You Are Dust :: Ash Wednesday
Joel 2:12-19; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
What the Lord God said to Adam in Genesis 3:19, he also said to all of us this evening at the imposition of ashes: You Are Dust . . . and to dust you shall return.
We’ve entered the season of Lent. Lent is a holy season of prayerful and penitential reflection which begins with today’s solemn Ash Wednesday assembly. Ashes ... just like my crucifix ... visually confess that the wages of sin is death.
We die because we are sinners, who are corrupt through and through, body and soul.
We die because we are sinners.
Sin sticks to us. Unlike these ashes, we are not able to wash them away. We are not able to make ourselves clean. We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners. We are born that way. Sin is a total corruption that leads to all kinds of unfaithfulness, unrighteousness, deceit, immorality, ruin, and misery.
Our sin is blacker than these ashes. We are like the diseased tree that Jesus refers to in his sermon on the mount. By ourselves, we bear bad fruit. Sin is killing us.
So today we have been marked with ashes, marked for destruction, just like beautiful ash trees in our country that are being devoured by the emerald ash borer. On the outside, we may appear healthy, but sin is destroying us from the inside out. Since 2002, emerald ash borers have been marching west, killing hundreds of millions of trees in the U.S. Last year, they were discovered in neighboring Benton County.
Sin continues to kill billions at a much faster rate.
We are dust, and to dust we shall return.
Lent is not a time for superficial spiritual arithmetic. This is not a season for us to select a few sins, a few vices that trouble us, to embark on forty days of discipline to eradicate only those sins. Lenten repentance will not improve our score on some heavenly exam. There is no heavenly exam. We cannot make ourselves holy. We can not cleanse ourselves. We cannot even slow the march of destruction.
We are dust and to dust we will return.
Nevertheless, Lent is a time to consider how destructive sin is in our lives and the lives of others. To consider how sin is ravaging your body.
No matter what your sin is ... Selfishness? Greed? Anger? Unfaithfulness? It’s causing pain and blindness, physically and spiritually. It numbs your fear of God.
Sin leads us to become lovers of ourselves, lovers of money. Sin leads us to become prideful and arrogant of the things we do. Sin even leads us to declare ... Look at how I have turned away from sin.
But truth be told, sin leaves us heartless, not loving good. I don’t know what your sin is. But you must know, it is killing you. You are dust and to dust you shall return.
But brothers and sisters in Christ, you are all baptized. As God’s baptized children, we don’t need to live like this. In fact, as Paul reminds us in his Epistle to the Romans, how can we continue living in sin?
So today, we have begun a new period of special reflection. Today, we hear our Lord teaching us about prayer and spiritual life. Jesus says, Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them (Mt 6:1). When you give to the needy ... when you pray or fast ... when you put on sackcloth and ashes, don’t do it to impress others.
You don’t need to show it to the world you are repenting. Our Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Our liturgical rite of the imposition of ashes in Christian churches began in the tenth century. The use of ashes as a marker of repentance is much, much older.
The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah employ this image to reflect grief and mourning. Ezekiel uses it to show complete destruction. Those who wore ashes also wore rough sackcloth ... you know, material made of burlap or hemp or goat’s hair. In repentance we recognize that only God can soothe us, only God can heal our wounds, only God can cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
The special marks of repentance ... almsgiving, prayer, fasting, and ashes ... are not wrong. These activities are in fact good and beneficial. They’re what God’s people do. God’s people live in repentance not because of some choice they are making or some working they are doing, but because of what God is doing for you, through you.
Properly speaking, repentance is contrition and faith. That is to say, repentance is the work of God. As the prophet Joel reminded us, he is the one who enables you to rend your hearts and not your garments. He is the one who enables you to return to Him.
And he does this throughout our lives ... through the faith that he created in us, faith that comprehends the promises of God in Christ Jesus. We don’t merit grace because of our contrition. We can’t even begin to remember all of our sins, let alone confess them.
But you are saved by God’s grace through faith in Christ. He has chosen you before the foundation of the world to believe in him. And because of the faith that he gave you, your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Today.
Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, your sins have been forgiven in Christ Jesus. God has led you in repentance here so that you can hear his promise once again. Your sins are forgiven in Christ. He who knew no sin has become sin for you. The author of Life has traded his life for your ashes.
Jesus took your sins .. the sins that were killing you ... he took them from you. He took your sins Golgotha. There he ensured that your sins would die with him on the cross. Then he made sure your sins were buried in his tomb, to ensure that they will never be heard from again. More than that, Jesus has raised from the dead. Death and ashes have no more dominion over you. He has given you who faith in these promises eternal life.
These promises were given to you at your baptism. There, at that font, God united himself with you. There at the font, he washed away all of the black marks from your life and he clothed in the active righteousness of Christ. Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
And that new life is yours now.
It begins anew today.
Today he has prepared a Feast of Forgiveness for you. Here at his altar, your Father in heaven is entreating you to join him and all the heavenly hosts at his table to celebrate the feast of the lamb, whose kingdom has no end. It is fitting to celebrate and be glad, he said, for your brothers and sisters in Christ were dead but now are alive. There is no greater treasure than the forgiveness he delivers here tonight.
When you leave church, if you stop somewhere on the way home, don’t be surprised if folks look at you a bit perplexed. The mark of Christ on your forehead and on your heart is showing forth a little more today.
There’s no need to blow the trumpet and go into a lengthy theological discourse about what it all means. Just keep it simple. “Oh, it’s Ash Wednesday, and I was at church. We are dust and to dust we shall return. But Jesus Christ was raised from the dead giving us the promise that we now have eternal life in him.