Dust

Preached at Saint David of Wales March 9, 2011

Joel 2:1-2,12-17
Psalm 103
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

Remember--

You are dust and to dust you shall return.

That is the good news we all came to church today to hear.

With last nights pancakes sitting still heavy in our guts, we came here today to remember that we are dust.

Here we are at Ash Wednesday at the brink of Lent with our toes on the long dusty road to the Cross. We are being invited to walk with Jesus all the way to Jerusalem, and that is hard, because Jerusalem is death, but we are here as a community because we believe the awesome truth that on the other side of that death is a whole new kind of life.

but the only way to get to that life is to go to the foot of the cross, where we will show the world what we are really made of-

Dust

On this Lenten walk with Jesus to Jerusalem we have the chance to come closer to God, to, to try and wrap our minds around the crucifixion and the resurrection. Lent is not an invitation to self improvement, but to intimacy with our creator, the one who loved us into being, who breathed life into the dust of this world and made it holy and awake, living and breathing.

without the breath of God we are only dust.

We are people of dust building houses of dust, working for dust, accumulating dust, eating dust, drinking dust, and pretending its all real.

This life is like a giant monopoly game and no matter how much we accumulate, at the end its all going back in the box and we will be left with nothing but the treasure of love.

Lent is the time to be reconciled to God, if there is anything keeping us from a full and deep relationship with God this is the time to put those things aside. Stop playing the game for six weeks and fall more in love with God who makes all of this dust worth loving.

We are here to receive a public and visible mark on our foreheads and hear the Gospel message :Don’t make a performance of being good, don’t practice our piety before others.

So what do we do about these ashes on our foreheads?

If you are proud that you came here today, if you think anyone is going to be impressed, go wash your forehead as soon as the service is over. Don’t worry it still counts. Consider yourself reminded and move on. If you want to make sure that people know you have fulfilled your religious duty- go wash your face.

On the other hand if you are kind of embarrassed by the thought of going out in the world with a weird dirt smudge on your face, leave it. A little humility will do you good. Its okay, not being clean won’t kill you. Your friends might ask and this is a great chance to tell the truth.

“I am part of a completely mad little community of people who once a year smear ashes on their foreheads and remember that nothing here that we are working for will last and that all our human efforts are in the big picture, dust.”

In the collect we ask for the remission of sins, we aren’t fully cured but we can be in remission.
These ashes take us back to the truth that we are not and never will be perfectly sinless, that there are marks and smudges on us that we ignore all the time.

Its okay to say we are sorry. to the world, to our family, to God.

For too many people repentance is insulting.

Don’t in any way indicate that I’m not perfect, because this edifice of dust that I have constructed is so fragile, that being ok is all that is holding me together.


If we Rest in the love of God and we can realize that nothing we can do can pull us out of God’s love, and like stepping out into the bright sun after years inside we may see things in ourselves that need tending. It doesn’t make us awful people, just people who need to wash our faces.

We need to wash our hearts, clean off our intentions, and give our courage a good scrubbing.

So this one day we can go out with faces to match our insides. We can go out in the world looking like the imperfect people we are, with dirt on our faces.