"Remember"

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." 

I gathered with a small, rural Episcopal church to share in the beginning of the Lenten season. "Lent" literally means "spring," so rightly understood, Lent is not a kind of winter experience but rather a preparation for spring. New life is coming. Resurrection is coming!

We gathered in silence. The lectionary readings were followed by a congregational reading of Psalm 51. It was a conscious turning our faces away from sin and self and toward the Lord.

And then the Imposition of Ashes. These are the ashes left over from last year's Easter service, a mixture of burned palm branches mixed with olive oil. We all gathered at the altar rail as Father Jeff marked an X on our foreheads with the ashes. "Remember." Remember that our bodies are made out of the stuff of our planet. Remember that we are mortal. Remember that we were conceived in sin, so in many ways, our mortality is a gift of God's grace. 

"To dust you shall return." It isn't possible to escape death. By definition, mortality is temporary. We are having a temporary bodily experience. Every day is a gift that requires God's mercy, God's grace, God's presence.

And so, we entered into this Lenten season, a season intended to prepare us for a new Spring, with a focus on our sin-limited temporariness and our desperate need for redemption and daily grace. We are motivated anew to return to the Lord with all of our hearts, to break up the fallow ground of our hearts, and to seek the Lord.

It's not hard for me to do this year. We have lost so many dear friends and loved one this last year. In fact, the older we get, our friends and family occupy heaven in greater numbers than those who are still here. It made me wonder about God's perspective of our death.

"Precious"

"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful servants" (Psalm 116:15). Why would the Lord consider our death to be precious? Doesn't God know what an agonizing loss it is to those other mortal human beings who were connected to the one who has now died? Obviously, so, and God promises comfort in those times. So why "precious"?

It seems as though our death will not come as a surprise to God. The Psalmist sang, "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be" (Psalm 139:16). Even the day of our death is written in God's book. But somehow that particular day is looked at as "precious."

Could it be that God anticipates with joy the day when we will no longer be limited by our mortality? That the "lust" of our temporary flesh will be finished? That there will be no more barriers in our intimacy with God? No veil between us? Could it be that God loves us so much, that God is so passionately committed to a relationship with us, that the day that releases us to full uninterrupted fellowship with God would be considered precious?

If so, then during Lent, we turn in our limited mortality toward the Lord with a new desire to be near God, to live a life of loving obedience, doing our best to represent the Rule of God in our time and place. During Lent, we anticipate Easter morning and the reality of Resurrection accomplished by Christ on that day. But we also anticipate the day when the veil will be gone and nothing will hinder our heart-to-heart communion with our Creator-Father. Indeed, "to dust you shall return." But that is not the end!