The Blessings of Dust and Burned Fibers

 

         

Ash Wednesday invites us to begin the Lenten season of repentance by looking our mortality and our imperfection squarely in the face. We repent of our sin. We remember the brevity of our lives. This year, however, I’m not so sure that we need a cross of ash on our foreheads in order to think about death. With almost half-a-million Covid deaths in our country, with contagion chasing us everywhere we go, I think that we are already well aware of death. I’m also not so sure that we need to be reminded only of our sin. The traumatic events of 2020 have left us deeply aware of the systemic evil in which we are all implicated: the racism and injustice that rule our lives; the disunity; the hatred; the lies; our continuing destruction of the natural world; the way in which we have turned our backs on the children at our borders. I have never arrived at Ash Wednesday more aware of my need to repent.

          Life in God is about more than sin and death. Tonight, even as we repent, let’s concentrate on two other truths that our ashes today bring to us.

          First: the dust. “Remember that you are dust,” we say. This phrase comes from Genesis. These are the words spoken to Adam and Eve after their sin had forced them from the Garden. These words do recall our sinfulness and our mortality, yet they also carry a hidden blessing and a responsibility. The dust into which God breathed life was not the useless fluff that collects under the bed. A study of the Genesis story reminds us that God created Adam from the “apar adamah.”  Apar adamah is “fine garden soil.” In this creation story, the first human was made from the “humus,” from the loose dirt, from the good, arable soil.[1] God didn’t create us from heavy, sticky clay to be fired in an oven and shattered. God didn’t chisel us from hard, self-sufficient rock. God didn’t form us from rotting peat or from shifting desert sand. God created us from rich garden soil, from the soil that grows things, from the soil that brings forth life when planted with seed and watered. As people of the ground, we are one with the same soil that we work, the same soil that nourishes us with food. And it is to that same fine garden soil that we will all return. Our common life as “dust” ties us to the earth, to our job as caretakers of the earth, as caretakers of one another. When Cain killed his brother Abel, it was the dust of the ground that cried out in pain and indignation to God.

          No wonder that Isaiah, in his vision of a restored Israel, calls us to be “a watered garden.” We’re not created “to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes.” Instead, we’re tied together in responsibility to one another and to our world: “to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin,” says Isaiah. Like the farmer who continues to work the soil, to fertilize, to weed, to bring forth growth by the sweat of his brow, we are expected to work the ground of our world, feeding, clothing, and caring for one another, as if our lives depended on it—for they do. The ash on our foreheads tonight reminds us of this blessing and this responsibility.

          The second thing that I’d like to point to tonight are the burnt palms. At St. Ambrose, as in many parishes, our ashes are made by burning the previous year’s palms—the leftovers from the Hosannas of Palm Sunday. If you’ve never participated in palm burning, it can be quite an ordeal. After the flames, you’re left with charred fibers, strong filaments that must be tediously ground before you can use them. I thought about those burnt fibers as I contemplated our jar of ashes this year. I remembered the words of poet Jan Richardson: “This is the hour we are marked/ by what has made it/ through the burning.”[2] We, too, have made it through this past year’s burning. We have been tried, tested, sometimes scorched. But we are the stuff of God’s creation. We are woven together of strong fibers, filled with the breath of God, and re-formed in Christ for a new creation. Hear the rest of Richardson’s words, and go forth, blessed and strengthened by a cross of dust, for the life of the world.

This is the moment

we ask for the blessing

that lives within

the ancient ashes,

that makes its home

inside the soil of

this sacred earth.

So let us be marked

not for sorrow.

And let us be marked

not for shame.

Let us be marked

not for false humility

or for thinking

we are less

than we are

but for claiming

what God can do

within the dust,

within the dirt,

within the stuff

of which the world

is made

and the stars that blaze

in our bones

and the galaxies that spiral

inside the smudge

we bear.

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[1]  See William P. Brown, The Ethos of the Cosmos: The Genesis of Moral Imagination in the Bible (Eerdmans, 1999), 137-140.

[2] Jan Richardson, “A Blessing for Ash Wednesday,” found at Blessing the Dust - A Blessing for Ash Wednesday (Jan Richardson) (billjohnsononline.com).