This sermon was preached for Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow, MA. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 103:8-14, and Matthew 6:1-6,16-21.
Today is the day we stare our own mortality in the face. Lent is a disruption in our daily lives, an upending of our usual rhythms so that we might reexamine how we’re living out our faith. It’s why I love that we purposefully rearrange the sanctuary for this season, sometimes in intentionally uncomfortable ways. Most deliciously, the interruption of Lent begins in the rudest of ways - by forcing us to confront the reality of our own deaths.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what death reveals, the truths it often uncovers. I was recently idly browsing a list of public figures who were revered throughout their lives - that is, until after their deaths, when the reality of how they really spent their time or wealth or power was made widely known. Once the extent of their crimes and abuses became clear, how they were seen in life no longer mattered - their legacy and reputation had been altered forever. I discovered there’s even a reality TV show all about scandalous wills and the surprises contained within their pages - stories of hidden debts, secret families, and illegitimate children come to light. The advent of genetic testing and DNA genealogy has exploded many a family secret that people once believed could be taken to their grave and beyond. Death will claim us all, and eventually, inevitably, death, too, is the great unraveller of all our carefully constructed facades.
Our two passages for Ash Wednesday - both the excerpt from the book of the Prophet Isaiah and the section from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount - caution against living a life of empty gestures for the sake of appearances. Like practicing the righteousness of fasting but not the righteousness of treating your workers fairly, or praying loud, performative prayers whose intended audience is not actually God, but other believers. Jesus’ words especially ask us to consider the difference between what we say we value and where we actually invest our time, attention, and funds. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
What will be revealed when you die? What will come to light about the you you are when only God is watching? These are the sort of big, hard questions Lent arrives to ask us each year as winter winds down. “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.”
Death can reveal scandal, intrigue, and unspool lives, but it can also lay bare generosity, good-heartedness, and extraordinary love.
Dale Schroeder died in 2005 in Ames, Iowa at age 86. A hard-working, humble man, Dale lived quite frugally. He worked for the same carpenter firm for 67 years, attended church each Sunday, and never had a spouse or kids. When Dale died, he left behind two pairs of worn blue jeans and a rusted out truck. Oh, and also a secret $3 million scholarship fund with specific instructions that it be used to send small town Iowans to college - something Dale, who was raised by a single mom, never got to do himself. Dale’s scholarships sent 33 Iowans to college for free over the course of a decade - the last of them graduating in 2019. These were all young people Dale never knew, would never get to meet. They call themselves “Dale’s kids,” though. They’re doctors and nurses and lawyers, who all got their start because of one quiet, unassuming man who thought deeply and carefully about the impact he wanted his death to have on the world. Because of a carpenter who took the commandment to “love your neighbor” seriously.
Facing our death, and preparing for it, is not creepy or morbid. It’s actually a great act of Christian responsibility. It’s the one thing we all can be certain is going to happen, after all, we just aren’t privy to when and how. But boy, figuring it all out ahead of time can be such a gift to one’s loved ones. I’ve got a binder sitting in my office right now filled with the funeral planning sheets from many of you who’ve already taken the time to ponder these questions and write it all down with their priest. Sitting with grieving families as I have over the years, let me tell you what a gift it is to have as many details and decisions about one’s death already made and thought through - but even more than that, how amazing it is when people like dear Marge Shaw see their funeral as their way to speak one final message of comfort and faith to their loved ones. It’s beautiful, just beautiful, to put together those memorials, to witness what love went in to the selection of the Gospel or just the right hymns that will say to your widow or widower, your children, here is the Good News in all this, here is what our faith can say in the darkest moments of our lives.
One family I sat with discovered a letter that their mother had written to be read upon her death, an exquisite poem that her children texted to each other and shared at her funeral, words they returned to again and again as they remembered her. These folks I’m thinking of were faithful Christians who not only had the courage to face the reality of their death as we do together today, they also had the wisdom to see their passing as their final sermon, an opportunity to share the Gospel, to preach the message of love that guided their life. To reveal where their heart was and is.
Churches, schools, libraries, and all sorts of public institutions are littered with the names of people who carefully considered the legacy they wanted to leave behind in the world. I used to think all those names engraved in stone were a way of cheating death - an attempt to remain immortal in some form - and perhaps some are. But many others reflect the humble hopes generous people had for the world that would continue on after their death. Folks who planned for their deaths to ensure that it’d be a world where art and music and Christian community exist, where small town Iowan kids get a chance at life-changing education.
All along the beautiful riverside path by the apartment we lived in in Wellesley, there were these lovely outdoor benches and many of them had plaques with names - names of neighbors who had lived and walked along those paths. In death, those people, all strangers to me, became a place for me to sit and breathe - particularly when I was ridiculously pregnant with my firstborn. I’ll never know their stories, beyond a few lines or two on a plaque, but I knew the world they envisioned and helped create - a world of beauty and dappled sunlight and safe spots to stop and rest for a while.
Today we face the fact that we will die. Our bodies will return to ash and dust, our souls to the Lord. Most every day we gather here for worship, I hope it’s to think deeply about how we want to live in a way that reflects God’s call to love. Today, Ash Wednesday, I hope we set aside some time to think about what impact we want our death to have on our families, our communities. What will your death reveal about where your heart is when all is made known in the end?
Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.
Amen.
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