Dusty

You’ve seen them all day today—crowded into the Metro cars, brushing past your shoulder as you rush along the sidewalks, standing in line beside you at the counter, waiting for coffee.  Have you had the same compulsion I have?  To lean over and whisper . . . “you know, you’ve got a smudge or something right there, on your forehead . . . .”

And, yet, here we are, gathered in the quiet, waiting for our smudges to mark our foreheads, too, so we’ll be one of them . . . going through the long day, no longer pristinely groomed and, as far as anybody else knows, pretty perfect . . . but instead, marked by dust.

On any other day, no one would know . . . or would they?

We’d just melt into the crowd, one of the many in a swirling mass of humanity, all of us trying desperately to ignore our humanness, or overlook it like it was something bad, or try again focus elsewhere.

But not today.  Today is different.  Today we come for the ashes, asking to be marked by the dust, acknowledging that sometimes things break, they crack and fissure, and when they do, there’s bound to be a cloud of dust, a little pile of rubble, some grit that punctuates our carefully preserved, pristine humanness.

Today we remember that we are dust.

Why?  (I get asked that a lot.)

Why, Pastor?

There’s already enough pain, despair, disappointment, failure in this world.  We can’t avoid it even if we try.  What’s the help in going over and over it again?  Why add to the messages we already hear loud, loud and clear every single day: missed the mark . . . not good enough . . . failed again . . . can’t seem to get it right no matter how hard she tries . . . so disappointing.

Wouldn’t it be better to skip the dust altogether . . . to focus instead on all the perfection we aspire to?  Maybe if we try, instead we can spend our time on positive thinking . . . remembering everything we hope to accomplish, how, if we keep trying hard enough we can rise above all the dustiness of being human and shine, shine with all the good potential we’re sure is in there somewhere?

Three years ago on Ash Wednesday we gathered right here for worship.  We read David’s psalm of lament then, as we did today, we heard his acknowledgement of broken places in his life.  We nervously thought about our own dustiness, as we do every year, the places where our humanity forces its way in and things crack open and the dust gets, well, everywhere.  Then, we gathered here, up front, at the altar to receive the ashes.

In the line that year was a friend of mine, another minister, who was on maternity leave and not presiding over a service that day.  She showed up to sit in the pew, to receive the ashes rather than to impose them.

I could see her out there, drinking in the words of the Psalm, closing her eyes to really feel the music, letting the peace and safety of worship wash over her.  As it came time for the imposition of the ashes, I could see her get ready to come up to the altar.  She hesitated for a minute and then gathered up Graham, her little newborn old son, and brought him with her up to the altar.

When she reached me she looked up with a question in her eyes.  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.  “I didn’t want to leave him in the pew, but he’s so little—do you think he should get ashes too?”

I didn’t know either, to tell you the truth.  It seemed somehow wrong to smear smudgy ashes on this little, perfect baby.  I stared down at Graham’s smooth baby forehead, unmarked by the worries of the world, so surely innocent and bearing of none of the heavy weight you and I drag behind us as we stumble to this altar every year.  I wasn’t sure, but I gave Grammy ashes anyway.  I smudged them on my finger and touched them to that smooth baby skin; I whispered words he surely couldn’t understand “remember, Grammy, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return . . . but the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.”

And when I looked down and saw his little smudgy baby forehead through my tears, I finally remembered what the dust means—not that we are marked as sin-filled and beyond redemption, dirty, unacceptable failures . . . because I could gaze at little Graham and know for sure his dustiness didn’t mean that.

No, the dust marked him, and the dust marks us, as human beings who, in our human living, break and hurt and crumble a little from time to time.  And, we tend to get a little dusty.

So when we take the ashes we’re really saying to the world outside . . . pardon our dust.  We acknowledge our humanness.  Let us be for just a little while, who we really, really are.

But today we are also marked with an awareness of a divine miracle: even in our human dustiness, you and I shine with every bit of hope and promise and potential that God had in mind when God first scooped up the dust of the earth and, spinning his holy imagination, took a little spark of God-ness and fashioned it into you and me and all of us.  With the dust, we claim our designation, now more than ever, as people marked by the grace and love of God—not in spite of our dust . . . but right along with it and every other dusty and shiny thing about who we are.

Today the smudged foreheads proclaim to the world around us: “Pardon our dust, would you?  God does . . .”.

God does.  Amen.