that GOD may happen here (ash wednesday)

Miércoles de Ceniza | ©rpphotos (flickr)

​This sermon was originally preached on Ash Wednesday (March 5, 2025) at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN. The service may be viewed in full here. The sermon may be viewed below. Gospel Text: Luke 9:51-62

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Good evening, Beloveds. We are gathered tonight to confess our limitations, to renounce all pride and pretense,  to remember our mortality as we embark on a 40 day journey following Christ to the Cross, where humanity’s faithlessness and duplicity will be laid bare and laid waste in Christ’s passion. I have always loved this season of the liturgical year, not because it ends at the Resurrection, but because it takes us to the very foot of the cross. To where the blood spilled by the powers and principalities of the earth and ether alike pools at our own feet and we are forced to reckon with the folly and fragility of flesh, and our brazen will to conquer it. 

It is a journey to the deadest of centers, the holiest of in-betweens, that dark day when what was is gone and what will be has not yet risen. When God is dead, and we must bear its totality. It is not sexy. It is not hopeful. It is just, in the guttural poetry of Leonard Cohen, a cold and broken hallelujah. “Even here, even now, when all is lost and not yet found: God be praised.”

These 40 Days are a practice of faithfully walking toward the most ruthless truth that whatever accolades or appraisals, felicities or failures, friends and foes we accumulate across however many hours or days or decades we have on earth, we are dust, and to dust we will return. No one — not even God Incarnate — escapes death.

Today that truth is wetter on my own cheeks and more stingy in my eyes than it has been for a long time, because I spent last night in the hospital with a beloved friend who is dying or may already have died. Years back when he was my internship pastor, he was already suffering kidney failure and had been for some time. And so he often spoke bluntly, even joyously, about the funeral service he’d already planned for himself. I, on the other hand, squirmed in my seat. I’d never been around someone so full of life and yet so ready to greet death at literally any moment. I’d never met anyone who was such good friends with death. So I’m glad he hung around for a couple more years.

Across the time I’ve known him, Tom has been in turns my pastor, mentor, friend, colleague, champion — and even, when my relationship with my parents and siblings was fracturing into pieces, my family. He trained me, encouraged me, cajoled me, and pressed me toward a more excellent way, and showed me what it was to care for people’s souls and honor their blessed flesh. Somehow he was able to become what the Apostle Paul strove to be: “All things” — if not to all people, then at least to me and the many others who came to say goodbye and are now grieving his death.

I think he was able to do that because he knew the dust from which he came and the Eternity to which he belongs, and found that in between those two extreme and extraordinary absurdities, even the most ordinary person who knows their place in the cosmos can still find and create endless ways to love others well. With nothing to lose, his life became a proclamation that “To Live is Christ and to Die is gain.”

The truth is he would be so embarrassed if he were sitting here now, so I’ll just say this: To remember our mortality by marking ourselves with the dust from which we come and which will deliver us to rest, need not only be a sad and somber affair. It can also be an exhilarating promise that beckons us to Be Here Now, to stay radically present for everything in between, and  not waste a single second on anything less than Love. 

What I’m saying is not just that Life is what happens in-between. But more so that We — we who bear the Image of God; we who show others in every interaction who we believe God to be; we who birth children and communities and liberated futures — We are what happens in-between. We are how God happens in-between. We, who are so often begging for divine intervention, are God’s Divine Intervention. I know we are because that’s what Tom and so many countless others have been for me: Christ incarnate, God in flesh, loving me the way Jesus loves and making me want to do the same.

If it’s unsettling to hear a pastor say that you are how God Happens to this world and on this timeline, I invite you to let it be. Linger in the in-between of not-being-God and still very much bearing God in your flesh to some who may only ever meet God in you. Linger and consider what God you’d like them to meet. 

If it sounds radical, let it radicalize you — that is: let it draw you deep into the very center of all Being — Christ our creator, keeper, and sustainer — and you’ll become its radiance.

If it doesn’t make sense, let it confound you. Linger in the mystery and dwell on the Way of Christ opened to us in the gospel of Luke.

Take note in verse 55 of how Christ rebukes our will — however righteous or justified our intentions may be — to call down fire from heaven to destroy those who oppose him. Linger in the space between passive indifference and rage-ful retribution, and you will find God in righteous anger that works itself out not in destruction of enemies, but of enmity itself.

Hear Jesus’s call in verse 58 to follow him away from the security of place and possessions. Linger within the paradox of a God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills and is yet homeless, in the vast in between you will discover the exceeding abundance of interdependence and mutual care, the infinite wealth of shared Life.

Hear Christ’s exhortation in verses 60 and 62 to let the dead bury the dead. Linger in the space between paralyzed grief and rushed okayness, and you will meet God weeping for those who’ve returned to the dust from which they came, even while begging the Living to take seriously this momentary and miraculous in-between and LIVE as Christ. Put your hands to the plow, don’t look back, sow the Kin-dom, and God will happen in our flesh.

In the 40 days ahead, the world will not stop. Nor will it suffer gently those of us who move with measured deliberation and rooted intention, who act not in reaction to outside provocations but always and only in alignment with our most sacred principles. 

We will be called, over and over again by lesser kings to rise in service of lesser kingdoms. 

We will be bombarded by powers that demand our total allegiance and unwavering loyalty, that promise prosperity for the compliant and threaten those who reject the purity tests they’ve designed to divide, conquer, and profit off our isolation from each other. 

Wars and genocides will rage on, and we will have to keep bearing witness again and again to the death of our neighbors, to the fragility of flesh, and to our collective mortality as the dust gathers around us. 

In all these ways and more, we will be prodded by manufactured extremes and pestered by fabricated binaries to revolt against each other, rather than against the powers that feast on our enmity. This is the only promise powers of earth and empire can fulfill, the only guarantee the principalities of the ether can make good on: If we cede the holy in-between, they will grind us into dust. 

Amidst such chaos, the call to follow Christ to the Cross may be no louder than a whisper, but listen for it anyway. As the world yanks us between extremes, hold fast to Christ who is the Heart of God, the radical center, the source of all being. Resist the extremes and the extraordinary will happen. 

Heed his call to follow, and trust, Beloved: It is no trifling matter to be made of dust and born of God, but is fact precisely why we gather: to re-member that both the inevitability of mortality and the eternity of God always happen in this here sacred flesh, in our very own holy lives.

We are dust, and to dust we will return.
But while we bear flesh, we bear God.
So let us, Beloved, in this wild and wearying in-between — 
Let us bear God, let us be God, that God may happen here.  Amen.

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