Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust
Dear Friends,
I can remember Ash Wednesday services when I was a boy. I was about 10 years old and had been signed up to be the acolyte at the 6:00 am Ash Wednesday Service. The priest picked me up at the house (early) and drove me to the church. Most of what I can remember was that it was early. The church was musty and cold in Southern Arizona and as a few people shuffled in (did I mention that it was early) I wondered what the service was all about. Ashes?
I wondered if Ash Wednesday had anything to do with the nursery rhyme that I remembered from my childhood. “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down…”. (It turns out it there is no connection at all.) Within 50 minutes of the start of our service, I was being driven to a local coffee shop for breakfast with the priest and then off to school.
But I had these ‘ashes’ on my forehead. What on earth for? I didn’t get the idea. But I get it now. Tomorrow, I will say the words from Genesis 3:19 over hundreds of foreheads: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” We are ashes…or nearly so…soon. We are dust in the wind. (That is a song from my youth.)
Mazur/catholicchurch.org.uk
It happens like this every Ash Wednesday. A line forms. I meet each person in the line one by one. They stepforward for the imposition of ashes. I press my thumb into the ground charcoal of incinerated remains of last year’s Palm Sunday fronds. I trace the sign of the cross on the forehead of a man, a child, a woman, or a teen. Some are old men with deep furrows in their brow. Some are uncertain teens who don’t want to be touched at all. When a young baby is brought into the line, I almost cry out in my spirit: “Stop, no, not this one, Lord. This baby is too young to have such a terminal word spoken over their life!” But the line moves forward; man by man, woman by woman, child by child, all brothers and sisters of the dust.
The bible affirms that we are children not just of dust, but of God. “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:12-13) That is, not just dust, but born of God. The Bad News is that without Christ we are dust…and only dust…and to dust we will inevitably return. But the Good News is that, for those who believe in Christ Jesus, we cannot despair. We do not. Because we know that Christ acted in history so that we will never taste final death, we will never “bite the dust”. We will never be just dust.
The Old Prayer Book said it this way: “…earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the earth and the sea shall give up their dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his own glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.”
I’ll see you tomorrow for Ash Wednesday.
In Christ,
David+
