Unfathomable, mysterious, cosmic grace

Ash Wednesday, Feb 10th 2016

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

They are the words around which we gather today, in churches and at train stations and on street corners. A reminder of our mortality, of the dust of our lives, an invitation to reflection and repentance.

These words can feel like threat. The threat of what will happen, what is yet to come. But they are not meant that way. Rather, they are meant simply as truth. The truth of the unfathomable mystery of the cosmos, and the truth of the unfathomable mystery of God’s grace.

These words to point to that cosmic dust which, billions of years ago, came together to form a planet which life could inhabit. That dust was swept together into algae and mosses that became leaves and plants and eventually trees. The dust became one-celled organisms and then multi-celled organisms then fish then frogs then somehow bunny rabbits and lions and humans. And then two cells came together, some 70 or 50 or 30 years ago, and created you. That cosmic dust is a part or who you are, a part of how you were created, a part of all of creation. This is the unfathomable, mysterious cosmos.

It is also grace. That God, some billions of years ago, gathered together that cosmic dust and breathed life into it. Sent it swirling into a universe that might inhabit life, that might hold us. God breathed life into the planet and the plants and the sea creatures and the animals. God breathed life into our very cells, our very own bodies. And God keeps breathing life into dust, from a billion years ago and thousands of years ago to hundreds of years ago to yesterday. God breathes life into the dust from all of history into all of time. This is unfathomable, mysterious grace. This is who God is.

How much we need that, for God to breathe life into the dust. Into a world full of hunger and famine and thirst. A world of greed and racism and sexism and homophobia. A world of oppression and injustice, where we seem bent on crushing our brothers and sisters and all of creation into dust. And into a church that is “declining” in membership and effectiveness. Where, in our pseudo-Christian culture, people don’t want to worship the way we’re used to worshipping or at the times or in the places that we’re used to. And it seems we watch the church be crushed into dust. Or even within our own selves, our minds and bodies betraying us to sickness and pain, our families dissolving before us, and we lose the things we count on to know who we are. We are crushed into dust.

It is into this dust that God breathes life. We see this each winter when the leaves fall and the flowers wither and drop into the ground. Months later, God breathes anew into flowers and trees. So we call out to God to notice the dust, and to breathe.

This is what the prophet Joel is doing when he calls out to the people. Often in the church, we use this passage as a call to repentance, but the prophet never asks the people to repent. They are experiencing a plague of locusts, which was causing famine. There was hunger and likely thirst. People were dying from lack of food. Most likely, there was also greed and hoarding and oppression and stealing. Certainly, there was grief as children died of hunger before they could really live. And there was pain, the pain of hunger and the diseases that accompany starvation.

Into this situation, the prophet calls on God. He calls not out of repentance, but out of lament. The prophet lifts up the people’s situation, the dust of their reality. He calls on the people to cry out to God, for the priests to weep before the Lord. To tell God of what is happening. To cry out with the grief and pain of it. And then, to call for God to remember who God is – good, and merciful; steadfast, abounding in love.

This, again, is the unfathomable, mysterious grace of God. That in the midst of all that crushes us, we can call on God to be who God is. The God who breathed life into the cosmos also breathes life into this. Into the world, the church, yes even ourselves. Into oppression, brokenness, pain and grief. Into families who haven’t talked in years and failing marriages and sick bodies and anxious souls. Into Flint, Michigan and into Taiwan.

So today we are reminded of the dust from which we came and the dust to which we shall return. It marks our Lenten journey. So this Lent, we will notice the dust around us and experience the dust within us. We will repent, yes, when we notice how we are responsible for that dust. But mostly, we will lament, crying out to God to notice us. Crying out to God to be who God is. Good, merciful, abounding in steadfast love. Breathing life into dust from the beginning of time and into eternity. And we will watch with hope as signs of that breath come to life around us.

The young clergyman and his wife do all the things you do on Christmas Eve. They string the lights and hang the ornaments. They supervise the hanging of the stockings. They tuck in the children. They lug the presents down out of hiding and pile them under the tree. Just as they're about to fall exhausted into bed, the husband remembers his neighbor's sheep. The man asked him to feed them for him while he was away, and in the press of other matters that night he forgot all about them. So down the hill he goes through knee-deep snow. He gets two bales of hay from the barn and carries them out to the shed. There's a forty-watt bulb hanging by its cord from the low roof, and he lights it. The sheep huddle in a corner watching as he snaps the baling twine, shakes the squares of hay apart and starts scattering it. Then they come bumbling and shoving to get at it with their foolish, mild faces, the puffs of their breath showing in the air. He is reaching to turn off the bulb and leave when suddenly he realizes where he is. The winter darkness. The glimmer of light. The smell of the hay and the sound of the animals eating. Where he is, of course, is the manger.

He only just saw it. He whose business it is above everything else to have an eye for such things is all but blind in that eye. He who on his best days believes that everything that is most precious anywhere comes from that manger might easily have gone home to bed never knowing that he had himself just been in the manger. The world is the manger. It is only by grace that he happens to see this other part of the miracle.

Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed-as a matter of cold, hard fact all it's cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word become flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not touching. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God . . . who for us and for our salvation," as the Nicene Creed puts it, "came down from heaven."

Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.

- from Beyond Words

The young clergyman and his wife do all the things you do on Christmas Eve. They string the lights and hang the ornaments. They supervise the hanging of the stockings. They tuck in the children. They lug the presents down out of hiding and pile them under the tree. Just as they're about to fall exhausted into bed, the husband remembers his neighbor's sheep. The man asked him to feed them for him while he was away, and in the press of other matters that night he forgot all about them. So down the hill he goes through knee-deep snow. He gets two bales of hay from the barn and carries them out to the shed. There's a forty-watt bulb hanging by its cord from the low roof, and he lights it. The sheep huddle in a corner watching as he snaps the baling twine, shakes the squares of hay apart and starts scattering it. Then they come bumbling and shoving to get at it with their foolish, mild faces, the puffs of their breath showing in the air. He is reaching to turn off the bulb and leave when suddenly he realizes where he is. The winter darkness. The glimmer of light. The smell of the hay and the sound of the animals eating. Where he is, of course, is the manger.

He only just saw it. He whose business it is above everything else to have an eye for such things is all but blind in that eye. He who on his best days believes that everything that is most precious anywhere comes from that manger might easily have gone home to bed never knowing that he had himself just been in the manger. The world is the manger. It is only by grace that he happens to see this other part of the miracle.

Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed-as a matter of cold, hard fact all it's cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word become flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not touching. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God . . . who for us and for our salvation," as the Nicene Creed puts it, "came down from heaven."

Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.

- from Beyond Words