The other day I took my daughter, she’s six, to a friend’s birthday party at a trampoline park. For the next two and a half hours, I watched her run as I have never seen her run. Fierce and determined. Hair flowing wildly behind her. She jumped with courage. Climbed every obstacle in her path. She laughed with her friends until her shoulders shook. She was utterly in her element. “Dad,” she told me later, “The whole time it felt like a dream. I didn’t believe it. I had the very best time.”
My daughter had the very best time. This, despite never noticing a large, shiny, electronic leaderboard hanging prominently over the middle of the jumping course, listing in real-time the ranking of the children, as measured in jumps completed. My daughter had the very best time, despite having no idea that for the majority of the two hour session she, who is among the youngest and smallest children in her class at school, placed in the top 10 - out of more than a hundred kiddos - on that board. Now, I thought about this. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t imagine that this knowledge would have added one iota to her euphoria when she said to me, Dad, the whole time it felt like a dream. I had the very best time. The board was impressive, even suggestive of what mattered most. But, in the end, it was silly. What, after all, can it mean to win jumping with friends?
Similarly, delivering a commencement speech years ago at Northwestern University, Stephen Colbert one time observed to a quad full of eager college graduates, “You cannot win your life.” You can’t win jumping with friends, and you cannot win your life. It’s a memorable saying that belongs on the Mount Rushmore of True Things I Love and Frequently Live as if I Do Not Believe. Or TTILAFLASIDNB, for short.
You cannot win your life. But here’s my dilemma. I’m a good American who was taught early on that a tie is like kissing one’s sister. That winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. And, for these and other reasons, soccer is a fraud. Let me ask you. What would the alternative to winning your life even be? That’s the challenge for my 21st century American imagination. At the 2024 summer Olympics, Noah Lyles won the closest track finish ever when he outran Kishane Thompson in the 100 meter sprint by a record five thousandths of a second. That’s 0.005. Do you realize the absurdly amazing levels of technology required to manufacture a winner of a race that close? But we do have the means to decide it. Consider how fantasy football has given way to legalized sports gambling and - setting aside questions of morality for a second - consider how it turns so much of life into a thing to be won. You can now bet not just on the outcomes of games but on individual performances, even real-time wagers as to whether this or that shot will go in. Each ball and strike. One prop bet for this year’s Super Bowl was whether Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would get engaged directly after, and again the point isn’t whether or not you should care about Tay Tay and Travis but how so much of our cultural mindset imagines every second of our experience as a thing to exploit, to win or to lose, most often as measured in money. Because every second should bear a profit.
Jesus says today, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Another beautiful saying on the mountain of True Things I Love and Frequently Live as if I Do Not Believe.
There your heart will be also. Where is your heart? If you listen closely, that’s the question Ash Wednesday asks you today. Where is your heart? What are you trying to win? At whose expense? Would you believe that the God of all things doesn’t give a lick for the leaderboard of our victories? And, if this is true, what would you be willing to reconsider about your life and the bedrock, the foundation, of its worth?
Maybe that’s why Jesus gives his followers this warning. Beware of practicing your piety before others. See how he names that even religion is something we sometimes slip into imagining as a thing we can win, over against those who differ from us in ways we judge to be unforgivable. See how even something like love of God and love of neighbor can be warped by a leaderboard with real time rankings in ways that decay and undo the heart of it all. But, if in Christ Jesus the scorecards have all, in the final analysis, been thrown away, then my love toward my neighbor isn’t winning me heaven, it’s allowing me to become more true. If the scorecard is silly, and instead, all things come of Thee, O Lord, then even the love I think I’m giving you is really God’s gift to me and you together, giving us the gift of a life that remembers our kinship to each other and all those who are made in and bear the image of God in this world. In other words, embracing lives of love, first of all God’s own, is how we’re made real. Why do I settle for winning my life, when I could instead live my oneness with God and with you as a beloved child of God in the household of God? Why waste my life with winning when I might more rightly find my place in a holy communion and come to thank God for the gift of it all? Where, O Lord, is my heart?
So, today, following Joel’s advice to “rend your hearts and not your garments,” we pray for hearts that can both seek and grieve. Hearts that seek God and hearts that can grieve the ways our attempts to win life have wounded the world and the heart of the One who loves it. We grieve especially the places in our lives and in the world where creatures of God are in any way diminished or destroyed. We pray for hearts open to remembering that to love a sister or brother is to find our lives caught up in their own. Rend your heart and not your garments. Let God’s all-compassionate heart break open your heart. Take your Savior at his word when he says that to find your life, we must lose it.
The ashen cross on our heads today confronts us with a new possibility and a true invitation.
What if the only way to be not afraid isn’t to win every battle (with the unfortunate side effect of imagining the world as a series of battles) but to embrace the depths of our vulnerability, our fragility, even our mortality, and discover new lives of deeper trust in the living God?
Because there’s no getting out of life alive. So, there is no winning life, much less love. There is only dying and being given new life. The life that is life: the abundant life of giving, forgiving, being forgiven, and trusting that the God who made you and will never forget or forsake you; will not let life or death or height or depth or anything else separate you for the breadth and the depth of God’s love for you. Will forever bless, hold, and keep you. And this is exactly what this holy day means to tell you.
Amen.
