My sermon for this year’s Ash Wednesday worship service includes three sermon moments, all based off of Jill Duffield’s book cited below, which we planned to use for all our community Lent services this year. Her article here was also a big influence on this sermon. The first reading is Genesis 2:4b-8.
As our theme for this year’s mid-week Lenten services, we’re using the book Lent in Plain Sight: A Devotion Through 10 Objects (Amazon link) by Presbyterian Pastor Jill Duffield. Each week, we’ll be looking at how something ordinary can help open our eyes to the presence of God’s kingdom around us.
Remember You Are Dust
Thinking about tonight’s object, dust, I want to start with something I’ve never done before in a sermon: A commercial break. The Ash Wednesday sermon will be back in exactly 30 seconds.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O8yoZitoOk”]
That ad is titled “Tessa’s Cleaning Confession” and I appreciate how it illustrates the truth of dust. Dust and ash are not nice things. They’re the stuff of death.
Ashes are what’s left over from destroying something with fire. As that commercial says, dust is made from things like dust mite droppings and dead skin cells. Bits of hair that have fallen out. Pollen and soot. Tiny fragments of carpet and clothing fiber. Tracked-in dirt.
Genesis 2 tells us “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.” You and I are made of dust, molded by God out of the dirt, and given life.
And some day, we shall return to dust. Perhaps after death our bodies will be cremated, turned into fine ash by fire, or perhaps we’ll be buried and it won’t be for years or even centuries that the husk of our lifeless corpses will disintegrate into dust.
Either way, we return to the dust from which we were formed. As we proclaim in the funeral service, “Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.”
In her book, Pastor Duffield writes, “I have held the last of what remains of an earthly life in my hands, whole people now only ashes, years of living reduced to fine rubble, relationships, work, dreams packaged in a plastic bag to be scattered, buried, or put in a concrete square or ornate urn.”
It’s uncomfortable to think of returning to dust, isn’t it? It’s hard to imagine our lives fitting into a little plastic bag or blowing away on the wind. But that’s our reality. We are not God. We are finite human beings.
We continue a little later in the story. You know the story. God takes the dust and breathes life into it, creating humans and placing them into a paradise where there is no death, a paradise where they are in harmony with their creator. But there is one restriction, one way to give them the freedom to choose whether to rely on God for life or strike out on their own, and just like us, they choose wrongly.
The temptation to rely on ourselves rather than God is too much, and they eat the forbidden fruit.
But our human efforts to find life and knowledge apart from God are not enough, and in the next reading, God pronounces the consequences of this sin, this selfishness, this separation from God, the source of life.
No more will life be paradise. Sin has entered creation, and sin always leads to death. After a lifetime of toil, doing our best to eke out existence from the ground, each of us will return to the dust from which we were made.
Our dusty nature clings to us, and our best efforts cannot set us free. There is no product that can cleanse us of our sin and restore us to right relationship with God our creator.
Not even a heavy-duty duster with a three-foot pole and textured cloths. Like dust, sin clings to our very nature, and we cannot free ourselves.
Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
The second sermon reading is Job 30:16-23.
Ground Down to Dust
Looking at the reality of our sin, accepting the death that awaits us all, the despair we hear from Job makes sense. Job is the Bible’s most profound illustration of losing everything. He was once rich, with a large family, thousands of sheep and camels, oxen, donkeys, and very many servants, plenty of everything he needed.
And as the story goes, through no fault of his own, he loses everything. Bandits kill his servants. A whirlwind collapses a house crushing his children to death. Fire burns up his sheep. He’s left with nothing.
A man of great faith—previously unshakeable faith—Job cries out to God, asking why this has happened to him. He begs God to intervene, and God is silent.
I suspect this story’s profoundness comes from the times we’ve all had of grieving and wondering why bad things happen, wondering where God is and why God doesn’t do something.
There are times in life when all of us can relate to Job’s cry: “I have become like dust and ashes. I cry to you and you do not answer me; I stand, and you merely look at me.”
Job is alive, but without hope, he feels dead, ground to dust.
And yet, God is not absent. The story is not yet done.
These last few weeks, I’ve been holding on to a quote from, of all people, John Lennon. “Everything will be ok in the end. If it’s not ok, it’s not the end.”
This season of Lent is about wandering in the wilderness. It’s about acknowledging that death is the best we can possibly hope for when we try to live on our own, without God.
