Ash Wednesday

Sermon on Joel 2:12-19, by Evan McClanahan |

Some time ago, I was doing student outreach when a young woman came up to me and began to share her story. She was a recent immigrant from a Muslim country and was interested in becoming Christian. Only, I wasn’t 100% sure she wanted to become a Christian because she had heard of Jesus and sought him to be her Lord. Rather, she was hoping to enculturate herself more as an American and perhaps resurrect a relationship that had fallen on hard times.

In fact, it became clear that her chief concern or source of anxiety was a relationship that had ended that she hoped could be revived. Without attempting to be an actual relationship counselor and without knowing all of the facts, my suggestion was that, in all likelihood, she needed to realize the relationship she was seeking to revive was dead and gone. There was no good reason to continue to pursue it. It had run its course and the race was over. There was nothing to salvage.

Clearly, that is not what she wanted to hear. She wanted to maintain the hope – however remote – that the relationship could be repaired and begin anew. Meanwhile, she continued living apart from it: getting her degree, working hard, perhaps truly pursuing Christian truth. I assessed – and she agreed with my assessment – that she really had one foot in her future and one foot in her past. I mentioned that is a very difficult way to walk.

What she wanted to avoid was death. She did not want to admit that something in her life was really dead and could not be revived. And in so doing, she really isn’t so different from any of us. We all live in denial of death. Maybe death of relationships, but also death itself. Indeed, while many Protestants do not like the rituals of Ash Wednesday, it is not hard to defend the Church’s reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return soon enough. While it would be morbid to focus or obsess on our death, it is equally unhealthy to forget that one day, we will die.

There is a show on Netflix – 90% of it I have not watched – that aims to take a deep dive into healthy living. You know, cleansing, de-aging, eating healthy, stuff like that. On one episode, three women undertook various diets to see if they could “de-age”, that is draw a larger disparity between their actual age and their virtual age. The idea is that by healthy-enough living, we can extend our life spans. Sure enough, with the right diets, a few of them added a few months to their expected lifespans.

Transhumanists go many steps further. Their goal is to extend their lives eternally, first by gene therapies; then by becoming something like cyborgs; then, finally, by leaving these bodies behind altogether to live in a virtual cloud, presumably on a server that never crashes, overheats or is not run by an incompetent System Administrator.

I would argue – especially given the thoroughly materialistic worldviews of all involved – these are nothing more than attempts to deny death. You can tell yourself whatever you like and you can do all the cleanses in the world. You can even fool yourself into believing that your soul can be uploaded onto a computer. But you – the body and soul that make you you – will experience physical death.

Just embrace it. Accept it. Admit it. And then move forward. It is hard to fully live while you are in denial of reality. For you have to spend so much time, money, and energy denying the truth, that you are not free to live life to its fullest. Just as the young woman refused to admit her relationship was dead and she found herself stuck in a holding pattern, so, too, do we find ourselves if we do not admit the reality about these lives.

So tonight, we admit the truth. We are dust, and one day we will return to dust, until Jesus comes again and raises these bodies from the dead. At that point, our souls and bodies will be together once again just as they are now. Except then, our bodies will not be mere dust, they will be glorified bodies that will never die, decay, or disease.

So that is reality: we will die, and we will be resurrected. So you don’t have to walk like a penguin, barely able to waddle because you have one foot in this truth and one foot in another. You can accept the inevitable reality of your death and resurrection and live now embracing both. And what does such a life look like? For starters, it is not a life that seeks to impress other people. You live as though you have only an audience of one: God himself.

Jesus speaks about not letting the world know of your virtue. That’s right. We don’t just live for the here and now. We are free from even impressing ourselves! We don’t need to justify our existence through our works or our goodness. We exist and thrive by God’s grace. We can live without the right hand knowing what the left hand is doing. Who cares! And if and when we fast, it isn’t to de-age, but to make a small sacrifice of praise to demonstrate our sincerity.

You see, if you are honest that death is your ultimate end, then there is no need to posture or preen or pretend. You are free to live for others, having freed yourself from the judgements of others. You can move ahead because – let’s be honest – you’ve already admitted the worst: you are already dead. It’s just a matter of time before that becomes a reality and you are resurrected.

So congratulations. You are dead. You have nowhere to go but up. Thanks be to God, through the promise of resurrection, that is exactly where we will go. Amen.