In this way we are all the same

The Rev. Alissa Newton

Ash Wednesday

text: Matthew 6: 1-6,16-21

“Mama,” my daughter says to me one evening as we are eating dinner. “Mama, I think your neck is getting old. I can see it.” I pause to assess my emotional state before responding. She is right – my neck is getting older, right along with the rest of me. I am both amused by the observation and a little, well, I feel a little bit of something else, a feeling that is harder to identify. Insecurity, maybe? Fear? I respond carefully. “Yes, my neck is getting older. The rest of me is, too. Everybody gets older, honey.” My daughter pushes on: “Mama,” she says. “I don’t want you to get old, because if you get very old then you will die.” And I realize that the fear I am feeling is this – the fear of death. So I look into the face of my beloved child and tell her the truth that I remember my own mother telling to me. “Everybody does get older, and someday die, sweetheart, and someday I will die. But I don’t think it will happen to me for a very, very long time.” She is satisfied, and my neck escapes further scrutiny. Dinner, and life, goes on. We laugh and fight and eat and talk, and I am relieved that the subject of my death does not come up again.

Facing our mortality is not something that is comfortable for most of us. And yet, here we are, gathered in community, on a day that has been set aside by our faith tradition to do just that. Today is the first day of Lent – a season of journey toward the cross with Jesus - and in a moment we will mark our foreheads with ashes and be told that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. We will leave here with a visible mark on our heads – marked for death. Why do we do this? What is accomplished by looking at our own inevitable deaths and why do we begin Lent this way? Well, one answer is, because Jesus lived his life with a deep awareness of mortality and we belong to Jesus. Another answer is that knowing where we came from and where we are going reminds us who we are and how we belong to each other, and this reveals God to us. The Christian life does not see death as the end of all things – we see it as one of the big moments in our lives where God is faithful. And Lent is a time when we center ourselves on this story of God’s faithfulness, a time for us to get as close to God as we can by getting as close as we can to the story of God’s mortality – the story of Jesus Christ. Mortality – the shadow of death - is all over the story of Jesus. It is not just in the big event, his death and resurrection, but also in how he lived and who he spent time with. Jesus faced mortality every time he touched a leper, healed a sick child, or stepped between a fallen woman and the men who wanted her dead. Today is an invitation for us to face our mortality as well, not just by thinking about death, but by acting differently here and now, while we are alive.

In the gospel for today Jesus is on a bit of a tear against visible acts of piety. “Beware of practicing piety in front of others so that you can be seen by them,” he says to his listeners and also, perhaps, to us. Jesus isn’t upset about the acts themselves, but why they are being done. Giving money, fasting, and praying are important spiritual practices – they were important for people who walked the earth when Jesus did and they are important for us now. But Jesus is concerned, not just that these things happen, but that we do them in ways that form us for relationship with God and each other. In this gospel text, Jesus looks around and sees people engaging in behaviors designed to bring people closer to God and each other. He sees them twisting those behaviors into something that sets the people doing them apart and above others, instead. I can imagine why he found this upsetting. After all – Jesus is God incarnate, the creator of all things, whose desire to be with us was so great that he became mortal and died. This is Jesus, the man who never met a human being he wouldn’t touch, love, or heal. It is no wonder that when he saw people using giving, fasting, and prayer to distance themselves from each other, well it’s no wonder it made him mad.

The reality of our lives is that in this way we are all the same: we will all die. The reality of our lives is that in this way we are all the same: God loves us so much that God died, too. The reality of our lives is that in this way we are all the same: God’s promises to us cannot be bound by life or death. There is nowhere God will not go for you, no high peak or low valley that can separate you from God, no death that can remove you from belonging to God. And this is not just true for you, but for every human being you come in contact with. In this way we are never separate from each other. Our homeless neighbors, our mentally ill relatives, the people who annoy us, the people who we are told are very different from us – the reality of our lives is that in this way we are all the same: We are together, we are loved by God, and we belong to God and each other whether we like it or not.

So this is Ash Wednesday, and this is Lent: a time to come close to this reality. Some people choose to do this by giving something up or taking something on. If there is something you can give up or take on that will bring you closer to God in Jesus and closer to God in your fellow human being, then do it. But your practice should bring you close, not set you apart. As a community we are going to engage in practices together that will, we hope, bring us closer to that belonging we all share to each other and to God. We will learn about, pray for, and serve our vulnerable neighbors. We have replaced our usual icons with icons that help us in this practice – pictures and art that reflect God in the hands, feet, and faces of the poor. And tonight we will contemplate our mortality, our eventual death. We don’t do this because we deserve to be punished, or because we want to be sad or because we should be afraid – none of this is the purpose of tonight, or of Lent. Remember you are dust – God has created great things, from dust. To dust you will return – God continues to create goodness, hope, and love from the dust in your life and in mine. Ashes are our hope, a sign that God’s promises will never cease, a moment to remember that cradle to grave, baptism to funeral, we are held by the God who loves us into belonging, who compels us into service, who calls us from death into life.