Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come.  Take my lips and speak with them, take our minds and think with them, take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you.  In Christ’s name, we ask it.  Amen.

Today, we embark on our forty-day journey through Lent to the great celebration of our Lord Jesus Christ’s glorious resurrection.  On Easter Sunday, our joyful acclamation, “Alleluia, Christ is risen!” is full of the profound hope that God has reached beyond the grave and gate of death resurrecting Jesus offering to each of us abundant and eternal life.  And as badly as perhaps we would like to forget this foreboding season of self-sacrifice and self-examination that proceed our joyful Easter celebration, our journey to the empty tomb must begin here on Ash Wednesday at the cold contemplation of our own deaths: in the conviction that I will die.  Whether we have the ears to hear it or not, Ash Wednesday reminds us that no matter how in control of our lives we believe we are, death will claim each of us.  No matter how secure we feel with all things we have gathered around us and all the accolades we have won, you and I are powerless over our own physical death. 

“Remember!” the priest has said for centuries on this day.  “Remember!”  The priest warns as he or she places her thumb in ashes and signs the cross on our foreheads.  “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  Ash Wednesday, the day of personal ashes, the first of the forty days of Lent.  Like the tolling of a church bell, year after year, just as in ages past, the word rings in our ears, “Remember!”

But, isn’t the whole business of remembering our own mortality irrelevant and at best archaic?  The Lutheran pastor and author Walter Wangerin, Jr. writes, “Why should I think about death when all the world cries ‘Life’ and ‘Live?’  The priests of this age urge me toward ‘positive thinking,’ ‘grabbing the gusto,’ ‘feeling good about myself.’  And, didn’t Jesus himself promise life in abundance?  It’s annoying to find the easy flow of my full life interrupted by the morbid prophecy that it will end.  Let’s keep things in their place, simple and safe: Life now, while there is life; death later, when there must be death…”  Nevertheless, remember, tolls the ageless bell.  In spite of my resistance, this day and the season that follows warn, “Remember that you are dust!” 

Our Old Testament Lesson, from the Prophet Joel, echoes the words uttered during the imposition of ashes.  The prophet paints a fearful portrait of the final passing of the age of humankind, “Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my Holy Mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near—a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness!  Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes.”  Additionally, Jesus’ words, in today’s Gospel lesson, remind us that the physical world is deteriorating—slowly wasting away eventually into that which human’s fear more than anything else—non existence.  Jesus warns, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume.”

You see, you and I are so afraid of dying and so unsure of our faith’s promise of life beyond the grave, that we seek security and meaning by trying to take control of our lives and by surrounding ourselves with material trappings of success.  We are utterly consumed by our own lives, and we hoard the treasures of this world hoping that they will offer us the salvation our hearts so desire.  If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that youth, beauty, and wealth are the gods of this age and, unfortunately, so many of us are fooled into believing that these idols will bring meaning and value to our lives—even when we know that the fountain of youth is a myth and that all material things are wasting away.  Again and again, we try to lose ourselves in the madness of the aquisition of things and the importance of our well constructed lives to avoid the reality of our mortality.  Individually and culturally, we fear death so greatly that we mask it, avoid it, and deny it at all cost, sadly, at times, including the cost of our souls. 

I was on a plane several years ago flying to visit a friend in another part of the country.  As I flipped through the Sky Mall catalogue mindlessly wasting time, I noticed that they were selling cross necklaces.  The simple gold cross was draped across the neck of a beautiful woman dressed in the trendiest outfit possible.  She had a smile on her face that gave the impression that she didn’t have a care in the world.  She was young, beautiful and full of life.  The caption read, “The elegant simplicity and beauty of the cross necklace is the height of fashion this season.  No woman’s jewelry collection is complete without one.  Available in both gold and silver.”  I hope you see the irony.  As a culture, we have turned the cross, an instrument of death and torture, into a fashion symbol.  We make a mockery of Christ’s resurrection if we avoid and don’t take seriously Christ’s death.
 
In affect, Jesus’ words and our Ash Wednesday service say, “If you do not interrupt your life [and all its preoccupations] with convictions of your death to come, then neither will your death, when it comes, be interrupted by life.  Life now death later, indeed, but your life will be now only, and brief.  Your death will be forever.”  Remember that you are dust.

So here, in the conviction of our own mortality, we begin lent a season defined by self-examination and repentance.  The tradition of giving something up for Lent is not about losing weight or improving self-image, it is symbolic of peeling back the lairs of self-centeredness and worldly desires that separate us from a life-giving relationship with God here and now as well as in the life to come.  Self-examination is the process of intentionally looking inward, recognizing, and naming those things in our lives and lifestyles that are clearly not of God.  We are then moved to repentance—to turning our lives around.  We repent by, first, confessing those things that keep us from meaningful and healthy relationships with God and others.  And, second, we turn from our destructive ways, make amends with those we have hurt, and work diligently not to fall back into patterns of un-health and abuse. 

Just as the church’s call to the observance of a Holy Lent is timeless, so is the consolation and peace we receive through participation in this season.  There is meaning and abundant life to be had for each of us but too often we are looking in all the wrong places.  Abundance, in this life and the life to come, is discovered the moment we let go of our fear of death and our preoccupation with ourselves and with things and, instead, place our faith in that which can never pass away—God in Christ.

Instead of avoiding death, it is when we are moved to remember the death we so deserve to die that we remember the death that our Lord Jesus did, in fact, die—because his death took the place of ours.  As we hear the story of Jesus’ passion in the Gospels again and again, we see our death in Jesus’, and rejoice that we will know his rising, as well.  “Remember that you are dust.  Death now—yes, even in the midst of a bustling life.  My death and Jesus’ death, by grace joined together.  Remember—because this death, remembered now, yields life hereafter.  And, that life is forever.  Amen.

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