Sermon by John Marboe

Text: Matthew 6.1-7 and 16-21

Ash Wednesday 2009

Immanuel Lutheran Church

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

When I did campus ministry I sat thru countless commencement exercises.

Invariably, the keynote speaker would be some kind of success story in business or show business or politics. And the message was generally the same: You can be anything you want to be, achieve any goal you set for yourself, go as far as your dreams will carry you, overcome any obstacle, if you set your mind to it.

“Easy for someone like you to say,” I would think. Then I would think of my friend Araf, a brilliant and dashing young man from a wealthy Pakistani family, whom I met while he was studying at the London School of Economics. His bright future was cut short by a rare liver disease, and he died just five years after his graduation. I thought of Harold, Big Harold, we called him. He was an honor student at Cambridge University, a champion heavy weight boxer and had a genius level IQ. Shortly after his graduation he suffered a nervous breakdown and was never able to pursue the academic career he had dreamed of.

“The world is your oyster” commencement speeches sounded a bit hollow, thinking about them.

In 2001 Vassar College decided to break out of the mold and invited a very different kind of guy to make the commencement speech.

They invited Stephen King, the premier living American horror fiction writer. “America’s boogeyman,” as he likes to call himself.
He began: “Imagine 100 years from now. Imagine there is a 100 year reunion for the 2001 class of Vassar College. Imagine all the chairs are set up here. And look around. How many of you will be left? Everyone is gone. Gone.”

That was his starting point. His intent was to awaken an imagination about the passage of time and the proximity of their own death. There, at the threshold of adulthood for young men and women about to enter the career world with a degree from a prestigious college, Stephen King says “What in God’s name were you thinking, to invite ME to the party?”

He talked to them about death. He talked to them about the fleeting nature of power and influence. He talked to them about his own brush with death in an auto accident that nearly took his life. He talked about how in that moment in the mud and the blood and the broken glass, it did not matter that he had a gold master card in his wallet.

He wanted the group to imagine forward and to real-ize, to make REAL, the experience of their own mortality and passage to eternity.

Then King did something that surprised me and inspired me. He said “I came here to talk about generosity.” “One thing is certain,” he said, “you can’t take it with you. We all leave this world broke. Should you give away what you have? Of course you should, King said, I want you to consider making your LIFE one long gift to others. Why not? All you have is on loan anyway.”

Then he said: “Here's another scary thing to think about before you leave here. Imagine a nice little back yard, surrounded by a board fence. Dad—a pleasant fellow, a little plump, wearing an apron that says YOU MAY KISS THE COOK—is tending the barbecue. Mom and the kids are setting the picnic table by the backyard pool: fried chicken, cole slaw, potato salad, a chocolate cake for dessert. And standing around that fence, looking in, are emaciated men and women, starving children. They are silent. They only watch. That family at the picnic is us, ladies and gentlemen; that back yard is America, and those hungry people on the other side of the fence, watching us sit down to eat, include far too much of the rest of the world. It's Asia and the subcontinent; it's countries in Central Europe where people live on the edge from one harvest to the next; it's South America, where they'[re burning down the rainforests to make room for housing developments and for grazing lands where next year's Big Macs are now being raised; most of all it's Africa, where AIDS is pandemic—not epidemic but pandemic—and starvation is a fact of life.”

King then invited the students and families at Vassar to consider generosity on a very large scale, on a national and global scale, and to use their brief lives and their short-lived power and influence to wield compassion, not selfishness; generosity, not greed; to share the wealth, and not to hoard.

Finally, he reminded them that giving is not primarily a benefit for the receiver but for the giver. It is an expression of gratitude for being alive, and an expression of the freedom that comes from knowing how briefly everything we have is on loan to us.

I don’t know if Stephen King considers himself Christian. But this speech is full of echoes of the kinds of things Jesus constantly says in the Gospels. Better to give than to receive. Do not store up treasures. Where your treasure is, that is your heart. Don’t ask who your neighbor is, be a neighbor in time of need. Be generous and lend without expecting anything in return. And, of course, The parable of the man who builds bigger and bigger barns to store his wealth and then dies, and God calls him “fool”.

Not everyone Jesus spoke to in this way was rich. Generosity knows no class distinction. Rich and poor alike can be generous. Neither does greed, rich and poor alike can be greedy. What is so striking about the similarity between King’s speech and Jesus’ sermons is the way in which they concern themselves first and foremost with the well being of the soul. And what they are trying to get people to see is that your soul needs to be generous. It wants to be generous. Stinginess, greediness, possessiveness, and the like are soul killing.

Furthermore, generosity is the realization that life does not consist of possessions, and the surest way to realize this is to contemplate our own death.

Jesus speaks about storing up treasures in heaven, not on earth. Not like some giant eternal candy jar that we get to enjoy after we die. He means rather that our spiritual needs are our most important needs, and generosity is a spiritual need. It means that to have a spiritually vibrant life, one values things differently, one loves things differently, one holds things differently… because it passes…away.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I say over every body that we lay to rest in the ground. And at every funeral, we contemplate just what it was that the person really treasured, what that person really loved, and how they expressed it.

What will be your legacy, what mine, what ours? Where is your heart? Your treasure? Where would you like it to be?

Ash Wednesday is the perfect time to ask ourselves this crucial, spiritual question. Because we remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.