More Than Dust
Sermon given by the Rev. Christine Gowdy-Jaehnig on Ash Wednesday, March 5th, 2025
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17 * Psalm 103:1-14 * 2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10 8 Matthew6:1-6,16-21
Henri Nouwen, teacher, speaker and writer about the spiritual life, went to visit a friend who had been fighting cancer for three years. This man had long been a social activist who cared deeply for people, living a faithful and useful life. He said to Nouwen, “My whole way of thinking about myself has always been in terms of action. My life is valuable because I’ve been able to do so many things for many people. And suddenly, here I am, and I can’t do anything anymore.” The two talked and Nouwen realized that his friend was still focused on “doing” and his hope rested upon the idea that he might still return to his work of serving others. Nouwen believed his friend’s hope to be groundless, for his cancer was now advanced. Nouwen believed was important that during his friend’s remaining time he come to a deeper understanding of who he was and discover a new meaning for his life that embraced his finitude and frailty.
We may not be facing a clearly approaching death, but Ash Wednesday invites us to take up the same task as Nouwen’s friend. This day prompts us to look straight at that which most people shy away from: our mortality. Our culture helps us avoid it, having created the illusion that life and growth are almost endless. We often use euphemisms to speak of death. As Voltaire noted, “One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.” The truth is that humans do not fall asleep, pass over or pass away. No one ever has departed, kicked the bucket or pegged out. Our loved ones do not push up daisies, snuff it, take a last bow or, to quote George Eliot, “Join the choir invisible.” We die. And so the church calls us to be counter-cultural and remember and engage with this fearful, mysterious truth.
Our liturgy tells us we are dust. Dust is light and easily blown about. Hear this reminds us that we have no heft and are not really in control; we are fragile and fleeting.
We are created dust. Imagine God kneeling down and scooping up some muddy clay. Imagine God squishing it, rolling it, pinching and poking it, shaping it until it bears a human shape. But God does not stop there. God raises this creature and blows into its nostrils. God animates us with his very breath and spirit. We remember our finitude to underscore that we are not self-creating or self-sustaining but radically dependent upon this creating God; a God for whom matter matters, and whose very nature is to bring dust to life. There is dirt under God’s fingernails.
We are sinful, created dust. When we look honestly at ourselves and at the state of the world, we can not deny that much is wrong. I thought of sharing a list at this point of all the ways humans have and continue to sin, but it feels too overwhelming. Please use your imagination to fill in this gap and we’ll take it as read. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that original sin is the only Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable by observation. In other words, we are all prone to sin. I like the word “prone” for it creates in my mind a picture of someone who has tripped and done a face-plant; sin leaves us lying prone on the ground. Too many of us then just crawl around on our hands and knees instead of doing the hard work of getting up.
Some people want to deal with sin by coming down heavily on law and order, and think punishment is the way to go. They preach fire and brimstone sermons. Barbara Brown Taylor writes clearly and helpfully of a better way in her book Speaking of Sin: the Lost Language of Salvation. She says that sin is not just the things we do or say that are wrong or harmful, but a way of life that needs to be exposed and changed. “[Sin] is something we experience both as a species and as individuals, in our existential angst and in our willful misbehavior. However we run into it, we … [experience] it as wrecked relationships: with God, with one another [and ourselves], with the whole created order. Sometimes we cause the wreckage and sometimes we are simply trapped in it … [T]he choice to remain in wrecked relationship with God and other human beings is called sin. The choice to enter into the process of repair is called repentance.”
In past years, Grace has made a practice of reciting the Decalogue on two Sundays during Lent. Brown suggests that Sin is not so much the violation of law as it is a violation of relationship. The law is there to give us guidance about how to keep our relationships just and life-giving.
The confessing and lamenting that we do today is actually something hopeful. We do this only when we have decided not to remain crawling on the ground, that is -- in those wrecked relationships. We are not here to simply engage in remorse, a prolonged and insistent self-reproach which does not require us to make painful changes. We need penitence. Penitence accepts responsibility and commits to the work of repair. Following our confession here tonight, you will hear words of pardon --thank goodness!-- because without it we might not have enough hope to engage in the work of transformation.
I can stand and declare to you God’s pardon because we are beloved, sinful, created dust. We get the ashes smeared in exactly the same place that the chrism oil was put following our baptisms, sealing us as Christ’s own forever. The cross shape reminds us that the One who shaped us out of dust joined us in the dust. When Christ stretches out his arms upon the cross he encompasses all of us and all of life. Nothing escapes his knowledge and embrace: our joy and pain, delight and terror, pleasure and heartache, and our sinning. The Biblical claim that God knows us head to toe is tied to the Biblical claim that God loves us toe to head. This love reaches out to each of us seeking a loving response -- a relationship. To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to allow ourselves to be shaped by God’s relentless love into who we truly are: the Beloved. And when we sin, God yearns for a restoration of the relationship that has been damaged. We are chosen to be God’s companions not just in this life but in the next. A love like this can never be severed.
Let us pray:
God, who breathes life into us;
Take away our fears of our finitude, frailty and failings;
Fortify us with your Spirit as we do the work of repair;
And write new words of mercy on our hearts
that we may forgive as we are forgiven.
This we pray through Jesus Christ, the friend of sinners. Amen.