Most likely you think that you have come to church today for ashes. But I think, whether you know it or not, what have come to church for today is a tiny little bit of poetry. A poem tries to say a great deal in a small space: to compress deep meaning in fewer, more carefully chosen and arranged words than prose can manage. And Ash Wednesday is a day for poetry.
For better or worse, the preacher’s job, on a day like today, is to serve as the sort of Cliff’s Notes to the poetry - to unpack, in how ever many words it takes, what the poetry of the day says so very much more concisely. I’ll try not to over-do it.
The poem today comes in three stanzas that are delivered simultaneously. The first stanza is the little cross-shaped smudge of ash with which we will mark your forehead. The second stanza is this little accompanying line: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This line comes from the Book of Genesis, after God discovered that Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit of the tree from which God had forbidden them to eat (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). God finds the two of them embarrassed about themselves, wearing fig leaves to cover the beautiful bodies God made for them. And they must have sort of made friends with the serpent, because he seems to be lingering in the vicinity when God shows up.
God is upset to find not only that Adam and Eve have disobeyed him, but that they have become embarrassed about themselves in a way that God never intended. He has words for each of them: for the serpent, for Eve, and for Adam. And the second stanza of today’s poem comes straight from God’s lips, intended for Adam: “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
It’s foolishness on my part to try enlarge on the poetry of today, but here I go.
Two things, I will say. The first thing, is to mention the one word of the poem that we have added to the words that came from Genesis. And the second thing is to mention the third and silent stanza that the poem relies upon, but that you might not have heard, since it is silent.
First, the added word: “remember.”
When you walked into church today, we assumed, without even knowing who you are, that you had forgotten a great deal that it is actually very important to remember... starting with where you come from: which is dust. You may tell yourself and the world all kinds of stories about who you are and where you come from. But the church wants you to remember that in the beginning God formed you and me and all of us human creatures out of the dust. God made us out of whatever stuff of the universe was lying around within his grasp that day. And what’s most important about that memory isn’t so much the material we were made from, but the hand that made us: God’s own hand, which molded and shaped us into the kind of creatures we are.
On a daily basis, (judging by the way we live our lives) many of us forget that we are creatures of God’s own making, formed, we are told “from the dust of the ground,” which, I guess, seems like an inauspicious beginning.
But this is where the crucial silent third stanza of the poem of Ash Wednesday comes in. Because after God made us out of dust, he didn’t stop there. No, our first memories (those memories that we have to work hard to remember today) remind us that when we had been formed Adam out of the dust, then, God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life….” That’s the third and silent stanza: the sound of God breathing life into Adam. God breathed into us, with his own breath, the breath of life. Remember this. God breathed life into us. Remember this.
The flip side of remembering that God gave us life by breathing his own breath into the dust from which he made us, is that without God’s breath we are nothing but dust.
Curiously, many of us have mostly decided that the most important part of ourselves is the dust. We have forgotten that there is more to us than dust.
The church is not interested in reminding you that you are nothing but dust. The church is deeply interested in reminding you that once you were but dust.
And it remains a fact, as it always has, ever since that sad day in the Garden of Eden when God had those hard words with the serpent and with Adam and with Eve, that to dust we shall all return. But since the very first day of our creation, we have never been nothing but dust. Since that day we were first made, we have always been dust-plus-God’s-breath.
Since time works differently for us than it does for God, we don’t know what happened since the day when God had those stern words for Adam, “thou art dust and to dust shalt thou return.” Maybe it was that God heard Adam snoring (or maybe it was Eve). Or maybe God heard one of them sighing; or breathing heavily (for whatever reason). And maybe the sound of their breath coming back out through their nostrils put God in mind of the time that he put the breath of life in them that way. Whatever it was, God remembered that, alone in the vast array of creatures he had made, it was to us men and women to whom he gave life with his own breath, since we were the pinnacle of his creation, and he made us in his image. It was our human nostrils into which he breathed his life-giving breath. And the dust of our lives was hallowed that way, when the dustiness of us was allowed to carry the divine breath within ourselves. Which is why we believe that even the dust to which we will return when we die will be restored into something good when the breath of this life finally goes out of us, and God gives us a new breath in the life to come.
All of which is a lot to say from up here in the pulpit. But all of which I think is intended in the three simultaneous stanzas of the poem of Ash Wednesday:
One: the little cross-shaped smudge of ash on our heads.
Two: Remember… remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Remember.
Three: the silent stanza of God’s breath in the dust of our nostrils.
You have never been nothing but dust, and you never will be.
Please, remember. Remember. All three stanzas. It is far too easy to forget. Especially since part of the poem is a silent breath, a long time ago.
Still… remember.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Ash Wednesday 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia