Ash Wednesday 2012

Ash Wednesday 2012
February 22, 2012
In preparing to write today’s sermon, I read two different “opening lines” that are so great for today’s sermon that I wish that I had written them myself.
The first one is this: “Jesus did not intend [for us] to use Ash Wednesday to give up chocolate.”i
The second one is this: “Ash Wednesday is the day Christians attend their own funerals.”ii
Perhaps you are wondering, “Other than being two great opening lines, what might the first one (giving up chocolate), have to do with the other (attending your own funeral)”?
And in reply, I say to you, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
A couple of weeks ago I happened upon a blessing written by the late poet and theologian John O’Donohue and the blessing is titled, “For Death.” In this blessing, O’Donohue writes about how, from the moment you are born, your death walks beside you and about how when destiny draws you into spaces of poverty, you are quietly befriending your death… The end of this blessing is

“…That the silent presence of your death
Would call your life to attention
Wake you up to how scarce your time is
And to the urgency to become free
And equal to the call of your destiny.

That you would gather yourself
And decide carefully
How you now can live
The life you would love
To look back on
From your death bed.”iii

That’s what this day is really about. It’s not about what you are going to give up to make yourself thinner, more virtuous, or even more holy. This day is about imagining that you are lying on your deathbed, as you feel those ashes scraped in the sign of the cross upon your forehead, about imagining what you hope that life stretched behind you looks like. And today is about asking yourself, “How does this life that I am currently living look differently from the life that I hope to have lived when I am facing my death?”

This day is about accepting Jesus’s invitation to consider what practices you might keep (or give up) during this holy season that can help you draw closer to God and can help you live more fully the life that you long to have lived as you prepare to die.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. As we spend the next few moments in silence, I invite you to consider: “How, then, can you live the life you would love to look back on from your deathbed?”

i.Michael Battle CREDO meditation 2/22/12

ii.Barbara Brown Taylor Feasting on the Word Year B Vol. 2 p21

iii.O’Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. Doubleday: New York, 72.