Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down
into the grass,
how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
-- Mary Oliver
In a few minutes, we are going to have ashes placed on our foreheads, drawn in the shame of the cross. We will be reminded of our mortality with the words, “From dust you came, to dust you shall return.”
We live in a society that does its best to avoid talk of death. Instead of funerals, we have celebrations of life. Most of us have long lost the traditions that connect us with death – the ways of sitting to observe the death, of sitting with our dead, acts of mourning like cutting our hair or wearing black.
We avoid speaking not only of our own individual deaths, but of the deaths of our institutions. We avoid the realities of the deaths of our congregations, our church body, the possible death of democracy.
When confronted with the reality of the fact that all things end, many of us get scared, we get sad, we shut down. But in the ash, in the reminder of our mortality and the mortality of all we hold dear, all of our systems and structures we come to, we have the opportunity to ask what are we to do with this one wild and precious life?
We can’t get to the answer to this question without admitting to ourselves, to our community, to the world that we -individually and collectively - have done some stuff wrong. That’s where confession and repentance come in.
Lots of people don’t love this part of the worship service. For some people, its too negative. For others, they don’t want to think about the ways we have missed the mark – the ways we have sinned. For many, it’s both. But we can’t get to the answer, we can’t get to new life, we can’t get to the place where our light shall rise in the darkness and our gloom be like the noonday without taking a long hard look at where we have gone off track, where we have allowed things to get in the way of our relationships between God, ourselves, one another, and creation.
And I get the reluctance.
As a society, we are deeply invested in being good people, and to admit to missing the mark gets interpreted as us not being good people, and not being good people means we are not worthy of love and community. We have attached shame to admitting mistakes, making it incredibly difficult for anyone to admit they have done something wrong. As I always say to me beloveds – you did something bad, *you* aren’t bad. It is in our nature to mess up – in our nature to sin. Confession is the opportunity to admit that, be witnessed in admitting it, be in community *also* admitting to mess up, and then getting back on the path together.
We can’t create meaningful connection with - others, with ourselves, with God – if we can’t admit we mess up. We can’t create meaningful connection if we can’t be vulnerable enough to be honest about our shortcomings and our desires.
Our desire to be perceived as good, our desire to not think about death lest we grieve lest we be vulnerable these things get in the way of making honest human connection, get in the way of forming community, get in the way of having support when we admit we messed up or when we want to ask the question what do we want to do with this one wild and precious life.
There is also that ever so important part of the lutheran order of confession – absolution. We are a people who believe we are saved by grace through faith. We believe that God’s love and forgiveness are always there for us.
Confession isn’t a moment for shame, it’s a moment to be reminded a) that we all mess up and b) who we are and whose we are.
We are beloved children of God.
Having these ashes placed on our heads, being reminded of our mortality and the end of all of these systems and structures we hold dead is not only an oopportunity to ask what will we do with this one wild and precious life, what will we do as individuals, as a congregation, as a church body, as a nation to love extravagantly, to have God’s light shine before us as if it were the noonday?
Most importantly, it is an opportunity to remember that we are a people of the resurrection. We are a people who believe in new life. In baptism, we die to sin and are risen to new life. In death we die to this world and rise to new life with God. Our faith communities, our denomination, our nation will all die some day, but there will be new life. This is God’s promise to us. Though we dwell in death this day, we are a people who believe in the promise of the resurrection.
