Ash Wednesday 2015 sermon

Ash Wednesday 2015 February 18, 2015 “Ash Wednesday is the day Christians attend their own funerals.”i This is the opening line from an essay on the gospel reading today by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor. “Ash Wednesday is the day Christians attend their own funerals.” Today is the day in the life of the church when we take up the penitential practice of marking ourselves in ash, in hearing the words while we feel the grit on our foreheads: “remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Why do we do this? Are we that morbid that we take some sort of pleasure in attending our own funeral? We do this to start fresh, to remember, to be forgiven, and to help us get reoriented in our relationship with God. So much of life we live in a mindless way, going through the motions, not really paying attention. Today is the day we are called up short out of that. Today is the day that we are reminded that we will not live forever; that life is precious and of value, and how we live this one, unique life matters to God and to the world. One of my favorite contemporary poets, a woman named Mary Oliver, was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, and so she wrote a poem about it. In the first two stanzas, she contemplates the frailty of her body and she reflects on what her death will be like. Listen now to her last two stanzas: 3. I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you're in it all the same. so why not get started immediately. I mean, belonging to it. There is so much to admire, to weep over. And to write music or poems about. Bless the feet that take you to and fro. Bless the eyes and the listening ears. Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste. Bless touching. You could live a hundred years, it's happened. Or not. I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years, none of which, I think, I ever wasted. Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going? Let me be urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats, so single of purpose and thinking, for a while, he had a lifetime. 4. Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat, all the fragile blue flowers in bloom in the shrubs in the yard next door had tumbled from the shrubs and lay wrinkled and fading in the grass. But this morning the shrubs were full of the blue flowers again. There wasn't a single one on the grass. How, I wondered, did they roll back up to the branches, that fiercely wanting, as we all do, just a little more of life?ii Today we live in this tension of remembering that we are dust and to dust we return and the fact that, at least for a while, we belong to this world. There is so much good that God invites us to give ourselves to in our short time here. One of my Facebook friends, who was also my liturgy professor in seminary, had posted this reflection yesterday and it gets to the heart of the matter today, I think. It is attributed to Rabbi Simcha. “Keep a piece of paper in each pocket. One should read: ‘For my sake the world was created.’ The other should read: ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ i. Barbara Brown Taylor Feasting on the Word Year B Vol. 2 p21 ii. http://www.onbeing.org/blog/mary-olivers-cancer-poem/7277