Ashes and guns – John 11

Once a year I put my thumb in a jar of ashes and oil, draw a cross on the forehead of a child, and remind her that she will die.

This past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday. It’s the day when we remember that we are made of dust and that each

of our mortal bodies will one day return to the earth. We mark this day at the beginning of Lent, the way Christians have for thousands of years. But it’s always a strained and complicated experience to invite children into this ritual. After all, as a parent and a pastor my work is to protect children from the destruction and terror of our fragile world.

But Wednesday was a stark reminder that there is no protecting children work of death all around us. It was just after I visited Growing Together preschool, practicing drawing ash crosses on paper with three and four year olds, watching them trace the cross over and over again on Ms Kat

hy’s forehead, when I got the news. Multiple shots fired. Another school shooting.

When I place the ash mark of death’s remembrance on children I am reminded that death makes no exceptions. The shooting at a Florida high school proclaim to us that religious-like zeal for guns and th

e freedom to amass weapons is a sickness that marks each of us. I felt that weight as I left our preschoolers to their puzzles and playdough with the gray cross on their brows.

But I also know there is mo

re to this story. Later on Wednesday my friend Rev. Callie Swanlund told my children that the oil mixed into the ashes is the same oil used in baptism, when the sign of the cross is made on our foreheads to mark us as “Christ’s own forever.”

Callie huddled the kids around her on the floor of Christ Church Episcopal. She then drew pictures in a tub of sand, telling the story of how we came perfectly into the world, and how death found a way thr

ough sin, but how Jesus is making a new way, that God has brought us life. I held my children as Callie placed the sign of the cross on my beloved, the flesh of my own body.

As we got back into the car–ashes smeared across Wick and Etta’s foreheads, proclaiming that their bodies would one day be earth—I heard the full blow of the news report from the Florida high school.

As I saw the news reports there was one particularly stunning image that came up over and over again. Two mothers, one collapsed in the arms of the other as they wept. The woman standing, her face contorted in pain and fear, had a cross on her forehead, the remnants of an Ash Wednesday service.

The Lenten season is strange and subversive because it begins with a public declaration of death. We smear ashes into the shape of a cross on our foreheads, wearing a sign of our mortality everywhere we go. We wear this symbol to grocery stores, offices, and playgrounds — a signpost saying “death will visit here.” You are dust and to dust you shall return.

As I read today’s Gospel reading, I couldn’t get the image of those mothers out of my head. In the reading from John, we hear Martha making death public, the death that snatched her brother away. I saw in those two women the faces of Mary and Martha. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” Martha tells Jesus after he delays two full days before coming to her aid.

I love Martha and Mary in this story. They want an explanation. Mary wants public grief. She isn’t content to let the matter rest. She sees that this death could have been prevented and she wants there to be witnesses. When Jesus finally arrives in Bethany, she gets up so quickly that people with her assume she’s going to grieve at the tomb. Instead, she’s looking for Jesus. She wants him to see the sign of death on her body, in her tears.

Mary repeats the same phrase – “if you had been here our brother would not have died.” They’ve seen Jesus heal others. They know that Jesus loves Lazarus. There is no reason things should have ended as they did.

Martha names their grief, their betrayal, their disappointment. And even after all of this, she manages to eke out a sliver of belief. “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world,” she tells Jesus.

But she doesn’t get the fullness of what she’s saying, about what she’s declaring—the truth about Jesus. She doesn’t know what Jesus means when he tells her these words about resurrection and new life, that Jesus is going to raise her brother from the dead, return him from death to life.

Instead, when she brings Jesus to the tomb, it is to mourn for Lazarus, not because she thinks something miraculous is going to happen. When Jesus asks her to have the stone rolled back, Martha reminds Jesus of the smell of a four-day old corpse.

Martha’s belief is filled with half-understandings. It was common for Jews of Martha’s day to believe in a final judgment where the dead are raised back to life at the end of all things. It may seem extraordinary to us, reading this story through our post-Enlightenment skepticism of the miraculous, but for Martha she isn’t saying anything new, nothing different from what anyone else around her believed.

But even if she can’t figure out what Jesus can do, she has a sense of who he is. And that’s enough. In the end Lazarus is returned to her, brought back from the dead, restored to Mary and Martha.

I want to remind you of what happens next, after the raising of Lazarus. The religious leaders seek to kill Jesus because people believed in him after they saw Lazarus brought back to life. “What are we to do?” the Pharisees mutter to one another. “This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.”

The miracle of Lazarus is dangerous because it allows people to believe something else is possible, not only for themselves, but for the way power functions in their world. The Pharisees aren’t worried about a spiritual awakening, a transformation of the heart, or of religious blasphemy. They’re worried about an overthrow of the government.

If we spend some time here, we can see that it makes sense. Imagine if you weren’t afraid anymore. Imagine if you saw something that told you all the powers and authorities of this world were utter nonsense. What if you saw something that clearly revealed that a new world was at hand—a world where we lived without relying on princes and government officials, and that no matter what happened we would be safe in God’s life? What if you actually believed there was something worth dying for?

For the rest of his ministry, those who seek to kill Jesus will bring up the raising of Lazarus. The high priest Caiaphas will remind them – “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” There is nothing more dangerous for the stability of governments than a people who no longer fear death.

I wonder what would have happened if Martha had decided not to send for Jesus. I wonder what would have happened if she accepted the inevitable, relentless course of death. But she didn’t. Instead, she made her grief public. She declared the world is not as it should be and she demanded an answer from God.

I have always thought of Ash Wednesday as a private event, a time of reflection on my mortality. But after Wednesday, after sitting here beside death with Martha and Mary throughout this week, after seeing the ash crosses on the foreheads around me this ritual took on new meaning. The crosses became a protest, a scream, a public declaration of the death-working power in our world. The crosses I saw were a refusal to let the world remain unchanged and unchallenged, a refusal to back down.

Over the last couple days something remarkable has happened among teenagers who survived the shooting in Florida. They, too, are refusing to keep their grief private. They are showing us grief that demands an answer, one that stands in defiance of the persistent work of death and corruption of the gun industry and the lack of willpower from our elected officials. They are posting their own stories, organizing their own campaigns, planning walk-outs, and demanding that someone bear witness to their grief. They are showing us the way of courageous grief.

I will have those students in mind throughout this season of Lent, a time of contemplation and reflection, of preparation for Easter. Perhaps this Lenten season will also be a time when you name publicly the death-working power of our world, name what gives our country power, declare that this is not the way it has to be. Perhaps this Lenten season you will look for others who show us how to be a resurrection people, a people who are dangerous to institutions of money and violence.

On Ash Wednesday we remember not only that our mortal bodies will one day pass away. We also declare that we have already died, that below the temporary mark of ashes we have been grafted into God’s life, a life that renders death powerless.

As it is, Lent begins with a declaration of death at Ash Wednesday, but it ends somewhere else. Lent ends in resurrection, an act so subversive that, if you come to believe it, even a fraction of it, even with the misunderstanding and hesitation of Martha, nothing will be the same for you again.

You will not be able to lead your life in the same way because you will have discovered that those who do the work of death in our world are fools. And your declaration of their foolishness, the petty kingdoms that rise and fall, will be the first sign to others that all around us the resurrection is happening, that a new world is breaking in. It will be the first sign that you are not afraid anymore. And when you are not afraid anymore, the powers of this world will quake.