Our Dust [Ash Wednesday]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Psalm 103:8-14

Our Dust

It’s just dust.  This won’t hurt.  It will feel like when a gentle breeze causes your bangs to sweep across your forehead.  It will feel just like when the priest marked you as Christ’s own forever with chrism.  It’s just like that except instead of oil there will be ashes, dust.

And so it won’t hurt.  Unless, that is, unless you really think about it.  If you really think about the ashes, if you sit with them and let them seep through your pores and into your soul, you will feel just how heavy something that weighs almost nothing can be.  And then it will hurt.  It will hurt like life.  And it will hurt like death.

Ashes are a fitting reminder of our mortality.  They are what is left after life has left.  And they are everywhere.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  Signs of decay lazily dance in the air all around us, revealing themselves most brazenly in the beautiful warmth of a ray of sunlight, as if to caution us against too easily giving in to bliss.  Signs of decay blanket every surface like dew blankets the mown fields.  We are surrounded by ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  Everywhere.  And today on your face.  By your choice.

It’s like telling a secret without having to say it.  I have traced ash crosses on so many faces.  And every time it is true.  I have marked the oldest people I have ever known.  And I have marked babies – including my own.  The ashes, so heavy in a way dust never otherwise is, are always accompanied by the same words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  Words both easy to understand and also impossible to fully grasp.

That each and every one of us will die is not news.  We know it; whether or not we care to admit it, we know it.  We know that this story ends.  But that is all we know.  We know only that the story ends; we do not how many pages are in the book or how it ends or what really happens after The End.  And that can be a heavy burden: to look in the mirror, or into the face of your beloved, or into the eyes of your children and to know: this won’t last.

When my oldest, Oscar, was younger, four or five years old, he used to say: “When I’m older I’m going to invent a magic wand that makes it so that no one ever dies.”  Like searching for the Fountain of Youth.  Or like modern scientists trying, as we speak, to upload our brains to the cloud to be downloaded into android bodies.  Death is hard to live with.  And so humanity is forever trying to change how the story ends.  But it does end.  And we all know it.

And so we wear ashes.  We wear ashes because we know it.

And I don’t pretend to know why this is.  I don’t know why God made us with expiration dates.  I don’t know why we were built for decay.  I don’t know why God chose dust.  I know only that we are dust and to dust we shall return.

And I know that there is something about that that makes God love us even more – or if not love us more, because God loves us perfectly, maybe love us more tenderly.  Our psalmist says, “As a parent cares for a child, so does God care for us.  Because God knows whereof we are made; God remembers that we are but dust.”  This mortality, it was built into the system by God.  And still God is sympathetic to our decay.  This is how we are created but the Creator knows that it’s not easy.

I have buried many people as a priest.  I have buried people who have lived on this earth for more than a century.  And I have buried people who have died far, far too young.  I have touched death many times.  I have gently held the dust that remains.  I have held in my hands so many bags of ashes.  And after life, I can tell you, they all look the same.  God’s final answer to all our ungodly judgments and prejudices: we are all made of the same stuff; we are all made of dust.

Your ashes are a sign of your mortality, yes, but they are also a sign of solidarity.  Today you will walk the streets and sit the pews with your black cross.  And some of the people you encounter today will wear the same symbol.  And some will stare at your ash in confusion.  And some might even roll their eyes.  But each person you encounter, whether with or without ashes, they too know the pain of death; they too feel the weight of mortality; they too understand all too well that every story one day ends.  And it hurts.  And so they too need to be loved through this life.  I mean, can you imagine how hard it must be to walk through this life so aware of your dust and your death?

Of course you do.  And so does God.  The God who made you, shares your dust.  We did not choose this.  But our God did.  Our God chose to wear the weight of our mortality.  Our God wept at the death of Lazarus.  Our God comforted those who mourned.  Our God suffered and died on the cross.  Our God has been intimate with life and death and dust. 

That black cross, that cross formed of the dust, that sign of decay that today you will wear so openly, is not found only in the mirror.  You wear it today but it does not belong to you alone.   It is traced on every forehead, on every face, imbedded in every soul.  You are not alone, mortal.  Your fate is common; it is something we all share.  And so then is your burden.  You do not have to carry the weight of mortality on your own.  It was created to be shared – by every person on the earth and even by the One who inhabits Heaven.