2 March 2022

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

Last night at our Shrove Tuesday Supper, the question was posed, “what are three things to celebrate in life?” I said, “births, anniversaries, and death.” At that point everyone wondered why was the priest invited to the party! Everyone agrees that births and anniversaries are worth celebrating, but is death really something to celebrate? The answer to that question requires us to go deeper. How is death a celebration?

For the Christian we do not need to fear death. In fact, when we celebrate the saints, we celebrate them on their day of death. Only in the cases of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist are earthly birthdays celebrated, and in regard to God, we do celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Yet, even with Jesus, the celebration of his death and resurrection is much more important than the celebration of his worldly birth, and for Mary and John the Baptist, we also celebrate their deaths, or in Mary’s case, her assumption. But the celebrations of the earthly birthdays of Mary and John the Baptist are the exceptions. For the vast company of saints, we remember their lives on the day of their death – the day they entered into larger life.

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. On this Ash Wednesday we face squarely how all of us shall die. We shall return to the dust. The point of this is to remind us that there is a greater life to come for each of us, and because we believe in the Lord Jesus, we do not need to fear death. Hence for the Christian, when we are asked “what are three things to celebrate in life?”, it makes complete sense to say death. For the Christian death is not something to be feared as it is our entrance into new life.

This is the first day of Lent – Ash Wednesday – a day of fasting – a day of discipline and self-denial – a day of facing our mortality. And these forty days and forty nights shall lead us to Good Friday, a day when we celebrate our Lord’s death. To the outside world, Lent is a hard sell. The world teaches us to store up riches and to live our lives to excess, but here we are entering into a period of holy discipline and self-denial. And it is not just the world that struggles with Lent. I have known Christians who cannot stomach Lent. I have had parishioners tell me that they are not coming to church during Lent – that they would return at Easter. They are very honest that they expect church to constantly inspire them – they want church to be happy all the time – they are not interested in lament or even the proclamation of God’s justice. They only want to feel good when they come to church.

Well, Lent is not going to do that for anyone, and frankly, authentic Christianity requires Lent with its themes of sacrifice, the cross, and our dying unto the Lord, and one of the practical ways that we learn sacrifice is through our Lenten disciplines of fasting and self-denial.

And yet we must be careful how we practice self-denial. Sometimes the disciplines that people choose are problematic. How often have people chosen special diets that are more about their own glory than God’s glory? In our world of constant self-improvement, the line is thin between giving honor to God and living what some people call “one’s best life.” Still, I believe giving things up for Lent is a good idea, and this can be done in multiple ways.

Many of you know that yesterday was my birthday. Sometimes March 1 falls on Ash Wednesday. When that happens, I give up my birthday on the day, celebrating it on another day. It is a harder practice than we might assume, for the world will want to celebrate your birthday on Ash Wednesday, and wouldn’t it be nice to celebrate your birthday no matter what? Isn’t that what the whole world does? But again, when it falls on Ash Wednesday, fasting and God come before birthdays. And yet the cost of giving something up creates new riches for the soul that were unimaginable. By giving up the birthday, one receives the blessing of realizing that one is actually not that important.

Whatever we give up, or whatever we take on, and preferably we should do both of these things, Lent is a time when we dedicate ourselves to being uncomfortable for the sake of Christ. One of the things that is often done in worship during Lent is the use of incense that is particularly offensive. Some incense makse your eyes water for instance. It is a venerable tradition to use such incense during the season of Lent so that we are all uncomfortable. It points us to the fact that Lent should raise our anxiety and make us unsettled. As we see the world living its best life, we should feel as if we are being left behind by the world if our Lenten discipline is a good one. Then we will begin to have an insight into how our Lord gave everything to the world, and yet the world completely forsook him for doing so.

And so we come back to celebrating death, because our disciplines this Lent help us to begin the process of gracefully dying in the Lord Jesus. We have entered the season where we die unto ourselves over and over again, so that we might rise with Christ when Easter arrives. We are nurturing many deaths of everything within us that is not of Christ.

Finally, as we begin another Lent, I commend to you the practice of walking the Stations of the Cross every Friday night with your fellow parishioners. If you do so, you will not only be giving up your Friday nights, but you will also be taking something on, and you will be doing it with others – others who can hold you accountable to your Lenten practice. This year the Stations will be especially meaningful, as they were just refurbished. They are beautiful works of art by the artist Jean Charlot. But more than this, Kapahulu Avenue is very busy on Friday nights. As is the case on many Fridays, people will be living their best life, drinking and eating and carousing – socializing with friends and family. On the street it will hardly resemble the introspective Fridays of Lent. You will struggle to find parking, and you will have to travel through loads of narcissistic activity to get to the church to walk the way of the cross.

However, by making your way to this holy place – by passing through the parties and the chaos and the busyness – you will discover that by walking the way of our Lord’s passion, you will grow deeper in faith. You will find that you are more open to understanding the pain of the world, whether it is here in Honolulu or whether it is the pain of those poor people in Ukraine. By walking the way of the cross, you will find you have more compassion for all those people the world ignores. You will find that your heart is burning for justice for the oppressed and the imprisoned. By walking the way of the cross, and by choosing a discipline that challenges you and makes you uncomfortable, you will discover what true glory is – namely the glory of the cross. You will discover that you have become much, much closer to God. Your very life will increasingly be handed over to Jesus. You will understand how amidst the pain of the world, you can still have joy and peace as you follow Jesus Christ.

I wish you a blessed Lent, and I pray that through your self-denial and your holy disciplines, that you may become closer to Jesus Christ.

Father Paul Lillie +