In a few hours I will be standing with many of you with a piece of burned wood in my hand marking your foreheads with the sign of a cross and proclaiming these words, “From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return…”
Pretty grim words. Nearly enough to make you want to run as fast as you can away from the church. Talk about being the one who rains on the parade, nothing like slamming home our own finitude. ‘Yippee, I’m a human being who, just like every other human being is going to die someday.’ Isn't this fantastic news!
But this is the starting point for the journey we take toward the cross. We indeed are human in every sense of the word and live in a temporal and broken world. If in fact we are going to ‘turn’ and be changed in the lives that we live, we need to know that we all begin at the same trailhead and share the same map.
But our God has a plan, and even as we gather to rightly acknowledge our own limitations and our collective ineptitude in carrying out the plan for the world that God has called us to in Christ, God meets us as we turn back toward the one who creates, redeems, and sustains us. The second phrase that I speak tonight will be this, “but the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.” And as I say those words, I will trace a cross on your forehead in the same spot where many years ago a pastor or priest traced a cross beside a baptismal font and claimed you as a child of God for the sake of Jesus Christ and his redeeming work in the world.
What has happened between those two tracings is of no concern to Christ. He has died to make it all disappear the same way that the ashes will disappear when you wash your face. The questions that we are faced with are these: Do we really believe that this is true for us? Christ has obliterated all of our missteps and we stand as a new creation called to engage the world with purpose and passion? And if we dare to believe what our own experience tells us can hardly be true, are we ready to live into the new life that this good news brings to us?
For seed to take root, it must fall to the ground and die in order to bring forth new life and achieve its purpose of providing fruit for a hungry world.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. New life to new life.
Welcome to the journey.
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