Wednesday, March 5 - Good Bones

This sermon was preached for Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025 at St. Andrew's, Ayer. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 58:1-12, 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6,16-21, and Psalm 103 or 103:8-14.

In the little cabinet where my sisters and I kept our Flintstone multivitamins and the checklist of all the things we needed to do to get ready for school in the mornings, my mother taped a small article she cut out from the wellness section of the New York Times. It was all about how taking time every day to jump - even just five minutes of jumping - can help strengthen your bones. Apparently, it’s especially important for girls given rates of osteoporosis later in life. So when I’d open the cabinet to get my vitamins in the morning, the little newspaper clipping would remind me to jump up and down. I remember picturing the bones inside me getting stronger as I jumped. 

“The Lord will make your bones strong,” Isaiah proclaims. 

Scripture is filled with metaphors about our bodies. All throughout the books of the Old and New Testaments, we hear about the hardening or softening of hearts, the reaching out of hands, the freeing or blessing of lips, as metaphors for determination, compassion, acts of service, and words of power. As we just prayed together in our Collect and as we will echo later in Psalm 51, “Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.”

So what does Isaiah mean by bones? Bones are really quite basic. Bones are about the basics. What’s underneath, holding you all together. What is hard and firm and certain in your inner core - inflexible, perhaps, but for good reason. Your integrity, without which you’d just flop around. Bones are also what remains when everything is stripped away - what remains even long after you die. 

Today, Ash Wednesday, is the day we set aside to remember that we will die. Today, we remind each other and ourselves that someday we will be ash and dust - and bones. The bones are always the last to go. Even if you’re cremated, your body’s burned to ash but the bones are leftover. They’re processed separately, to put it vaguely for the squeamish here. Most of the “ashes” we bury or scatter after a cremation isn’t ash at all. It’s bone dust. 

Lent, too, this 40-day journey of self-reflection, repentance, and transformation, is the perfect time to think about our bones. What are the essential core values that form our integrity? What do we want our legacy to be?

What does it mean to have good bones? Strong bones? 

Son of dust, 2016, Charla Maarschalk

One of my favorite poems is by Maggie Smith. It’s stark and morbid and perfect for Ash Wednesday. Here it is: 

Good bones by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real [dump], chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Lent is a time to be aware of our sinfulness, to confront the ways we fail to love God, love each other, and love ourselves. Lent asks us to lament that stones are chucked at birds and children are broken and thrown away. Lent demands we name oppression. And perhaps, too, Lent requires us to learn how and when to teach our children about the realities of this world and our own deliciously ill-advised shortcomings.

On this threshold as we begin Lent, as we sink into a liturgy full of angst about how we miss the mark over and over, it is absolutely crucial to hold fast to our deep conviction that we have good bones. Because we do have good bones. You and me. So does this parish. So does this world. So does this country. 

As we endeavor to set about making this place beautiful, there are things we can do to strengthen our bones. Or really, ways we can partner with God as God makes our bones strong. A Lenten discipline, whether that’s a fast or a spiritual practice, reveals the power of a little practice done every day for forty days. Jumping up and down can feel silly and pointless in the moment, but who knows? Maybe our bones really are getting stronger so that when the time of life comes, when the hormones go crazy and old age catches up, we’re a bit more prepared, that much more protected. 

But choose carefully this Lent. If you want strong bones, Isaiah teaches, you’ve got to care for your neighbor. You’ve got to stand up for the poor and the homeless and have those hard conversations with your difficult kin. Fast from blaming, fast from speaking evil, fast from miserliness and self-interest. That’s what strengthens your integrity and your righteousness. There are plenty of little Lenten practices to choose from that actually have nothing to do with humility and spiritual transformation and much more to do with our own misguided perfectionism. Tweaking that thing we despise about ourselves. Losing that weight or those bad habits that have been nagging us. Goals that have nothing to do with embracing the fact that we will die and all that we leave behind, in the end, is what and whom we loved. 

Jesus teaches, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

So a good Lenten practice, a bone-strengthening Lenten practice, gets at your real values, the things that actually matter to who you want to be - your heart and your bones. And so we start here by remembering that we will die. So we reflect on what we will leave behind when all the surface stuff rots away, taken by moths and rust and thieves and flame.

Life is short and the world is at least half terrible. The Christian faith is honest when we admit that. I want to be part of a church that is able to say that. Even as we long to sell each other on this broken world, even as we chirp on about all the possibilities, I need us to also tell the truth without fear, without obfuscation - this world is at least half terrible. 

And, and, we are also honest when we say: we've got good bones, we've got good, strong bones.