Sermon for Ash Wednesday, 2020

Homily for Ash Wednesday, 2020

Fr. Tony Melton, Christ the King Anglican

“Remember, O Man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.

Man is a complex being. Men and women are, on the one hand, immortal souls, crafted specifically for everlasting communion with God, spiritual, like the angels. And on the other hand, not like the angels, for we are creatures, made from the earth, made for the earth, over the animals, but like them. And in the beginning, there was no conflict between the two realities of spirit and body, heaven and earth. Our earthiness was not, in any way, an obstacle to our everlasting communion with God. Far from it! All of the earthy gifts from God, most especially the Tree of Life, were intended to be a conduit, or sacrament of His love and life. Mankind was commissioned to go, tend, keep, multiply, and subdue the unspeakably beautiful Creation. And though it was left unstated, the whole task given to Adam and Eve was to be filled with eating and drinking and dancing and multiplying and hunting for rubies and precious stones in the rivers. These earthy immortals would have lived forever in this state of bliss, with no conflict between them and Creation. But it was not to be.

Within the context of this grand Feast of all Creation, there was one thing that was prohibited. A sort of Fast. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was kept from them to accentuated and teach that all that they did enjoy was given by God. It provided also the opportunity for the Adam and Eve to choose God, and what He provided, even as they enjoyed what He had given, thereby combining feasting with worship. But then the rupture of all Creation occurred. For the first time, Adam and Eve chose the one thing that was not given and ate the forbidden fruit. They created a nearly unstoppable momentum within the human heart to take and plunder and use all of Creation, not for communion with God, not for worship, not for that which would tend to immortality, but for the purposes of pleasing our desires, building up our own glory, and protecting ourselves from God. Because this really was a rupture of the human soul, Creation became to us both friend and foe. Friend each time we partake of it with perfect gratitude. Foe when God’s gifts become idols, attachments, or addictions. Death is the natural result of this rupture of the heart. In this way, the Holy Eucharist is a metaphor for our whole life of Creation. St. Paul says that those who partake of Christ’s body and blood with evil in their heart can become sick and die. Is this not what the story of our world has been from Eden on? We have sin in our heart and partake of the gifts of God with evil intention, and so we die. Death shows us that the relationship between our soul and Creation is broken because our first parents stole Creation from the Creator for their own pleasure and power.

Enter Jesus, the new Adam, who upon being baptized by John in the Jordan was driven out into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil. The Wilderness is where He begins, because this is where Man began, only the setting is reversed. Instead of a Garden, there is a Desert. He will undo what Adam did in the clearest of ways because Adam, in the Garden of Life, in the midst of all that Creation could offer still says, “Man does not live by the Word of God, but by this one thing which I do not have. This food; this dainty treat of mine.” But Jesus, in the Wilderness of Death, surrounded by nothing that this world could offer up for His satisfaction, says, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” And this time, the Serpent went away defeated.

I have just had the experience, within the last two weeks, of seeing Vandi’s Opa get closer and closer to Death. He died less than a week ago. As he lay there in hospice, highly medicated, struggling to breathe, only occasionally aware of what was going on around him, I wondered what the point of this was. Why does death have to be so slow, painful, humiliating, and ugly? Is it not bad enough that we must die?  And then the funeral plans add another layer of dread, and the reality hits that this body will disintegrate in the ground, the arms that hugged, the lips that kissed, the eyebrows that made funny faces. All of this comes to a bitter end. The Church in her wisdom reminds us this day, “Remember, O Man, that thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return.” Why? And what does it have to do with Lent?

To put it simply, Death teaches us of the broken relationship between the soul and Creation, which comes from our broken relationship with the Creator. It reminds us of the first sin in the Garden, where Adam and Eve put Creation over the Creator. Death shatters the illusion that “Man lives by Bread alone.” What death teaches us, and what I have contemplated these last two weeks with Opa, is that this earthly life, in all its beauty and wonder, will end in the humiliating state of the body and the cruelty of the grave. The Bread in Jesus’ Wilderness, which corresponds to the Forbidden Fruit, and is now representative of all that Creation can give us, cannot give us true life. This is what Adam and Eve failed to grasp. They were deceived into thinking that the key to their full life was to be found outside of the Creator, and found in the Creation. They made an idol of Creation, and placed it over the Creator. Now, because of the contagion of sin, you and I are in perpetual danger of idolizing even the things that God has given to us. Do you see that every single thing in Creation is a potential reenactment of the first Sin in the Garden? Your food, your money, your neighbor, even your body—what is exempt from our propensity to take, and use because this or that is desirable to the eyes and able to make us all that we, in our carnal imaginations, hope to be. Because of our sin, Creation is where idols are made. This is why Jesus went out into the Wilderness, the place of Death, the place where Creation had so little to offer Him. And this is why God allows us to die, like Opa, in the “morbidity of decrepitude.” It is so that we put away any illusion that our eternal longings can be satisfied by this world and in this body of death. And we receive this hard lesson that we might choose the one thing that is most needful, above all else; the only person or thing that stands outside of world: God.

Now there is another side to this. Remember what I said—all created things are foe and friend. Here’s the thing: If God is chosen, perfectly and fully, then all His gifts become what they were intended to be: conduits of communion with Him, just like in the Garden. But it is not that simple. We oscillate in our use of Creation. Sometimes we partake of God’s gifts with gratitude; other times we take for our pleasure and power. It is even more complex than that. Even are best moments are mixed with sin and righteousness. In this life, we will never choose God fully, nor use any of His Creation perfectly. All our good deeds are acceptable to God by the grace given to us through Christ Jesus. But when we eat a steak, or buy a car, or lie with our spouse, or relax on our couch, who among us can say that the “flesh” that St. Paul says still “wars against the spirit” does not touch these actions? “But these things are good!” True! But they are frequently made into idols, and even at our best they are mixed. Because our relationship is Creation is so complex, the Church has two modes, which teach us: Feasting and Fasting. Feasting is a reminder of the Garden, where Man and God and Bread lived in perfect harmony and worship. Fasting is a reminder of the Wilderness, where Man and God and Bread live in the  disharmony of sin and idolatry. Lent is the Great Fast, where the Church joins Jesus in the Wilderness and is reminded that “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Indeed, we make our world, for a time, less like the Garden and more like the Wilderness, that the sweetness and glory of God might be more clearly seen. We deny ourselves God’s gifts, for a time, that our natural idolatry, attachments, and addictions, which draw us away from God, might be atrophied.  And this is so that we can more fully enter into the Feast of Easter, where all things, even life itself, are celebrated in light of the New Creation, which will be untainted by Sin and Death, and where Man will live in perfect harmony with God and Creation.

This evening we enter this alternate reality, the Great Fast, where we join the New Adam in choosing God above all His gifts. We lean into the words that bewilder the dying world: “Blessed are the poor, and those who hunger for God.” “Man does not live by Bread Alone.” “What is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet to lose His soul?” The ashes on our foreheads are a sign that these bodies, and all earthy things will die. Power and pleasure make less sense in the dust of the Wilderness, and make even less sense in the dirt of the grave. Choose God over all things. Eat His food. Drink His drink. For “whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst.” And, “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.” Amen.