“Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” I am never surprised that there are so few people who come to Ash Wednesday service, because these words are by far the most difficult that we have to hear in the entire church year. Even outside of the church, in our day-to-day lives, being told that you are destined for death, which is what these words mean, is the hardest thing to hear. It is overwhelming and anxiety-provoking to hear that nothing that we have spent our lives on will last, to know that our days are limited, to be told that there is no legacy we might leave behind that will last throughout the ages. Everything is dust. We are dust. Our lives, our jobs, our relationships, our church - these things will all crumble into ashes––into the dust from which they came.
And we are in this for the next forty days. Lent has been a time when people have prepared for the glory of Easter by remembering how far from that glory we are. We bravely face the truth that our failures are more significant than our successes, that the realities of our world show us that we are really nothing more than a tiny speck on a vast and godly scale, and that we really are nothing more than the ashes that now rest on our forehead.
So it isn’t surprising that there aren’t many people here this evening. Who truly *wants* to immerse themselves in this period of sadness and critical self-reflection, especially at a time when the congregation is getting ready to close? Where is the Good News here? Where is the comfort?
“In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up––for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground––then the LORD God formed an adam (a human) from the dust of the ground, and breathed into the nostrils the breath of life; and the adam (the human) became a living being.” (Genesis 2:4-7)
God took the dust of the earth and breathed into it the breath of life, and the dust became a living being, one of God’s children.
This is our comfort, and our hope, and the reason we can, like Paul did, rejoice in the midst of sorrow, call ourselves rich in the midst of poverty and loss, and see ourselves as having nothing and yet possessing everything. It is the reason we can be joyful and grateful throughout the next forty days of Lent, and even after until the end of June. It might seem inappropriate––obscene, even––to rejoice in the midst of all this death and darkness, but the deeper reality of the world is that death and darkness does not have the final word. God, who created the world out of wild and chaotic nothingness, God, who breathed into dust and gave it life, God, who brings Easter Sunday after the death of Good Friday, this God has the last word. When today and the next forty days are over, God will continue to speak. Indeed, God walks through these days with us, accompanies us as we face our own mortality, and then, at the end, speaks words of healing and life and light. And so, even today, we rejoice.
What’s more, we might consider whether continuing to be sad and in despair and hopelessness during these next forty days and beyond is a denial of the life that God offers us. After all, in Lent we do not pretend that our sin and failure and death means the end of everything. Even on Good Friday, which we call “Good,” by the way, we do not adopt an attitude of downheartedness as if we do not know that Easter has already happened. We are somber, yes, and humble, but we look beyond Lent and Good Friday and beyond death, to the new life that is promised, and to the resurrection that has already happened. That is why we celebrate Communion on Ash Wednesday, and why, after I told you all that you were dust and to dust you will return, I then proclaimed that we are all forgiven, by virtue of the baptismal cross that lies underneath our ash ones. It used to be the tradition that forgiveness was not proclaimed for the entire forty days of Lent, in the belief that Confession and Repentance were only genuine if we didn’t hear the proclamation of Forgiveness immediately after. But this came to be understood as a kind of false piety, the kind of thing that Jesus condemns in Matthew, actually, and also as obscuring the heart of the Christian faith which is not that “we are sinners, the end,” but that God saves us and redeems us in Christ. To spend all of our time in confession and sorrow and the loss that comes from dying, to only hang our heads when talking about our death, is to deny that God breathes new life into dust.
So, while it may feel inappropriate, particularly in today’s culture that does not recognize Easter, we ask God in the midst of our losses, like King David did, to restore to us the joy of salvation. We ask God to lift our hearts while the ash is still on our forehead. We ask God to give us joy as we face death because we know that death is not the end. God is moving us towards Easter. God is moving us towards new life. Deeper into dust, yes, but through it. We know that God is doing this for us, but the ashes overwhelm us, and so we ask God to remind us of this deeper reality, to help us remember that Easter is coming, and indeed has already come.
And God does. And so even on this of all days, when we are reminded that we are dust and to dust we will return, and in this period of Lent, our last as a congregation together, we nevertheless rejoice in God, in God’s gift of new life, we rejoice even in the gift of dust because it shows us the power of our God, eternally the giver of life, and we say, Thanks be to God. Amen.
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