Preaching text: Psalm 46
How many of you saw President Trump’s speech before Congress last night? It was quite a speech. He was definitely trying to fulfill his somewhat jokingly-made promise that “we will have so much winning that...you may get bored with winning.” According to him, we’re going to do everything. We’re going to get rid of crime, give everyone healthcare, defeat ISIS, create millions of jobs, strengthen our military, and rebuild our infrastructure. We’re going to have our pie in the sky and eat it too.
Image from CNN.com
We may or may not like or agree with our new President, but you can’t say the man isn’t ambitious. In truth, his speech last night was a fundamentally American speech. We are the greatest nation on Earth. Nothing can stop us. We can do anything. We cannot be defeated. We cannot be stopped. We are invulnerable, invincible, undeniable. We cannot lose. No setback cannot be overcome. No enemy that cannot be defeated. No difficulty that cannot be removed. From us as a nation to each one of us as individual citizens, we are unstoppable.
The problem is, of course, real life doesn’t work that way. We are vulnerable. We can face defeat. There are setbacks that cannot be overcome. There are enemies that we cannot defeat. And as we gather this night to mark this Ash Wednesday, we are here to speak to one such thing that cannot be overcome: the power of death.
This night, probably more than any other event in the Christian calendar, is as fundamentally unAmerican as you can get. Death is the one thing we haven’t beaten. We can’t beat it and we don’t know what to do about that. As a result, our culture is very neurotic about death. We see it as defeat, as loss, and that’s something we Americans don’t deal with well. We try to pretend it away. Imagine it’s not real or that somehow we’ll dodge its inevitable touch. But it is real and it does come for each one of us.
It comes most obviously to us in the form of physical death: The stopping of the heart, the cessation of brain activity, the departure of the soul. But death has other forms. The loss of a job is a form of death. A failed exam in school is a form of death. The break up of a relationship is a form of death. The collapse of a business is a form of death. Bankruptcy is a form of death. Disease, injury, failure, all are ways death can touch our lives. All are things not easily overcome, if at all. In fact, many have argued that the reason Trump was elected was because of the presence of so many of these in lives of our citizens. Death is everywhere. Can our President do anything about it? He certainly promises it. Can he deliver? I doubt it.
No one could. Death is not an enemy we can defeat. This broken world is not something we can fix. These are existential problems beyond us. And yes, it is unAmerican to admit that we cannot do something, but this is the simple truth. We can’t do this. Not the President. Not you or me. Not anyone. Death is too powerful. It will take a god to stop it.
Thankfully for us, that’s precisely what has happened.
Five hundred years ago, at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation, death was very real for that handful of German educators and priests who had started the rebellion against Rome. Martin Luther knew that, at any moment, the Inquisition could come and burn them all as heretics. But he had read in the book of Romans that if “God was for him, who could be against him?” and that he was “more than a conqueror through him who loved us.” So he took those sentiments and a copy of another Scripture, Psalm 46, and wrote what is now the quintessential Protestant hymn “Ein Feste Burg” or as we know it in English, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”
He wrote it not just for himself and his inner circle of Reformers. He knew that death was real for any who followed him and for anyone in general. So it wrote the hymn not in the style of high Latin like most of the church hymns of his day. Instead, he wrote it in the style of the music of the local tavern and in the language of the people, accessible to all to learn and sing. He wanted them to know that it would take a God to defeat death and that is precisely what we have.
The hymn illustrates the battle between good and evil as a conflict between God and the devil, with we of humanity as the prize. That’s again not terribly American to see ourselves as passive participants in this, but the hymn essentially reveals us as the damsel tied helplessly to the train tracks while Snidley Whiplash and Dudley Do-right duke it out. God is our champion. He fights to save us. He fights to win us for himself. And HE is invulnerable and invincible and all powerful. He can and will win this fight for our sake.
God will defeat death for us. And he has, through his son Jesus Christ. He who was born of a virgin in a manger, who lived and taught us the truth of God in sermon and parable, who healed the sick and the dying, and who went to the cross. He defeated death by embracing it, allowing it to take him as inevitably as it takes all us humans. But it could not hold him forever and on the third day, the stone rolled away, winning not just for himself, but for all of us. Resurrection is ours!
This is the message of “A Mighty Fortress.” Yes, death is real. Yes, death is powerful. But we have a champion who is greater still, who fights and dies and rises again for our sake. As we are gathered here on this Ash Wednesday to hear those frightful words, “Dust you are and to dust you shall return,” remember also that death has met its match. Christ Jesus stands with us in life and against all the forms that death takes in this world. We truly can overcome it all, not by our own doing, but by our champion. By our God. By our Christ.
Amen.
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