Ash Wednesday, Isaiah 58:1-12; St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC, 2/14/2018

Jim Melnyk: 

“Dealing in Dust”

Years ago, in a Diocese not so far away, I had the privilege of working with a woman who was a wonderful deacon in the Episcopal Church.  Joan was a very special person to me – her ministry brought a healing touch to people whose lives knew great pain from the ravages of horrors such as HIV/AIDS and the isolation experienced by those persons living with the terrible disease.  Joan knew a lot about human frailty and human mortality.  She knew what it meant to take that final journey on this side of eternity with all too many people – people she knew personally – people whom she had come to know and love with great intimacy. 

For all her intimacy with human mortality – and all her time spent with folks moving from this part of eternity to the next – Joan could not impose ashes on a youngster’s brow with the traditional words of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer – the words we will each hear today – “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  She just couldn’t do it.  Whenever a toddler or an infant was brought forward Joan would smudge an ashen cross upon their foreheads and proclaim, “Remember that you are stardust – and to stardust you shall return!”  I think that somehow it helped Joan deal with the two-sided message that we are all human beings who often make choices in life that are sinful, and that from our very first breath we, as mortal beings, are in the process of moving toward death – hopefully not just around the corner.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  These are familiar words to the many of us who have spent any length of time in the Episcopal Church.  They are hauntingly familiar words – words that most likely strike us differently at different points in our lives.  Someone struggling with serious illness may hear them in a way that a healthy person might not. 

Someone who has journeyed long on this side of eternity may hear this refrain with different ears than the parent who brings her newborn forward to receive ashes.  “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” 

When we hear those words we should be reminded not just of our brokenness or our own mortality, but we should also be reminded of the common bond of humanity we all share.  The ashes remind us of our common beginning – of our creation – of our oldest stories of faith.  They remind us of a loving God who creates us and breathes into us the very breath of life.  As the poet/preacher James Weldon Johnson wrote, “like a mammy bending over her baby, [this Great God] kneeled down in the dust, toiling over a lump of clay, till he shaped it in  his own image; then into it he blew the breath of life, and [the human one] became a living soul” And as Johnson concludes, “Amen.  Amen” (God's Trombones, Penquin Books, Reissued 1990). 

These ashes tell us that at our deepest level we are one – that we share a common bond of creatureliness, and that we share a common bond of God's love for that which God has, and is, continually creating.  As one person I follow on Twitter put it this morning, “We are all of us made of the same dirt and that makes us family. What happens to our world if we begin to see each other as kin?” (Chad Brinkman, Program Officer at Episcopal Relief and Development)

 As it's been said by many people over the ages – most notably in my mind the mystic Julian of Norwich: before ever God made us, God loved us. 

These ashes are also a reminder of our common home in God.  They are a promise of our eternal life in God.  For as our burial office proclaims with incredible hope and promise, “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia” (BCP, p. 499).  You see, sometimes even in Lent those words of praise for God cannot be silenced! 

The Late Theologian Karl Rahner put it like this, “When on Ash Wednesday we hear the words, ‘Remember, you are dust,’ we [remember that we have also been] told that we are brothers and sisters of the incarnate Lord. In these words we are told everything that we are: nothingness that is filled with eternity; death that teems with life; futility that redeems; dust that is God's life forever” (Karl Rahner in The Eternal Year).

The ashes we share are also an invitation remember that we live in a world where hurt and pain, where separation and segregation, where oppression and want are real.  They are a reminder that we cannot learn to forgive until we learn to acknowledge that we, ourselves, need to be forgiven: that as good as we may be – as loving and caring as we may be – as hopeful and full of promise as we may be – we still stand in need, from time-to-time, of forgiveness.  

The ashes we receive today recall for us the words of Second Isaiah: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bond of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and the break every yoke?  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” (Isa. 58:6-7).  And we only have to read the Gospels to see it’s rather obvious that Jesus sure knew his Scriptures!

With God’s grace we can see Lent not so much as an obligation to focus “more and more attention upon ourselves, upon our foibles, [upon our] faults and [upon our] failures, [or worse yet, on everyone else’s foibles, faults and failures…but rather a time to shift] our attention away from ourselves to God” (Get Over Yourself; God’s Here! by Kate Moorehead, St. Mark’s press, 2009, back jacket). “Then,” the prophet promises, “[our] light shall break forth like the dawn, and [our] healing shall spring up quickly; [our] vindicator shall go before [us], the glory of the Lord shall be [our] rear guard….[we] shall be called [repairers] of the breach” (Isa. 58:8, 12c). 

Repairers of the breach. This is the grace-filled Jewish concept called Tikkun Olam – the healing of creation by the Spirit of God working in and through God’s people – this work of healing – in ourselves and in the world – is what Lent is all about.  How much more powerful could our Lent be if we found ways to reconnect with God and God’s creation in a welcoming, healing, and embracing way rather than beating ourselves up to the point of disheartened surrender?  Maybe Deacon Joan had a point about being made from stardust – the very stuff of creation.

The ashes we will have imposed upon our foreheads this day are an invitation to a Holy Lent – and an invitation to the hope and promise of Easter.  Yes, we pray these ashes will remind us of our own need for repentance and forgiveness, most certainly – for we cannot ignore our ongoing need for repentance. 

We also pray that these ashes will call us to challenge the “complexity of [this world's] corporate sin, [giving us the courage and the will to speak out wherever we see brokenness in this world – wherever we see brokenness and pain in people’s lives]. 

But more than anything, we pray that the] ashes [we receive this night will] invite us [more deeply into one another’s presence as part of the whole human family – mindful of the image of God implicit in every human being.  And we pray that the ashes we receive this night will invite us more fully] into God's presence, into God's love, and into God's gift of new life” (The Rev. John Beddingfield, St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church, New York, NY, Angelus On Line Newsletter).  Amen.