I first met Stella ten years ago. She was one of several hospice patients with whom I visited while in seminary as part of a class in practical theology. Even after that seminary requirement was finished, I continued to visit Stella until she died.
I don’t know how long Stella had been in hospice care, but she was too young to be there. I’m guessing she wasn’t more than fifty years old. She was dying of cancer and had been in hospice care for a while when I first met her. The nursing home where she lived was a grim place. It must have been a lonely one, too.
Stella and I would usually make small talk. She would tell me about places where she had lived over the course of her life and about her son and her church. But sometimes, she would ask me to read from her Bible. She’d point to the leatherbound edition on the bedside table, and then she’d cite a chapter and verse of a particular book for me to read. When I opened the well-worn Bible, I saw that the white margins were completely filled with handwritten annotations. Stella had little else in that bleak nursing home room, but her Lord and his precious words seemed to mean everything to her.
Stella could recall Bible verses with eerie precision. Even as she lay as a prisoner to her hospital bed, she knew what words from Scripture she wanted to hear when she asked me to read to her. On one Saturday when I visited, she told me to open to a passage in St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, a few chapters after the reading we just heard. The passage Stella wanted to hear was similar to today’s reading. In both passages, St. Paul speaks in graphic detail about the sufferings that accompany discipleship.
It might seem like Paul is boasting, even bragging about how much he has endured as a follower of Christ. But there’s irony in his speech. If we want to boast at all, he suggests, we can boast in how poor we’ve become for Jesus’s sake. And in this, there’s really no boasting at all. There’s no suffering simply for the sake of suffering. Far from it. The point is that when we become poor for Christ’s sake, whether materially or spiritually, we learn just how much we really have.
Of all the passages Stella could have asked me to read on that Saturday nearly a decade ago, she chose one in which Paul recounted all the beatings, lashings, dangers, and persecutions he’d experienced in following Jesus. Stella could have asked me to read Psalm 23 or an account of Jesus healing the sick. But she didn’t. She asked me to read that rather torturous passage from Second Corinthians. I think she understood something that, at the time, I couldn’t comprehend.
Suffering quietly on that uncomfortable hospital bed in a dreary nursing home, Stella seemed to have nothing, at least by the world’s standards. There was no question that she was dying. She had few possessions of which I was aware. But I’m confident that despite her seemingly dismal state of affairs, Stella knew that she actually possessed everything. She had even more treasure than others who could easily boast of earthly riches, material power, and good health. Stella possessed everything because Christ reigned in her heart. She had everything because she understood from direct experience that even when we’ve lost our homes and our health and our security and our comfort, we’re still the recipients of Christ’s inestimable gift.
Our increasingly secular culture has an odd fascination with Ash Wednesday. Is it a macabre obsession with our mortality? Is it a grim preoccupation with our sinfulness? I don’t think it's either of those things. I suspect that in an ineffable way, when we’re reminded of what we’re lacking in life, we discover just how much we have. When we seem to have nothing, we have everything in Christ.
We distort this day of fasting and penitence if we wallow in our frailty, human fallibility, and sinfulness, and we misunderstand this holy season if we imagine Lent as the opening of a great chasm between ourselves and God. And yet, we can’t deny the starkness of this rather somber day. We receive ashes on our foreheads. We hear that we’re dust and to dust we shall return. In a death-denying world, we can’t escape the unavoidable reality of our own eventual deaths, nor can we escape the fact that none of us knows when we’ll die and that, ultimately, our own existence is beyond our control.
Perhaps, too, on this day, we bring an acute spirit of repentance not only for our individual failings but for our collective refusal to care for our neighbors. We carry the leaden weights of our own many sins of omission, when we failed to speak up in the face of wrong, or when we dishonored God’s image in another, or when we were so filled with hatred, that we committed murder in our hearts. Whatever they are, we carry all these sins to God’s altar this day. And for a moment, we sense just how poor we are. We’re reminded of how much grace we need to turn again to the Lord and find forgiveness. We’re reminded of the heavy cost of following One who gave his own life that we might have life.
Having emptied ourselves of all conceits and all prideful comforts, we suddenly find ourselves poor. And when we become poor for Christ’s sake, just as he became poor for ours, we see just how much we have. We no longer see things from a human point of view but from a spiritual one. The world’s favor no longer animates our lives, but God’s grace does. The awareness of what we lack isn’t a curse but a profound gift in which we’re split wide open to receive what God alone can give us.
By the world’s standards, we might seem like impostors, but so be it if we can catch a glimpse of the kingdom of God. We might be unknown to many if we live humbly and simply, but every hair on our head is counted and known by God. We will all face death one day, but we also know that physical death is not the end of the story because in Christ, we shall live forever. We might be hated by the world because our mind is Christ’s, but our persecution can never take away our dignity in God’s eyes. We might be walking through the valley of the shadow of death, but we can rejoice that the risen Christ is walking right beside us.
And in the sober realization of the poverty of our mortality, we’re reconciled to God and one another. Amid our many differences, our shared poverty is the one thing that unites us. We’re dust, and to dust we shall certainly return, but one day, God will raise even that dust to a new, resurrected life.
So, beloved in Christ, now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation in which we celebrate that nothing can separate us from the relentless love and forgiveness of God. And although everything be taken away from us, there’s one priceless gift that will always be ours.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ash Wednesday
March 5, 2025