Devotional for Ash Wednesday

"All things die. Even the stars go out."

Among die-hard fans, the Star Wars prequel films, released in the late 90s and early 2000s, are largely regarded as tremendous disappointments. They are, however, not without their merits. One of those highlights actually does not come from the films, but from the novelization of the third prequel film, Revenge of the Sith.

In a brief scene before the main action of the story begins, Anakin Skywalker (the future Darth Vader) witnesses a supernova. This triggers something of an existential crisis in him, a crisis that largely drives the story that follows: Anakin's fall into evil and darkness. One line of his thoughts as he witnesses the dying star stands out to me even to this day.

"All things die. Even the stars go out."

I'm ever reminded of this observation every year on this day when we come into worship and hear the words anew from Scripture: "Dust we are and to dust we shall return."

Our mortality is the fundamental crisis of human existence. It drives nearly everything that we do, all that we think, all that we build. We fear death more than anything else. It is the true unknown that we all face. Oblivion. Non-existence. We use its fearsome power to threaten and destroy others, knowing how much it terrifies us in return. All that we are centers on death and finding ways to cheat or avoid it, only to discover that there is no cheating and no escape in the end.

Even the stars, whose life spans time we can barely count, billions of years, eventually die. Our paltry planet, in uncounted years to come, will eventually be consumed by one such dying star. Even that which we leave behind will not last. All the monuments that we might build to our life will fade away. The irony of the inscription below Ozymandias' statue in the famous poem belongs to all of us.

We enter into the season of Lent with the remembrance of this unpleasant truth. Even God did not avoid it. Incarnate as he became through Christ, he too faced death. He met the cross on Golgotha. But the story of Lent and Easter does not end on the mountain of the crucifixion. And in the midst of our truthtelling, we must also remember that there is life beyond. Life we cannot see, but life that has been promised to us nonetheless. The life of the empty tomb. The life of the resurrection.

Nature echoes this truth. Yes, the stars die, but you and I made up of their very essense. The "dust" of which we are created is stardust, the remnant of long dead stellar bodies. From death came life. And as it is true in astronomy, so it is with God and so it is with us. Yes, one day, we all die. But life beyond that awaits us. Amen