Remembering Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2003 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. I may be wrong. I hope I am wrong. While I haven't stocked up on duct tape and plastic, I anticipate that by Easter, we may be living in a substantially different world than we live in today. War against Iraq no longer appears a potentiality but a forgone conclusion. I anticipate this will occur before Easter. Therefore, by Easter, I anticipate we will have sent and have paid the price of sending our young men and women into harm's way. I anticipate, if our leaders are honest and we are willing to open our eyes, we will see the carnage that reminds us there is no such thing as a clean war - that all war is evil and contrary to the vision of God. I anticipate the consequences of a war against Iraq will result in even higher oil prices and that the increased oil prices combined with anxiety over the war will result in further economic instability. I anticipate that the taking of innocent human lives by the American military will result in terrorist retaliation and the loss of innocent human lives in America. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. With guilt, I admit the self-centeredness that motivates much of my concern. I fear the deaths our young soldiers most deeply because I have a son who is in harm's way. I primarily fear the economic consequences of a possible war because, having entered the priesthood too late to adequately invest in the Church Pension Fund, more economic instability will further decrease my financial portfolio which I had assumed would allow me to live comfortably in retirement. I experience guilt when I consider how much I focus on myself and fail to recognize how much better off is my quality of life than most who live in the world today. It is the type of guilt I experience when I struggle with trying to lose weight or deal with the consequences of eating an excessively rich diet but then come face to face with the reality that from the time we began and will end this service this evening, 18 children in the world will have died from starvation. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Perhaps I, perhaps we, have never more needed to hear these words. Perhaps I, perhaps we, have never wanted more not to hear them. However, in these words as the ashes are marked on our foreheads, we remember we encounter a God who confronts our fragile humanity with radical compassion. We encounter the God who knows whereof we are made, who remembers we are but dust, but also remembers bending down and shaping that dust into His own image and then blowing breath into that dust so that we breath with the same breath, the same spirit as God. In the ash that darkens our brows we remember to allow all our pretense to be stripped away. We remember what God, with great mercy and compassion, constantly remembers: that we are but dust, fragile creatures whose failures consist in our misguided attempts at self-sufficiency rather than in our lack of success in achieving it. Once free of our pretense, we celebrate the divine grace that enables us to remember, amidst all our disastrous forgettings, the good that God has made, is making and will make, and that God does not even know the word hate. If we will allow them, those ashes can give us the courage to let go of the ways in which we do a poor job of playing God. Feeling the mark of the ash pressed into our flesh and then seeing the blackened smudges on one another, we remember that our own self-deprecations, as well as our put-downs of other people, are as unnecessary as they are wrong. When we remember what God remembers - that we are dust - it becomes, for a time at least, less necessary for us to treat either ourselves or others like dirt. In the dust, created from the ashes of burned Palm Sunday branches, we remember to take a deep breath and, for a time, to consider our sins - personal and corporate, past and present. We remember to open our ears to hear the voice of God call us to consider the persons God calls us to be, to hear a merciful and loving God call us to confess our sins and seek God's power in a much needed renewed repentance. We remember with new eyes given to us through repentance and grace to learn from our sins and to move on more deeply into the journey of our life in Christ, to have a fresh look at the world God relentlessly loves back from the dust of past sinful dirt into healthy dependence upon divine life. With the ashes in the shape of a cross, we remember we cannot earn the forgiveness that we seek in Lent. We do not even recognize the need for forgiveness until we have recognized the sin. It is in the dust of Lent that we make ourselves vulnerable to the recognition of the sin. So, the call to repent is not bad news but good news. Thank God in Christ we have a place to bring our sin. Thank God in Christ that God is willing to forgive and continually offer the gift of a clean slate. If we accept the invitation to enter a holy Lent, through the ashes imposed on us today, our remembrance that we cannot earn the forgiveness becomes more evident to us in the resurrection of Easter. We remember the resurrection is a free gift of God - a God who simply loves us because that is who this God is. While we so often try to manufacture it for ourselves, it is only by God's gracious gift that we are given everlasting life. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. This is an invitation to remember our failures: our wars and violence against one another - against nations, against races, against our neighbors - our placing higher priorities on our comfort than on others' survival, our trying to be God rather than remembering we are created in the image of God. But it is an invitation not to dwell too long with such remembrance because we are also to remember who we are and where and to whom we belong. We are dust but dust shaped into the image of God. We are heirs of Abraham. We are members of Christ's glorious body. We possess the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We are the means to God's kingdom on earth and the future residents at the Heavenly banquet. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. I still anticipate that by Easter the world probably will not be restored to the order to which we are accustomed or may be even more chaotic than today, but the Easter Resurrection reminds us of the banquet that is prepared for each of us. Today, we remember we are but dust and to dust we shall return. But we also remember that on Easter we will call to one another: "Alleluia. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia." In both of these we remember that Christ washes all the dust of sin and failure from us. In both we remember that there is something far greater than the dust of the chaos we have created. In both we remember God doesn't call from the changes in the world around us but rather into the fray. We remember that assure us of our transformation in this kingdom and of our resurrection into the next kingdom. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.