Tag Archives: resurrection

An Odd Day, an Odd Faith — a Sermon for Ash Wednesday When It Falls on Valentine’s Day

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This is the text of the sermon preached on Ash Wednesday, February 14, at Shepherd of the Bay Lutheran Church in northern Door County, Wisconsin.

What an odd, odd day. Ash Wednesday is odd enough in itself, but when it falls on Valentine’s it’s even more odd. Many of my clergy friends have been making the most of this strange calendric convergence.  One posted on Facebook this imaginary conversation: “So, what are your Valentine’s Day plans?” “Oh, I have to work and remind everyone that they’re going to die.”  Another toyed with the idea of plastering the sign of the cross on her parishioner’s foreheads with melted chocolate. I, on the other hand, have been threatening to make an ashen heart on your foreheads.

While Valentine’s Day takes its name from two separate Christian martyrs who were both executed in the 3rd century A.D. by the Roman emperor Claudius II, the holiday has come to extol romantic love — it’s the day to send chocolates or roses to your true love, or to the one you hope will become your true love.

Ash Wednesday, on the other hand, seems to be the exact opposite. It’s not a party, but the definition of a non-party. The Old Testament lesson from Joel blows a trumpet to announce the darkness of sin and suffering. Joel urges the ancient people of God and us, all of us, from nursing infants to the most aged among us to come before God and pay attention to those things that are most important — our sin, our mortality, our need for divine forgiveness, and the accompanying assurance that God is merciful.

Ash Wednesday calls us to face the harsh and precious reality that each of us was molded by the hand of God out of the elements of creation and each of us will once again become those elements. Yet we don’t speak of this reality in a cold or clinical way like we might approach a cadaver in a morgue. We do so with a sense of wonder, and again, with a eye to the promises of God. The ashes we allow to be inscribed on our foreheads are understood as symbols of our frail mortality and certain death. The ashes point beyond themselves to a hidden life-giving power.

For a few years before moving to Door County, Sheryl and I volunteered at the Nachusa Grasslands Nature Conservancy Prairie Preserve. It’s a project in western Illinois that now encompasses nearly 4000 acres and is being returned to its original state as a biologically diverse grasslands. Key to that restoration is the annual controlled burning in the spring of the year. Regular burning is a necessary step in the health and vitality of the prairie. The heat germinates certain seeds and clears the way for others to sprout and grow.

Here is the paradoxical truth of Ash Wednesday. The loving presence of God is hidden in the dust and ashes that dominate this day. Far deeper than the romantic love of Valentine’s Day and chocolates and roses, God comes to us with a love that rescues us from our violent ways with each other, from the limits of our mortality, and promises life that endures beyond our death.

See, the season of Lent that we begin today is going somewhere. Where? We’re headed to Easter, that grand celebration of death that gets turned into life. There’s this part of the communion liturgy we call the Proper Preface. It comes right after the opening sentences. You’ll recognize it because it begins, “It is indeed our duty and delight that we should at all times and in all places give thanks to you, almighty and merciful God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” And then it goes on in poetic language to tie this eucharistic celebration to the themes of the church year. I kind of miss the old one for lent; they changed it in this new hymnal; the old one proclaimed that where death began, life will be restored and that the Evil One who by a tree once overcame will likewise by a tree be overcome. That infamous apple tree of the Garden of Eden will be superseded by a cross-shaped tree on a gruesome hill outside Jerusalem; there the possibility of life with God was born. Indeed, dear church, because we are so truthful today about our mortality, the promise of resurrection is all the more sweet.

This is an odd day, this Ash Wednesday, made all the more odd by the juxtaposition with Valentine’s Day. But then ours is an odd faith, a faith that began in the dust and ashes of a borrowed tomb, a grave, a place of death. That womb of dust and ash and death was the resting place of Christ who loved the world all the way to death on a cross.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  These are the words that will be spoken over you in a matter of minutes. Your life is fleeting. The clock is ticking. But the mark of the cross reminds you that there is so much more. Death gives way to the life that was promised at your baptism. Ashes are not forever. Endings always call up new beginnings. Now, even now, in the midst of dust and ashes on this day of love, it is a day of deep grace, the day of our salvation.

Because Resurrection Is More Than a Metaphor

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resurrection.jpgYesterday I posted this on my Facebook page: it seems to me that the challenge of preaching on Easter is to preach resurrection as something that God really did and still does without turning it into a metaphor for stuff that was going to happen anyway, with or without Christ’s resurrection.

