The Park Road Pulpit

Four years ago, today, Amy and I stood hand in hand around a hospital bed in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of Richland Memorial Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, with eleven members of her family. I would say we were eleven-strong, but no one was strong that day. It was the eighth and final day of the struggle for Kevin’s life. As we gathered for one final moment, Kevin’s arms were still warm. The blood pressure monitor held steady; Kevin’s pulse-rate was strong. As we saw him that final time, his chest rose and fell, rhythmically -- his lungs were still providing oxygen to the blood that filled his veins.

When you gather to bury a 94-year-old, there is mourning. But it is the mourning of death’s universal inevitability. When you gather to say a benediction around the bed of a teenager, recently pronounced “brain dead,” the mourning is of death’s indiscriminate unfairness.

Tonight we gather to be marked for death. It is a grim ceremony, this Ash Wednesday, imposition of ashes. Taken from last year’s Palm Sunday worship service, the ashes are a stark, ugly, irreverent reminder that though there will be days of great celebration, to the dust we shall all return. But as Thomas Merton has said, it is not death’s finality that we gather to mourn or to darkly celebrate.[1] The Christian gathers to celebrate that even in death… there is hope.

Just after the first anniversary of Kevin Adam’s death, I wrote the following letter, including this poem and its explanation to his parents. I’d like to share it with you now.

I am thinking of you this morning. As I sat down to my desk I picked up a journal which had arrived in the mail and opened the book to read Paul=s words from Romans 5. I thought of you and our last 14 months together, and I wrote these words as a prayer.

Paul assures us that hope will not disappoint, for God=s love (which is our hope) has been Apoured in.@ But it occurred to me that there is a contradiction or paradox of sorts here. The image of pouring water into a clay pot came to my mind, and I thought of those pots as the hearts of those who have been wounded by loss and death. And I realized from our conversations with you that in and of itself, simply Aholding@ hope in a Apot@ hardly makes a difference for the living of every day. (At that point Don and Susan they were still asking, “How do I make myself get out of bed each morning?”)

But scripture also reminds us that God wants to replace our Ahearts of stone@ with Ahearts of flesh@ (Ezekiel 11.19), and the Psalmist’s promise is not that we will Asee God@ in the Anext life@ -- but in the Aland of the living@ (Psalm 27.13). The poem=s ending, then, is a prayer, that somehow, by the sheer grace of God, your hearts which have remained so steadfast in Aholding hope@ might also, slowly be transformed back into hearts of flesh.

(Or is it Paul=s point, that only when, through suffering, we have made this transformation from life to death to life again, do we really know God? Is it possible that only then do our hearts truly Abeat fleshly free@?)

Tonight… whether you have been marked by death or not, it is our prayer, that as you are symbolically marked for death by these ashes, that you would consider your days. “Number your days” (Psalm 90.12), as the Psalmist says, that in the land of the living, and even through the valley of the shadow of death, you might see God.

In receiving the imposition of the ashes, the words following words are spoken: “Remember, You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

[1] The opening meditation in tonight’s bulletin was the following, from Thomas Merson, Seasons of Celebration. “The cross, with which the ashes are traced upon us, is the sign of Christ’s victory over death. The words, ‘Remember that thou art dust and that to dust thou shall return,’ are not to be taken as the quasi-form of a ‘sacrament of death’ (as if such a thing were possible). It might be good stoicism to receive a mere reminder of our condemnation to die, but it is not Christianity.”

Hit Counter