Holy Dust

This sermon is focused on the occasion of Ash Wednesday and the liturgy of the day, which can be found in the Book of Common Prayer beginning on page 264 or online here

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

In a culture that is both pervaded by death and obsessed with the avoidance of the subject, what we come together on this day to do is a radical act of honesty. Our annual reminder that we are dust, and to dust we shall return, is our annual affirmation that we are mortal and made creatures, that we are not God. If you watch the news or scroll through your media of choice for five minutes, you will be bombarded with people who are utterly unconvinced of that notion. If we just eat right, if we just exercise enough, if we have the right doctor or the best supplement, the fragility of our bodies would become irrelevant. If we’re smart enough, if we read enough and do our puzzles and insist on our independence, cognitive decline and memory loss will be something for other people to worry about, not us. If we journal every day, if we do what the next big self-help influencer says, if we meditate, depression and anxiety will not touch us. If we pray the right prayers in the right churches and vote for the right people and donate to the right organizations, we’ll be too busy to plan our funerals. These are the messages of the world around us. How does the Church respond?

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

At the beginning of all things, our ancestors imagined God as an artisan, a potter, someone who works with their hands. They imagined a God who looked around at all of creation and knew that it was missing something. Realizing what that something was, God reached down into the foundation of it all, into the clay and dust of the created earth itself, and shaped it into a person. God breathed God’s own life into the body, and imprinted God’s own creative spark there. And thus began our adventure.

Remember that this is what we mean when we say that we are dust. Dust that can make bricks, than can build a home or shape an oven to bake bread. Dust that can be hardened like a heart of stone, or forged into weapons of violence, or shaped into something beautiful and full of life. Dust that came from the center of stars and the bottom of oceans and the heart of mountains. Dust that has been touched by the creator’s hands, and given life and the ability to use it as we will. Dust that can become many things, but at our very core, we are clay pots shaped by the hands of God. Remember that you are dust.

These clay pots we are, these sturdy and yet fragile things, they will make us crazy if we keep pretending they’re something they can never be. The death-dealing, death-denying culture in which we swim would have us treat our bodies like tools, like something separate from our selves, something we can wield and preserve. We have heard infinite messages that teach us to believe our bodies are somehow not us, that our minds are separate or our souls are separate or our bodies are immaterial somehow. Remember though, that you are dust. Our bodies, our very selves, are material. We are made. Created. We are dust, given breath. We cannot truly separate our minds from our bodies, and scientists are learning more and more how very true this is. Things we experience change our patterns of thinking as well as the physical structure of our brains. Things that happen to our bodies literally change our minds. And the reverse we also see to be true; things that happen to our minds can dramatically affect our bodies. We are not people living in clay pots. We are clay pots. We are dust. Remember?

It is only when we remember this, when we know this in our heart of hearts- and by that I mean in our emotional centers and in our cardiovascular systems. I mean when we know this in our heartbeats. It is only when we remember that we are dust that we can truly experience the awe of what God has done for us in Jesus. It is only when we remember that we are clay pots that we can behold the earth-shattering reality that the God who placed pinpoints of light in the darkest nights and provided clouds for shade in the heat of the sun entered the world as a clay pot. That God became dust for us. Fragile, breakable, mortal. God became not just like us, God became us, was born of a mortal mother and died a mortal death. The clay pot that was Jesus became chipped, and punctured, and broken like we do over the course of our lives. The Dust that was Jesus was buried, placed in the ground like we are. Remember that you are dust, and for you Jesus did this. For you. For me. Not for theological arguments or to fulfill a formula or because it was expected. God did this because God made us out of clay and God loves every particle of our broken pottery. God did this for us, because to dust we shall return, and God does not let us go even there alone.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. God made that dust. God has touched it and made it holy. Remember that you are dust made holy. And even in death, to holiness you return.