lot more relevant.

One of those "somethings" happened to me in the past couple of weeks. Maybe it has happened to you at some time in your life. A doctor tells you that something has turned up on a routine test. It might be cancer. It might not. More tests are needed. If it is, it means surgery...

A-GAIN? I HAVEN'T GOTTEN OVER THE LAST SURGERY YET! ARE YOU CRAZY??

And so for a week, I lived in the world of not-knowing, as I had more tests done and waited for the results. Maybe you have been through this too. For a week, I didn't know whether I could make any plans for the future or not. And in that week, a few thoughts came to me, and they were the kind of thoughts that might be appropriate to consider on Ash Wednesday:

1. We are all mortal. Nobody gets a free pass out of this one. Some of us have more days than others, and that is the Creator's call to make, not ours. During the week I waited for my test results, more young soldiers died in Iraq, and so did the longest-married couple in our state, who died within three days of each other at the ages of 101 and 103, respectively.

2. What we do with our lives determines how we will be remembered. A Jewish Roman citizen in Palestine, two thousand years ago, made tents for a living. But the apostle Paul is remembered, down through the ages, for his faith in Christ and the remarkable letters he set down that established the foundations of our understanding of the cross and what it means to follow Jesus.

In your own life, who has influenced you for good? Who has made a difference in your life? Who has helped you on your journey of faith? And what have you done, what are you doing, what can you do to make a difference in someone else's life?

3. Jesus is Lord. That's the bottom line. Afraid of death? Jesus has been there, done that. Do you trust him with your life, or not?

The most modern confession of our denomination, A Brief Statement of Faith, begins with these words:

In life and in death we belong to God.
Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit,
we trust in the one triune God, the Holy One of Israel,
whom alone we worship and serve.

It is as simple -- and as complex -- as that. It's a matter of trust.

At the end of one of the darkest weeks of my life, the doctor called and said the additional tests were giving some very different results. It didn't look like cancer after all. No surgery in the immediate future (THANK YOU!!). I could make plans again.

But as you know, if you have ever been in this situation, no matter what the outcome, you are changed. You think differently about day to day living. I am still sorting it all out -- this has all happened very recently -- but I have a whole new appreciation for trusting in God. It isn't about trusting that God will fix everything the way I want it to work out. It's just about trusting God. Period. No matter how much we like to think that we are in control of what happens to us, guess what: we're not. And to be able to trust our lives to God is...well, it's a blessing. It's a blessing of the Christian life.