Ethan Richardson, “The Immortality Bus”
Topics: Ash Wednesday, Transhumanism
Well I know it was a contentious November and all, but there was a dark horse in this year’s presidential campaign that we all missed. And what a shame! This gentleman really promised to turn things around, in ways no one else was talking about. And I know several of us really liked the idea of bringing in a Washington “outsider,” someone who wasn’t going to go by the same old Washington rhetoric. Someone with something new to say, someone with answers to the questions no one had the guts to ask. Well, this guy had them. He wasn’t caught up in the same issues every other politician talks about, and I think, if we had only known about him, he really would have made some waves.
Of course, I am talking about Zoltan Istvan. Yes, that is a real name, and no, he is not from Star Trek. He was the candidate for the Transhumanist Party, a party whose purpose is to, and this is a direct quote, “become god-like and overcome death.” Zoltan spent his months before the election driving around the country in an RV camper shaped like a coffin, called the “Immortality Bus,” preaching the gospel of science and technology, and its ability to overcome death in our lifetime.
Zoltan writes the coffin bus is, and I quote, “my way of challenging the public’s apathetic stance on whether dying is good or not.”
Now, before we all roll our eyes at just one more kook who believes technology will save us, I would also say that, whether we’d ride around in a coffin-shaped bus or not, we are all on board with the immortalist movement. Zoltan’s rhetorical question—is dying good or not?—is rhetorical for everyone: no one wants to die. No one wants to be camping out, as Jesus puts it, “where moth and rust destroy.” No matter how you slice it, dying is not good. Ever. When it comes down to it, we’re all practical immortalists. Which is one reason why today, Ash Wednesday, is one of those holidays that’s never going to be coopted by our culture at-large. Easter has gone the way of chocolate bunnies and Peeps, we’re still trying to hold onto Christmas, but Ash Wednesday is safe. No, the message of Ash Wednesday—“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, where we say with as little abstraction as possible, “You are going to die.” —is one we get to keep all ourselves.
And while we may be in church today, it’s not as if we didn’t drive our own Immortality Buses to get here today. We’re all aware, sort of, that we’re going to die. But in the meantime! We get super into nutrition and our bodies: we do the flax-kale-almond butter smoothie thing. Or we stay unbearably busy: we go-go-go until we drop and if there’s a moment when the thought comes to us that one day, we might, you know...NOPE! Gotta run! Or we invest in the future of our family: we focus on the children and the grandchildren, their schooling, their friends. Or we invest in our “legacy”: we pretend as if we’re okay with death, but what we really mean is we’d like to set up all the pieces for how our “story” might live forever.
In short, we do not want to talk about death. Talking too much about death or dying is morbid. Depressing. Pointless. Why talk about something you can’t control?
Well, you talk about it because you live it, either in your head or in experience. If I’m honest with myself, I think about death and fear death all the time. Sometimes I’ll just be having a conversation with Hannah, my wife, when the thought comes in, “Oh my God, you’re going to die. I don’t get to keep this.” Or you’re driving around town and this terrible weight sets in—the same drive, the same Wednesday morning routine, the same job—until what? Until death? Or some nights, when you step outside and take in the stars, and what has other times been this splendorous view instead feels uncaring and cold, and you suddenly feel alone. Even those warm, nostalgic memories—old vacation spots, familiar smells—are enmeshed with pain. The feeling of nostalgia is bitter because the moment we loved so much ended; it didn’t last. This is what Paul meant when he described a world “groaning in travail”, a world “in bondage to death.”
Maybe someone you love has died recently or is dying now. Maybe you’ve had a brush with death yourself. Suddenly you are standing on the edge of a deep and terrible chasm. At the edge of meaninglessness. Your eyes are opened to the ridiculous amount of time we spend keeping ridiculous things going—the internet shopping, the dusting of antiques, the parties you go to that you don’t actually enjoy that much. Death comes like a judgment upon the trivial: have I invested wisely? What’s even worth investing in?
George Saunders’ new novel is called Lincoln in the Bardo. In it, he retells the story of Abraham Lincoln losing his nine-year-old son Willie while the country was engaged in Civil War. Their son died on a night when the President and his wife were holding a lavish party at the White House, Willie upstairs. History tells us that Lincoln was so distraught he repeatedly visited the boy’s tomb to hold his body again. Saunders gets into Lincoln’s head:
This is a trap. Horrible trap. At one’s birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget.
Lord, what is this? All of this walking about, trying, smiling, bowing, joking? This sitting-down-at-table, pressing-of-shirts, tying-of-ties, shining-of-shoes, planning-of-trips, singing-of-songs-in-the-bath?
...Is a person to nod, dance, reason, walk, discuss? As before?
In other words, all the human projects, even the noteworthy projects of the most noteworthy President, are rendered meaningless in death. Death is the great leveler of these projects, of every human hope and ambition and good intention. Unlike the IMMORTALIST creed, Saunders says you cannot escape it. It is “sprung at birth,” it’s written into the fabric of everything.
I don’t say this to be bleak, I say this because this is what Jesus is saying in this gospel reading. If all you have are your projects, no matter what those projects are, no matter how righteous those projects are, no matter how much good happens because of those projects, death will still speak after you do, after they do. Jesus forces you to look out over all you’ve accomplished, all you’ve ever been proud of, and shows us how quickly they will disappear. He says these projects have already gotten the small credit they deserve. They have no currency in Heaven. They will not justify you. They will die with you.
Which is an utterly offensive thing to be told. It is offensive to hear that everything you do, say, accomplish, maintain, rear up, win over, or influence will, one day, be snuffed out. But what is even more offensive is to hear Jesus say that none of those things are changing our scoresheet with the Almighty. That just can’t be true.
But in Lent we are meant to ask, what if it were true? What if, upon making it to the pearly gates, Jesus said nothing about how hospitable your home always was or how respected you were with your peers? What if he didn’t credit you for the good choices you made and the temptations you avoided? Once you got past the unbearable embarrassment of it, that no “great” thing you achieved was really getting you points; once you got past that, wouldn’t that sound kind of nice? That all the striving and elbowing forward, all the talk about making a mark or being remembered, all of that was closed up and finished? What if it were true?
But regardless of whether it is true or not, that God is not interested in the choices you made, we could not bear to hear it. We had to silence that message. Because we’re immortalists—we’re going to live forever. We’re going to make a mark. We’re going to prove to God himself we’ve earned the right. So we kill the man who told us we would die. We lifted our fear of death high above us, we called it King, we nailed it to a cross. And we got back on our Immortality Bus. And we drove on.
And, while this is the subject of another sermon, this is where the great reversal happens, and this is why we come to celebrate Ash Wednesday after all, why it is not just gloomy. Somehow, someway, our good news comes through that which we avoided and continue to avoid. On the cross, Jesus Christ did his saving work in death itself.
