Isaiah 58:6-12
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.
1 John 3:14, 16-23
We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death. We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us — and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?
Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.
And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.
John 15:12-17
[Jesus said to the disciples,] "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another."
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It has been a week of sitting at bedsides, holding the hands of dear ones who are whispering their goodbyes to loved ones who are passing from this life.
Bedsides are holy spaces. Spaces of grief and yet spaces of beauty, too.
These bedside moments are moments of lingering in proximity to death, which is at once unsettling and perspective-granting.
Because when you sit in the presence of death, you begin to make an accounting of life.
You consider all the things that have given this dear one’s fleeting life its worth.
And inevitably, you land at love.
You remember the ways that this dear one showed love for family and the loving ways they gave themselves to others. You think about all of the things that they loved to do and experience in their life. You think about the love that they shared with you, and you think about what you yourself held most dear about your relationship, what you will mis the most, what sort of emptiness will be left behind when your dear one can no longer breathe love back at you.
There is something about being near to the power of death that causes us to let go of everything else, and to set our sights on love as the highest value, the thing that makes life worth living, the thing that we most want to remember about those who have gone before us, the thing we most what others to remember about us when each of us, in time, will meet our own end.
Death always seems to bring us back to love.
I am always struck, at the beginning of Lent, by the way that we begin and end this season in proximity to grief and death.
We trace a cross of ash onto our foreheads and are reminded that “to dust we shall return” as we begin a season that will lead us, ultimately, to the foot of the cross, where Jesus will lament his own mortality, crying out in his last moment of despair, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
God has not forsaken him, of course. Neither does God abandon any one of us as we travel through times of grief and death.
But it can feel that way. Like God is absent. Like grief and death might consume us. Like the emptiness left after we have said goodbyes might as well be a giant, insatiable black hole in the middle of the cosmos.
And yet what God promises us, even if we cannot always feel the presence of God, is that we will yet be able to see and feel the presence of love in this world. And where love is, so also is God.
When everything is stripped away, when our lives, by grief or pain, are jostled into perspective, love is the thing that never fails, never ends, always endures.
Ash Wednesday asks us to draw close to the reality of death, that we might here recognize the depth and breadth of God’s neverending and unfailing love for us and for creation.
Our calling as we enter Lent is a calling to return to this love. We to turn back to the love that God has poured into this world through faithfulness to Israel, through the life of of Jesus, through his death and resurrection, through the sending of the Spirit. We also align our hearts again to the work of love that God has set before us to do in this world.
The ancient spiritual disciplines of Lent - prayer, fasting, and almsgiving - are disciplines that each, in their own way, draw us close to God’s heart. And they push us to challenge the power of death in this world by becoming the power of love.
Against the march of death and grief all around us, Jesus invites us to love one another as he has loved us; by pouring ourselves out in acts of compassion and servanthood. Loosening bonds of injustice. Letting the oppressed go free. Sharing bread with the hungry. Sheltering the homeless poor. Clothing the naked. Speaking grace instead of stirring up evil.
The writer of 1 John urges us to love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And he challenges us with the question, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”
And then he makes a bold and wonderful claim: it is because we love one another that we pass from death to life. It is love that keeps us from abiding in death; it is love that pulls us back to life, even when it feels that grief would swallow us whole.
God’s love abides in us. God’s love restores our life. And God’s love flows through us into a world of death, a world of grief, a world that needs to feel hope and renewal and resurrection.
Tonight, we have been marked with death. We have been given the benediction of our mortality. Like all those who hold vigil at bedsides, we are looking death square in the eye, and as we hold this gaze, everything unimportant falls away. Everything inessential dissolves.
And we are left with two things.
Ashes.
And love.
One is a sign of death.
And the other is a sign of life.
For however long we are given the gift of breath in our lungs, there is nothing of higher value in this life, no calling more basic, no devotion more profound than the dedication of our hearts to the work of love.
We might do well to get the song “Seasons of Love” stuck in our heads tonight, the most well-known song from the musical, Rent.
It asks the question, “How do you measure a life?”
And then answers, “Measure in love.”
Love is how we spend and measure our lifetimes, and love is how we spend and measure the season of Lent into which we are now entering. We step into this season by running back into the wide embrace of God, into the arms of a love that surrounds us and supports us and forgives us and will never forsake us.
We return to love so that we can become love.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
And remember that you have life, and so you are love.
Remember that we love because God first loved us.
I leave you with these final words of blessing and encouragement, Alexandra Vasiliu’s poem, “things to do in your lifetime:”
to love
to forgive
to heal
to dream
to hug
to rise from the ashes
to shelter others hearts
to bloom
to listen
to laugh
to keep warm
to search for beauty
to believe
to illuminate
to forgive again
to love more and
more
Amen.