Remember you are dust...

Sermon preached at Whitkirk Parish Church

Ash Wednesday - 25th February 2009

A couple of phrases have been reverberating round my head over the past few weeks.  They are ‘In the midst of life there is death’ and ‘death comes like a thief in the night’.  For those who don’t know my father-in-law died very suddenly at the beginning of the month.  I was painting the bathroom ceiling, one of those jobs you put off until the weather is so bad that there is nothing else you can do to distract you and you have to get on with it, because it involves defungussising first.  James and Michael had been making best use of a bonus day off school and with friends blasted one another with snow balls in Temple Newsam.  They had just returned for a warm-up.  Then the phone rang and it was one of Susan’s dad’s friends and our lives were instantly turned upside down.  Literally, death had come like a thief in the night and in the midst of our life there was death staring at us.

That gives Ash Wednesday all the more poignancy for us this year.  To be told, as we shall be in a moment, we are dust and to dust we shall return, has an edge to it that I wasn’t expecting.  To be called to focus on the gift that is life, so fragile and unpredictable, is timely.  Today is a mini funeral when we are reminded of our own mortality and the challenge that all good funerals should include to use aright the time that is left to us here on earth, to repent of sin, the evil we have done and the good we have not done, and to be strengthened to follow the steps of Christ in the way that leads to the fullness of eternal life – to paraphrase a traditional funeral prayer.

Death disrupts our normal pattern.  It is no respecter of important engagements in the diary, of plans and to-do lists, or even what the weather is doing outside and the need to travel 230 miles in the snow.  It comes upon us and whether we are ready or not, it doesn’t care.  So Lent, which begins today, is supposed to be inconvenient.   The busy-ness of life is disrupted.  We might give some things up to remind us of that – alcohol, chocolate, biscuits.  These are trivial but the doing without is supposed to disrupt our usual satiating of cravings and make us think a bit about what life is for and how precious a gift it is.  It has become popular to say that we shouldn’t give things up but take something extra on for Lent – reading, studying, charity work.  While I understand that, and we provide opportunities to do it, I think there is still something important about giving things up that we miss if we don’t do it.  The disruption lasts for 40 days, a bit longer if we haven’t read the small print that Sundays as Feast Days are exempt.  And our society probably needs 40 days of this more than many previous ones because we are so used to being able to have what we want when we want it.

That of course was very much how it was pre-credit crunch and there are many who are going through a penitential fasting of credit at the moment.  The new kitchen, the new car, the holiday or more seriously the ability to buy a house at all or move to take up that job, are plans that have all been disrupted by the squeeze on easy credit.  The loans that financed these things have dried up.  Some of these are not that serious, some are and the knock on effect certainly is.  Jobs are being lost and businesses are struggling to keep going.  It is like a death, and so we are disrupted.

Like any death, then there is a chance to take the breather that it brings, to reflect on what counts and what does not.  In fact we need to take a breather in it and I have been reminded how much you need to give yourself space to assimilate what has changed, to mourn what has been lost.   And there will be lament because some of the loss is real loss and damages us.  We need to heal and our economics needs to heal.

So today, Lent begins.  It begins with ash and words that remind us of our mortality.  As we are reminded, so we are challenged to think how we celebrate the fragile gift that is life.  By fasting and self denial, real giving up, we can be all the more ready to engage with a world at a loss how to cope with the crisis that has brought to dust and ashes so much that we took for granted.  The false security of riches makes us think we are invincible and not mortal.  The reality, which the old Prayer Book carried and turns out to be more in tune with how life really is, is that in the midst of life there is death and it can come like a thief in the night.

One of the prophetic messages that we have to our society at the moment is to hold this truth and hold our society while they confront it like many of them have never done before.  For that they are lost and struggling to cope.  But like all good funerals, we don’t leave it with dust and ashes.  We turn to follow in the steps of Christ that leads to fullness of eternal life.  There is a bright horizon, a glimpse of glory that is beyond.  Lent can be long some years, but it does come to an end at Easter and what joy there is when the Alleluias return.

© Ian Black 2009