Remember that you are dust

Herr, lehre doch mich
dass ein Ende mit mir haben muss
und mein Leben ein Ziel hat
und ich davon muss.

Roughly translated:
Lord, teach me to know that all things have an end. And that I will also have an end.

So begins the third movement of Johannes Brahms’ Ein Deutches Requiem, one of the first major choral works I learned as a young musician.

Today is Ash Wednesday. Today, those same somber opening lines are our prayer. Today, we consider the truth of our own mortality.

We live in a culture that has a curious love/hate relationship with death. The evening news, each and every day, reports death and destruction, the more brutal and bizarre the better. But most other places our culture wants to hide the reality of death. Funeral parlors make our loved ones look as if they’re peacefully sleeping. When someone dies in a hospital, they’re taken out using the back service elevator. At funerals, the casket is usually beautifully polished wood, and a sheet of green Astroturf covers the newly-dug earth from the grave, and we leave before the earth is replaced, if not before the casket is lowered into the ground.

One of my seminary professors had the idea that we should come to funerals in blue jeans, carrying a shovel in one hand and a bottle of scotch in the other. We should all take turns filling in the grave, because at funerals everybody desperately wants something to do, but there is nothing that can be done. And then we should all go get rip-roaring drunk and tell stories and celebrate the life of the one we’ve just buried.

I told you when I got here that I would always try to tell you the truth from this pulpit. So here’s your bit of truth for the day: we are all of us, every one, going to die. Our bodies will stop working the way they work now, in all of that wonderful complicated mysteriousness, and we will decay, and eventually, sooner or later, the stuff that we are now will crumble to dust.


So what of that?

Well, I’d like to share with you two lessons that I learned from a large group of people who had a certain perspective on death.

While I was at seminary, I did a course called “Clinical Pastoral Education,” CPE for short, in which I was more or less a hospital chaplain intern for the summer. I did my rotation at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I spent a whole summer talking to people who had been warned by their physicians that they had a short time to live.

The first thing to take away from those conversations were that the patients I saw didn’t concern themselves with small things. It’s almost cliché that knowing you’re going to die means that you tend to focus on the important things. In fact, there’s a country western song out right now about the guy who’s diagnosed with cancer and goes skydiving and decides to be nicer and all those sorts of things.

But many of the patients I saw told me something you might not expect. And that was that knowing that they had only a limited time to live gave them freedom that they didn’t think they had before. Freedom to speak to those they loved, when they had been silent for too long. Freedom to take actions that they had always wanted to or needed to do, but had put off for another day. Freedom to redraw the map of their lives, how they spent their time, what they were willing to put up with.

And that leads us to the second thing; I hope thinking about our mortality will give us a renewed sense of urgency.

This past weekend, at diocesan council, we had some prayer time before each session would begin. At one of those sessions, the bishop read the necrology, the names of people from our diocese who had died in the last year. Well, right at that moment, I had stepped off the floor, and as the necrology was being read I was way in the back of the room, out by the entrance to the hall. And I realized, as the bishop read the names, that standing there next to me was a friend, someone I’ve known for several years now. That friend has been diagnosed with cancer, and I’ll admit that it was a little bit of a shock to realize that next year, the name of the person standing next to me might be on the list.


It is with those things in mind: our own mortality, and hopefully a sense of seeking the important things in life with a certain urgency, that, in the words of the prayer book, I call you to a holy Lent. Holy in the sense of set apart. A period of time, a season, set apart for a purpose, for sober, solemn reflection on who we are as God’s people, and what we are about.

At Easter, we celebrate God’s great victory over death, we celebrate our adoption as God’s children, we celebrate that we are set free and redeemed and sent out to do God’s work in the world. At Easter, we celebrate the resurrection. Yes, we are dust. Yes, we will die. That’s true. But it’s also true that nothing is destroyed in death that God cannot and will not resurrect.

I urge you to make this a season of reflection and rededication.

Not a season of self-denial for the sake of strengthening your own will, though that’s a good thing in its own way.

Not a season of doing without something so that it will taste all the sweeter on Easter for its absence during Lent, though that’s true too.

But instead, like the cancer patients I talked to, a time to take an honest look in the mirror. A time to acknowledge our own sinfulness, our own faults and limitations, and in that honesty find strength.




The readings for Ash Wednesday are here