Ash Wednesday (OSLC) - February 26, 2020

Ash Wednesday
OSLC
February 26, 2020
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

As I was preparing for this sermon, I read an article in The Christian Century by Matt Fitzgerald, 5 Times a day, the WeCroak app reminds me that I’m going to die. I liked this, until I didn’t.” In the article, he tells about an app, called the WeCroak app, that reminds users that they are going to die. Not once. Not twice. But five times per day. Seriously, the app exists. I checked. It has four and a half stars on the Google Play app store, with over ten thousand downloads. It seems to have morphed a bit since Matt used in in 2018. When he used it, five times per day, it said the same thing: don’t forget, you’re going to die. Now, the app promises five quotes per day to help “find happiness by contemplating your mortality.” In our society, we’ve become death avoidant. Facing mortality is radical and countercultural in this world that tries to convince us – with enough wealth, with the right medical treatments, with the right attitude – that we can stave off death.
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Reviews for the app include this one from Kyle: “having this app for a little over a week now has been an experience to say the least… It has been interesting to have random reminders that I’m going to die, we all know this, but contemplating it regularly has shifted my lifestyle to a more pleasant experience simply by understanding this is it and I need to live fully aligned with who I am to feel fulfillment. I will never delete this app. 😊”

And for a time, for Matt, it worked. He found that by remembering his mortality he found more patience with his kids, speaking softly to them instead of going into a rage with them. Usually the alerts happened when nothing notable was happening, but in his words “nothing happens, but my coffee tastes better. Nothing changes, but I notice the sunlight pouring through the bay window. Before I had the app, I rarely found such pleasure in the mundane. A microdose of mortality can make the day glow.”

But there came a time when those notifications fell short – when the grief of his father’s death as a young teenager came pouring back. “As WeCroak pulled me under, down into the depths of existence, it also pulled me back into the pain I’d silenced long ago.” It is a reminder of death, of one’s own mortality without the promise of new life, without Christ. He said that, in the end, the app “ask[ed] [him] to put [his] faith in the grave.” But as Christians, we put our faith in the Christ who has victory over the grave, the one who says that death will never have the final word. He deleted the app.

Today, we do face our mortality. And that is an important part of Ash Wednesday. Today, we do hear the words, “you are dust and to dust you shall return.” In Lent, we are setting out in a walk toward Jerusalem. We are setting out on a journey toward the cross. To the place where God, made known in the person of Jesus, dies. We don’t get the joy of Easter morning without Good Friday. We don’t get resurrection without death. For it is in death - in Jesus’ death on a cross - God’s love is ultimately made known to us and to all humanity. It is here that God, in Jesus, makes it clear that not even death - including the death of God’s beloved Son at our hands - can separate us from God’s life-giving and redeeming work in the world.

Because we are mortal, because we are in bondage to sin, we need Jesus. We need the journey to Jerusalem. We need the journey to the cross. The journey to Jerusalem is one marked by repentance, by turning back toward God, reorienting our lives yet again to God’s work in Christ Jesus. The journey to Jerusalem is marked by the acknowledgement that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. These ashes are a reminder that We need God’s grace, God’s forgiveness, and God’s life.

But the ashes we receive today don’t stop there. The ashes follow the sign of the cross, the cross that was marked on each of our foreheads at our baptism. We can face our own mortality because of the promises of baptism. When we were baptized, we were “sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” It is a reminder that we have already been named and claimed as a child of God. We recall the gift of baptism, where in those waters, not only are we joined into the body of Christ, it is also where we have already died and risen with Christ. In the waters of baptism, we have received the promise that, in the words of Frederick Buechner, “resurrection means that the worst thing is not the last thing.” While we recognize our mortality and our sin, because of Christ, Sin and death no longer hold power over us. We trust not in the grave, but in Christ. Christ’s love, Christ’s death are what frees us from sin and death. As we say in our thanksgiving for baptism at funerals: “when we were baptized in Christ Jesus, we were baptized into his death. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into his death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall surely be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

These ashes remind us not only who we are: sinners in desperate need of God’s love, God’s grace, and God’s forgiveness. But these ashes remind us whose we are: God’s beloved children, named, claimed and saved by the grace of God through faith apart from the things we do or don’t do for the sake of Christ. And nothing, not our sin, not our mortality, can change whose we are. With those reminders, we are set out to live as the risen body of Christ for the sake of the world.

To quote Daniel Ehrlander, “Baptized into his death, we are raised to live as the body of Christ in the world today.” The call to repentance today is a call to return to our baptismal callings, to center our lives around the cross, to risk looking at death and sin in its face, place our faith in the one that declares victory over death and the grave, and to dare to live out our identity as beloved and redeemed children of God.
Amen