Dust

Text: Luke 9:51-62

            We mostly don’t know what to do with Ash Wednesday. I mean, we do the whole shpeel year after year. Come forward. Get ashes put on our foreheads. You are dust and yada yada, something depressing sounding. Return to our seats. Eventually, return home and wipe dust off our foreheads. But why dust? Why ashes? What does today have to do with anything other than the high holy days of soup suppers and this season called Lent?

            Well, a couple of things, actually.

            In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus’ ministry begins its course toward Jerusalem. If you can image the Gospels as a giant valley, in today’s reading we have reached the bottom of the valley and from here we are now ascending faster and faster toward the mountain top which is Jerusalem. The entire season of Lent is oriented toward the holy city where Jesus is heading—first to be celebrated with palms waving and finally to be crucified. But at this valley bottom of the Gospel narrative we have a series of strange stories about people who are willing to follow Jesus but are rebuked nonetheless. There’s the person who says he will follow wherever Jesus goes, whom Jesus shoots down with the line that foxes have holes and birds nests but the Son of Mon nowhere to call home. Then another wants to follow but has an obligation to bury his father, whom Jesus again reprimands, saying “Let the dead bury their own dead.” Another will follow but wants to wish family good-bye first, and again, Jesus rebukes him, saying, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back if fit for the kingdom of God.”
            Jesus is so completely focused on Jerusalem in these stories that he doesn’t have time for the slightest delay. Yet, that does seem a little strange to us. It hardly seems fair. Those people seem like they are willing to be pretty darn good disciples, and yet it’s not good enough for Jesus to be pretty darn good. Sometimes people say that God demands your best, but this story suggests something entirely different. Jesus doesn’t demand your best; he demands everything. My choir director at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, James Johnson, would often say, “I ask from you nothing more or less than perfection.” That is the same thing Jesus is after. You have to be perfect, no exceptions, to be a worthy follower.

            So, what on earth to do with that?

            Well, one option is to try to be perfect. That should occupy you for about five seconds. Try to follow everything Jesus demands of you; please do. Nothing will teach you faster that you are a dirty, rotten sinner than that. A few people can manage to be so completely turned inward that they actually believe they are perfect, but the rest of us realize pretty quickly that this is no simple task. Every one of us would have asked to say good-bye to our friends and family before following Jesus; every one of us would have buried our fathers; every one of us follows with conditions.

            And that’s why we have Ash Wednesday.

            When the ashes are signed in the cross on your foreheads you receive those melancholy words from Genesis 3:19, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” It’s the most humbling of moments that we have in the church year. You aren’t that special; you aren’t going to last forever; you aren’t all that much… but then again, to the God of the universe, you are in fact something. You are dust. When God created human beings in Genesis 2 he created us out of two things: God’s breath and dust of the earth—that’s it. And when we die the breath leaves us and we are only that—just dust.

            At first blush that sounds depressing; at first blush that confirms all the awkwardness you feel every time you hear those words. But dig a little deeper and things the perspective changes. After all, what is dust? If you get small enough, dust is just discarded atoms. Dust is just left over atoms that still have a shape, but they don’t stay that way forever. Gradually, they lose their shape and start to become part of things animate again. They are re-used by nature. When your body turns to dust on an atomic level you begin to be absorbed by plants and in turn by animals and in turn your atoms may very well end up making up other human beings. It’s how nature recycles itself. In fact, it has been calculated that you may have as many as a billion atoms that now make up you, which once were part of Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther or Moses. Anybody from history who has died is now, quite literally, a part of you.

            You may be thinking I’ve gone Buddhist or something on you so let me bring it back around. When Jesus demands everything from you it is to set you straight and remind you that you cannot do it. You are just chunks of dust, held together by God’s breath. On Ash Wednesday—and, really, every other day—we need to be reminded of that. We aren’t much. But then again, we are. We are dust of God’s own making and choosing. We are dust of a most complex and beautiful sort. And most importantly, we are dust that God will redeem and resurrect. Part of the reason I enjoy talking about the atomic nature of things is that it lends itself perfectly to how we talk about resurrection. We will be resurrected as the same kind of dust and God will breathe into us once more—not in this broken world but in a place free from constraints. Resurrection, not reincarnation. New creation—this earth, this dust, but changed.

            All of us will be resurrected as one body of Christ. Many members; one body. Much dust; one Lord. You are dust and to dust you will return.

Thanks be to God for that.