Really Living Means Getting Dirty Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 103, 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6, 12-21 Ash Wednesday, March 1, 2006 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. The Ash Wednesday liturgy is one of my favorite liturgies of our church year. No, not because it is a penitential service in which far too many choose to wallow in a pit of guilt but because I don’t think any other service clearly reminds us we are so loved by God. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. If you plant a garden – whether of the finest flowers or of summer vegetables, at the end of the day, you will have dirt under your fingernails and smeared across your forehead. Any real work you do you’re going to get dirty, either literally or figuratively. You know, I can think of very few things in life that are really enjoyable that don’t result in getting dirty. If after an evening eating barbecued ribs or boiled crawfish and drinking beer you don’t need to towel off afterwards, you haven’t eaten them the way God meant for them to be eaten. At a summer picnic with watermelons fresh off the farm – if you don’t have juice running down your chin and on your hands, you haven’t eaten watermelons the way God meant for them to be eaten. One of my fondest memories of our 10 years in McComb was when my youth soccer team challenged the parents to a soccer game. Scheduled for 2:00 p.m. on a spring Sunday afternoon, it started raining early that morning and rained hard all day long. As there was no lightning, we decided to proceed with the game. On a drenched field with low spots with as much as two inches of standing water, as the fervor of the game grew, the field became a soup of mud and dead grass. I still remember two perfectly shaped hand prints on the posterior of the white shorts of the wife of a now Federal judge for the Southern District. The post-game photo of mud soaked parents and players proved to be a more prized possession than any professionally produced team photos of players in spotless uniforms. The Ash Wednesday liturgy tells us it’s not only okay to get dirty but if we get to the end of life without dirt on us, we haven’t really lived. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. The ashes Diane or I will smear on your forehead are palm branches from last year’s Palm Sunday Liturgy which have been burned and ground to ashes and dust. Consider the implications of this. It says we have come full circle. The palm branches liturgically used to welcome Jesus’s triumphant arrival in the Palm Sunday liturgy, once green and fresh, then dried and brittle, have been burned and ground into the finest dust and used to make the mark of the cross on our foreheads, and this cross signifies that death has been overcome. It is the sign of the resurrection of Jesus and of each one of us. As we begin Lent these ashes made from burned Palm Sunday fronds reconnect us to the Palm Sunday liturgy. During that liturgy, we are the crowd in first century Jerusalem. We wave palm branches and cry, “Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” We have no problem with this. It is jubilant. We can easily see ourselves gleefully, proudly welcoming Jesus as the triumphant one. As the liturgy proceeds, however, we are also the ones when asked what should be done to Jesus, who cry with just as much zeal, “Crucify him!” The crosses smeared on our foreheads made from ashes of Palm Sunday branches say God knows this about us, that it is part of living, and that God still loves us. Yes, it is difficult to go through life, to really live, and not get dirty. The ashes smeared on our foreheads are not meant to make us feel guilty. They do not say we are not worthy of God’s love. God knows that we get dirty when we’re out in the dirt of the world, that we’re going to get some of that dirt on us, we’re going to fall in the muddy soup sometimes and come up with mud dripping down our faces or have muddy hand prints on our rear ends. And, God says, “It’s okay.” God says, “That’s why I took on your flesh so that I, too, could get dirty and show you it’s okay. To show you you’re going to get dirty, but I’ll pick you up, wash you off and have you start all over again.” Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Yes, the words may remind us of our mortality, but they more importantly remind us of our origin: of who we are and whose we are. We will return from whence we came. Yes, we came from dust, but we came from holy dust. Do not let the current political debates in public education deprive us of the imagery of the poetic beauty of Genesis. We don’t have to read Scripture literally to comprehend the imagery of God shaping humanity out of dirt. Imagine a potter who shapes a vessel. The potter’s hand never leaves the vessel being shaped for the lump would fly apart. The potter isn’t afraid to get dirty but must get dirty as the vessel becomes what the Creator means it to be. This is the imagery the Genesis story offers us. But it goes much further. It says after God shaped this dust into God’s image, God breathed life into it. The Genesis imagery says we are filled with God’s breath. It says God is as close to us as our next breath. The cross smeared on your forehead tonight says this is the dust of which you are made. It says this is the dust to which you shall return. It says God will once again shape you into a new image of God and once again breathe the breath of God into you in a new way. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. The invitation to the observance of a Holy Lent is an invitation to penitential reflection – not to deny the dirt on us, not to feel guilty about the dirt on us but to step back and accept that part of really living means we get dirty. It is an invitation to allow God to reveal to us what dirt we have gotten on us while we were in the places God wanted us to be and doing the things God wanted us to do and what dirt we have gotten on us while we were doing a poor job of playing God. It is also an invitation to allow God to reveal to us when we may not have dirt on us because we never really lived, never ventured into the dust of the world where daily God walks. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. It says that while we will each put on garments of the whitest linen and will glow with the same radiance as the transfigured Christ, we will still cherish that post-game photo of mud covered faces acquired by playing hard, being genuine, being part of the broader community, and cherish that we have the hand prints of real life on our rear ends. It is an invitation to allow the Holy Spirit during this Lent to rearrange the dust in our lives – to reshape it as it needs be, to reuse it for a different purpose, but not to throw it away, because as God reshapes it and reuses and once again breathes life into it, God says to us through the ash remains of burned palm branches, “Take off your shoes because the dust on which you stand, it is hallowed ground.” Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.