But even as we contemplate our dusty mortality, even as we wonder where God is in the midst of wars and cancers and shootings and hurricanes and all the other tragedies of this broken world, we know this is not the end.
To find hope, look to the cross and the empty tomb. Far from being absent, God has come in person into this broken world to take on the worst consequences of our sin, dying on the cross. And in the empty tomb, we see a preview of the end, and the end is not death, but life.
Did you know when we say there are forty days of Lent, that’s not quite accurate? If you look at a calendar, Easter is actually 46 days from now, because Sundays aren’t counted.
Each Sunday is a mini-Easter, a reminder that wearily wandering in the wilderness, wallowing in dust and ashes, wailing to a silent God are not the end of the story.
Pastor Duffield writes, “When nothing remains of hopes or health, dreams or relationships, but dust and ashes, Lent offers the space to grieve unabashedly and without apology or embarrassment.
And yet Sunday, the day of resurrection, cannot be stopped from coming. Alleluias may remain stuck in our throats, but nonetheless rebirth is proclaimed. Resurrection is promised even when we find ourselves weeping by the tomb.
If you find yourself in a dark night of the soul, know you are not alone there…No other than Jesus abides with you there, in the wilderness, in the Garden of Gethsemane, and on the cross.
Know too that like Lent, this season does not last forever. From the dust and the ashes will come new, good life, because the forty days of Lent do not include Sundays, and Sundays, like the light of Christ, cannot be thwarted, no matter how deep the darkness.”
The third sermon reading is Luke 9:1-6.
Shake Off Your Dust
All night we’ve been talking about dust as a sign of death. The ashes we receive are a sign of our mortality. And yet this is also a night of hope, for the ashes are placed in the shape of a cross.
Tonight we proclaim that nothing is permanent. Everything will pass away…except the love of God. Our hope is found in the ultimate symbol of love, the cross, in Jesus giving himself for us.
First Samuel begins with the story of Hannah, a faithful Israelite woman who longed to have a child. Far more than today, a woman’s social worth was found in her ability to bear children, and Hannah is barren.
Going to the temple to pray, she pours out her soul before Eli the priest, praying desperately before the Lord. And God hears her prayer, blessing her with a child named Samuel, who will turn out to be one of the most important figures in the Old Testament.
What Alex just read is Hannah’s song of thanksgiving, her prayer of gratitude for what God has done for her. As she prayed in her desperate grief, so she prays in her overwhelming joy.
Listen to Pastor Duffield: “[Hannah’s] prayer of anxiety and vexation focused on her own suffering, but this prayer of praise includes all who suffer. The feeble, the poor, the needy, all of them God will raise up from the dust and make sit with princes in seats of honor. No one will be left in the ash heap.
Hannah’s mourning turned to dancing encourages anyone still desperate or destitute to keep hope—God will not forget you or leave you brokenhearted.
When we are in the ash heap, looking up and around is almost impossible. All we can do is get through the day the best we can. Doing so uses all our emotional resources, with nothing left over. But when we start to feel our burdens lifted, when God raises us from the dust, we begin to notice the pain of the world.
Our season of suffering grants us a hard-won empathy that expands not only our prayers, but our actions as well. We know we are unable to fully rejoice in our great reversal until everyone has experienced relief from sorrow, too.”
Only by grasping the desperation of our mortal condition can we appreciate the eternal life Jesus offers us.
Only by understanding how hopeless is our bondage to sin can we enjoy the freedom Jesus gives us.
Even as Hannah’s own prayer has been answered, she prays for the needs of the world around her. Pastor Duffield compares it to the model of Alcoholics Anonymous, where someone in recovery themselves becomes a sponsor for another, or to the cancer survivor walking alongside someone with a new diagnosis.
She writes, “One woman I know works tirelessly on suicide prevention because she knows the unspeakable pain of burying her child who took his own life. Even when we’ve been raised from the dust, there are ashes that still cling closely, and we cannot forget those still mired in them.”
Sisters and brothers in Christ, Jesus has redeemed you from your destiny of death, liberated you from your captivity to sin, and lifted you from the ash heap to his own table. The sins that cling to you are forgiven, and you are set free.
May you—like Hannah—use your freedom to bless others, working to set free the captives, to feed the hungry, comfort the grieving, and bring hope to a world in desperate need of the hope found in Jesus Christ. Amen