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
