One of the reasons I love Ash Wednesday.
Today is Ash Wednesday. I will utter the following phrase a couple hundred times today… “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
It is a somber reminder that death is a reality, not someday, but it is a reality we deal with daily. We all sin, we will all die, when it comes down to it we are dust.
I really love Ash Wednesday. I really do.
You might be thinking how can you “love” such a glum day, such a downer of a reminder. Yes, it causes me to pause, to even become introspective, and even sad as I will be smudging crosses on the foreheads of people, and have that ashen smudge applied to my own very ample forehead.
I will apply these reminders on the foreheads of kids, who haven’t a clue what death means, and on to the heads of other kids for who have seen too much death already. I will smudge the cross on the foreheads of men and women who have lost a husband or wife in this past year, I will smudge this cross on the foreheads of those for whom I may very well make the same sign over their coffin in the not too distant future. It may seem grim, but dust is not the end of this story…
I think we need remind ourselves of our dusty nature because we need to remember who we are, what we are and most importantly who’s we are. You see even as we remember we are dust to need to remember that God does some of his very best work with dust.
“— then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” – Genesis 2:7
We are dust, but we are not just the dust that clings to our ceiling fans and on the back of the dresser. We have been formed by God, loved by God and the depths of that love and the life that it promises is what Ash Wednesday and Lent are all about.
Remember… remember you are dust… remember that to dust you shall return… remember what God can do with dust.
I am not the only one who loves this day, read this blog post by Nadia Bolz-Weber http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/ Pretty good stuff.
Ash Wednesday – mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
Yep, today is Ash Wednesday. I love it. Service was packed tonight. It is amazing who shows up when the weather isn’t horrid! We doubled the number of folks with cross shaped smudges on their foreheads from last year. Last year it was if I remember correctly snowy and icy. This year that junk is waiting until Thursday to show up.
I get all emotional on when people come up to receive their ashen cross. The words and the life experiences they are going through often get me… right… there… uff. A lady with cancer, another woman who just lost her mother, a guy with a nasty temper, but a heart of gold, little kids kneeling in front of me, not really sure what is going on, but they too are dust and to dust they shall return. In all of this darkness, still the word of promise rings all around me, in the stained glass, the cross that adorns our East wall, and the bread and wine, neatly and reverently covered on the altar, just waiting to be poured out into our lives, to feed us with the true life that is in Christ. It is just completely AWESOME!
There is a phrase we use in our confession, “we confess to you and to one another, and before the whole company of heaven, that we have sinned by our fault, by our own fault, by our own most grievous fault, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” Some folks don’t like that so much. Makes ‘em feel bad I guess. But, I think if we are honest it is our fault, much of what we do and don’t do that harms our relationship with God, with others and the whole creation is at some level our fault. Corporately or individually we have enough faults to make California seem solid in comparison. But even with our Mea Culpa’s our own most grievous fault is not where things are left. The point of the smudgy little cross on your forehead is that on the cross Christ came and moved us beyond that deep grievous valley and into the bright sunshine of life!
Ok, enough for now… I have started my 40 day blog officially now… we will see where God leads us!
