This sermon was preached on Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at St. Andrew's for Ash Wednesday. The readings for this text were: Isaiah 58:1-12, 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 and Psalm 103 or 103:8-14.
A few months after Kate Bowler received her terminal diagnosis of stage four colon cancer at age 35, she did what one might expect a Duke Divinity professor of Christianity to do: she wrote a New York Times Op-ed piece, which turned into a TED Talk, which turned into a book called Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. She looked at her suffering and journey with cancer through the lens of her academic passion: the Prosperity Gospel. The American theology that tends toward believing that we get what we deserve, that everything happens for a reason, and that willful, positive thinking brings God's blessing.
She tells a little story in the book about searching for a church service on Ash Wednesday after her doctor tells her yet again that she has two months to live. Her friend and her decide to seek out a Catholic church because in her words, “Catholics, of all God's people, are wonderful at being sad.” She looks forward to the stark grimness of Ash Wednesday, to a space where all these other people will join her in no longer being in denial about their inevitable death, their finitude. Where everyone, with her, will confront what the ashes make plain and hard and true.
So she's disappointed to encounter a cheerful priest who invites his congregation into a Lent based on small acts of self-improvement. Again and again, throughout that Lent, she finds herself complaining to her friends, “Everyone's trying to Easter the crap out of my Lent!”
Many religious traditions frame their spiritual practices of fasting as an act of solidarity with the poor and the starving. There is, of course, obvious limitations to this sort of embodied empathy. Going for a day without food does not come with the same sort of existential dread and lack of a future that chronic poverty and food insecurity does.
But there's also wisdom in this practice. It nods to our need to learn and experience in our bodies, not just our minds. Today, on Ash Wednesday as the ashes are dragged across our foreheads, we are invited into solidarity with the dying, with those who walk with death each day, with those who are grieving, those whose chronic diseases or medical conditions inescapably remind them of their human frailty each day. Maybe that’s your spouse, your parent, your friend, maybe that’s you.
This is the kind of fast of which Isaiah speaks. “Is this not the fast that I choose?” This is the fast I choose: one that teaches me more about the actions I should take in this world. Today, I choose spiritual practices that bring me into relationship with the suffering so I may act for and with them. Kate Bowler writes about resenting being treated just as another life lesson for all those around her. But her perspective is a powerful one Ash Wednesday invites us to step into. She writes of how her awareness of her own death brings clarity and beauty and its own kind of wisdom. Sometimes it’s a bit crass - once, when her mother-in-law was complaining, as one does, about the “wrinkles and droopy bits” that have come with old age, Kate rudely interrupted her, saying bluntly, “I think aging is a bleeping privilege.”
The ashes on our forehead today are meant to be a rude interruption. This reminder of death is meant to stop us in our tracks and turn us around. Just this morning, Adrian taught us a second sentence to say when we impose ashes, one I’d never learned. Every year I’ve said: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” But he taught us to add death’s invitation to us as well: “Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.”
What happens when we let death interrupt us just for today? What does it teach us about what the dying need from us? What we all need from each other in our short time on this Earth? What happens when we set aside the cliche of living like this day is our last and instead live as if everyone we encounter is about to die? Giving each other the compassion, the deep listening, the grace and the patience we afford to those whose days are numbered.
What does your own death have to say to you today? What clarity might it bring your life? Stay here, in that. Resist the temptation to move into Easter and hope and positivity just yet. Remember you are but dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin, and be faithful to Christ.
A few months after Kate Bowler received her terminal diagnosis of stage four colon cancer at age 35, she did what one might expect a Duke Divinity professor of Christianity to do: she wrote a New York Times Op-ed piece, which turned into a TED Talk, which turned into a book called Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. She looked at her suffering and journey with cancer through the lens of her academic passion: the Prosperity Gospel. The American theology that tends toward believing that we get what we deserve, that everything happens for a reason, and that willful, positive thinking brings God's blessing.
She tells a little story in the book about searching for a church service on Ash Wednesday after her doctor tells her yet again that she has two months to live. Her friend and her decide to seek out a Catholic church because in her words, “Catholics, of all God's people, are wonderful at being sad.” She looks forward to the stark grimness of Ash Wednesday, to a space where all these other people will join her in no longer being in denial about their inevitable death, their finitude. Where everyone, with her, will confront what the ashes make plain and hard and true.
So she's disappointed to encounter a cheerful priest who invites his congregation into a Lent based on small acts of self-improvement. Again and again, throughout that Lent, she finds herself complaining to her friends, “Everyone's trying to Easter the crap out of my Lent!”
Many religious traditions frame their spiritual practices of fasting as an act of solidarity with the poor and the starving. There is, of course, obvious limitations to this sort of embodied empathy. Going for a day without food does not come with the same sort of existential dread and lack of a future that chronic poverty and food insecurity does.
But there's also wisdom in this practice. It nods to our need to learn and experience in our bodies, not just our minds. Today, on Ash Wednesday as the ashes are dragged across our foreheads, we are invited into solidarity with the dying, with those who walk with death each day, with those who are grieving, those whose chronic diseases or medical conditions inescapably remind them of their human frailty each day. Maybe that’s your spouse, your parent, your friend, maybe that’s you.
This is the kind of fast of which Isaiah speaks. “Is this not the fast that I choose?” This is the fast I choose: one that teaches me more about the actions I should take in this world. Today, I choose spiritual practices that bring me into relationship with the suffering so I may act for and with them. Kate Bowler writes about resenting being treated just as another life lesson for all those around her. But her perspective is a powerful one Ash Wednesday invites us to step into. She writes of how her awareness of her own death brings clarity and beauty and its own kind of wisdom. Sometimes it’s a bit crass - once, when her mother-in-law was complaining, as one does, about the “wrinkles and droopy bits” that have come with old age, Kate rudely interrupted her, saying bluntly, “I think aging is a bleeping privilege.”
The ashes on our forehead today are meant to be a rude interruption. This reminder of death is meant to stop us in our tracks and turn us around. Just this morning, Adrian taught us a second sentence to say when we impose ashes, one I’d never learned. Every year I’ve said: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” But he taught us to add death’s invitation to us as well: “Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.”
What happens when we let death interrupt us just for today? What does it teach us about what the dying need from us? What we all need from each other in our short time on this Earth? What happens when we set aside the cliche of living like this day is our last and instead live as if everyone we encounter is about to die? Giving each other the compassion, the deep listening, the grace and the patience we afford to those whose days are numbered.
What does your own death have to say to you today? What clarity might it bring your life? Stay here, in that. Resist the temptation to move into Easter and hope and positivity just yet. Remember you are but dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin, and be faithful to Christ.
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