Too often, I think I’ve missed the point in my Easter preaching. In 25 years of Easter preaching, I think I’ve preached a few of those Easter sermons where I talk about our own experience of resurrection.  Someone experiences a reconciliation in a relationship; it feels like a resurrection. Someone is told that they’re cancer-free; it feels like a resurrection. One year, we had come out of a pretty serous congregational conflict; Easter that year felt like resurrection, and I’m betting that’s what I preached. In those cases, I was using resurrection as a metaphor. In a sense, they were resurrections.  A metaphorical sense. I’m not denying God’s presence in those experiences, and I’m not even going to deny that God might have had something to do with them, though I’m less certain about that. Regardless, they aren’t the point of Christ’s resurrection. Those things would have happened whether Christ rose from the dead or not. And if Christ’s resurrection is the game-changer that the New Testament tells us it is, then it has be be more than a metaphor for the places in our lives where we experience rebirth.

In that great chapter that interprets the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15), Paul begins by simply stating that the resurrection happened, that it’s an historical fact. He doesn’t begin by explaining it, but by proclaiming it. He then goes on to say that Christ’s resurrection from the dead means that there will be a general resurrection from the dead; Christ is the first in a long line of those who will rise from the dead. But even that isn’t what Paul is getting at, I don’t think. It’s an aside; not unimportant, but not the point.

What lies closer to the center of what Paul is getting at is embedded in these words:  Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. (1 Corinthians 15:24-27)

God’s work is on a trajectory. The kingdom is coming. The work is happening. God is working to foil the powers of evil and sin, to bind the powers, to lay low the authorities. Christ’s resurrection was the decisive turning point in the work of bringing all things to their fullness, to that restoration that God promises, the endgame to which all things are moving.

To do that God has made a people. That’s not our usual language to take about the fruit of Jesus’ death and resurrection. We’re much more likely to talk about personal salvation, of the implications of Christ’s resurrection for me personally. But I don’t think Christ’s work has ever been about personal salvation. It’s been about calling and creating a people.  It’s been about a body, a qahal, an ecclesia. It’s been about  forming a royal priesthood and a holy nation (not to be confused, fellow Americans, with a nation-state).

So, the connection of Christ’s resurrection to our own baptism is not that we have now been saved, it’s that we have now been joined to a body through whom God is working to bring redemption, healing, and reconciliation to all creation.

Here’s why I think it’s important. There’s enough bad stuff going on out there to make any reasonable person give up on resurrection and just let it be a metaphor for nice stuff that happens regardless of whether or not the tomb was empty on that first Easter morning. Truth is, I don’t guess that there is any more wrong with the world than there usually is when Eastertide rolls around. But it seems like it to me. I’ll own that. The bombings in Brussels aren’t anything new. But they are fresh and raw. This crazy circus that we call a presidential campaign has moved from the sublime to the ridiculous to the downright scary. My heart aches at the way we polarize and demonize each other and perpetuate structures of oppression. These are the front lines of the rulers and authorities and powers.

Most personally, for the last month our family has been trying to support each other and find light in our own darkness. Five weeks ago, our grandaughter, Eliana Frances was born; she’s a precious, beautiful little girl. Eliana was born with an extremely rare skin disorder, epidermolysis bullosa, and has been in the neonatal intensive care unit since her birth. EB is a very nasty disorder in which baby Eliana’s skin is deficient in the proteins that allow the layers of skin to adhere to one another. The doctors and nurses work tirelessly to manage her severe pain.

The resurrection of Jesus is not immediately going to change any of that stuff. The presidential campaign is what it’s going to be. Turning around the structures of oppression will take generations. ISIS isn’t going away and there will be more loss of life in terrorist incidents. And the resurrection of Jesus isn’t going to cure Eliana.

So, what does it mean? I think it means that in the midst of all the shit, in the damn middle of all the obvious signs of sin and brokenness and darkness and evil, God is at work. If the resurrection of Jesus was a game-changer, then I have to believe that in the same way that God was at work in Jesus’ death, so God is at work in the midst of the contrary bringing life in the midst of death. It’s a bit of a misnomer to say that death has been defeated; there’s too much of it hanging around to believe that. Paul reminds us that one day it will.

Here’s where we get at what I think is the heart of the game-changing action of God in Jesus’ resurrection. If God is at work in the middle of it all, then the body of Christ must be the incarnation of that work, a body called to live differently.  We are called, reborn, and empowered to be a people who live as if that defeat has already taken place. The powers and authorities are at work: anger, rage, oppression, vengeance, retaliation, fear. Those are the ways of death and they eat away at the human soul. They are the ways of death that God intended to put to rest in Christ’s resurrection. In it’s place a people was created who love without condition, who serve without counting the cost, who honor every human life as a brother or sister made in the image of God.

A people who have been raised from the dead. Not metaphorically. Literally.