I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, March 13. The text is Mark 8:31-38; read it here.
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
It’s been a rich week for St. Lydia’s. Last Sunday, a few of us went to visit a church way up on 100th Street to see what they were up to up there, and got to see several of the children of that congregation baptized, got to see them go down into the water, got to see them drowned and reborn, made new creatures.
Then Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent, and a few of us met up in Union Square park right around noon and dipped our fingers in some ash mixed with oil, and looked in the eyes of a stranger as we smudged a cross on their forehead and said, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
We said this to a woman with her shopping list clutched in one hand, a man who took off his baseball hat, a tiny baby.
Yesterday, a few of us gathered together to learn about how to be companions to one another. We learned about a practice of compassion and listening that helps us walk with those who are suffering. We thought about all the reasons people experience suffering, the times that each of us have experienced suffering, what it’s like to be in that place, and how to be with others when they are there, and how to do that as a church.
And as we sat there, talking about suffering, the people of Japan searched the rubble for those who were missing, or waited for word about someone they loved, and some of them went to work, to flood a nuclear power plant and keep it from going into melt down.
In the midst of it all we have these words:
The Son of Man must undergo great suffering,
and be killed, and after three days rise again.
And then, my favorite line:
He said all this quite openly.
What would happen if we could say it openly too?
If we could look up to heaven
and sigh
and say,
we must suffer,
and die,
and rise again?
What would happen if we could say it openly:
That the ashes on our foreheads
mark us every day of our lives?
Say it openly:
In the midst of life, we are in death.
From whom can we seek help?
From you alone O, Lord.
Lent, for me, is a time of letting everything that isn’t God fall away, and seeing if I can sidle up a little closer to that thing Jesus said so openly, and that I forget so easily: that he must suffer and die and rise again.
And so must I.
And so we are anointed with oil,
prepared for burial,
drawing closer to God,
closer to the understanding
that we’re nothing but dust, and will return there one day.
I ride my bike in the city a lot, and every once in a while I find myself riding back to Manhattan over the Brooklyn bridge. My favorite time to do this is at twilight, as the sun sets over the city. And so often, as I look out over the glittering skyline and think of all the people in all those buildings and out on those streets,it strikes me suddenly, that despite all that we’ve built, these towering skyscrapers and massive structures, it’s all an illusion.
We’ve built a city that seems so permanent,
so strong,
a shining, glimmering
distraction from the truth:
that all of it is nothing but dust.
When the earthquake strikes
and the buildings crumble,
or the waves rush in
and over the levees,
it becomes frighteningly clear,
that there is only you,
and God,
and the whistle of the wind around you.
Standing on that precipice
you begin to understand
what Jesus means when he says,
Those who want to save their life will lose it,
and those who lose their life for my sake,
and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
What would happen if we could say it openly?
Live as if it was the only truth that we knew?
This year, I want Lent to be a season of truth.
A season of abandoning the glittering illusions
that keep us living in half-deceit
about who and whose we are.
The message is stark,
and at the same time,
incredibly hopeful.
Hopeful because it is incredibly honest.
Those of us who gathered in Union Square on Wednesday spent an hour and a half doing nothing but telling the truth.
Over and over again,
we said it:
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Suffer, Die, Rise.
Those children who were baptized last Sunday,
their pastor looked them in the eye and told them the truth:
You have been raised to new life.
Suffer, die, rise.
Over and over, we remind ourselves
of what we’re so prone to forget.
In the midst of life, we are in death.
From whom can we seek help?
From you alone, O Lord.
The message is stark,
but incredibly hopeful.
For speaking the truth about ashes
gives way to the truth about resurrection.
That, though we go down to the tomb,
death does not have the final word.
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