Ash Wednesday I: Backward and Forward in Time (Week 27, Feb 26)
Reading
Genesis 3
Silent Reflection
Remarks
“For dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
Genesis 3:19 (NIV)
“As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”
Ecclesiastes 3:19–20 (NIV)
Here you are, in the shadow of Ash Wednesday. It’s a moment of getting ready to cross the street of Lent on the way to Easter. Ash Wednesday is an invitation to look both ways before you do.
When the priest or preacher (or whichever holy person it is) tells you, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return,” it is another way of telling you on this singular day to look both directions in time—past and future—as you begin the long trek toward the holiest weekend of the Christian year.
Remember where you came from. Remember where you are going. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.”
These words, being a direct quotation from Genesis 3, are first an invitation to look backward in time. In that story we hear about the fall of Adam and Eve. They listened to a voice other than God’s, trusting it instead of Him, and the results were as tragic as they are familiar. After they ate the fruit, the story goes, the sound of God that used to be such a comfort to them instead sent them running for cover. God asked after them and the man replied, “I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
Who among us hasn’t done things in life they wish they could undo? Who among us hasn’t looked in the mirror and felt something like regret? Who hasn’t thought words they knew to be deceptive or destructive and yet breathed them out anyway? Who hasn’t felt the pain of crossing a line knowing they couldn’t go back even though they’d give anything in the world to be able to?
God’s response to all of this was and is, in His wisdom and mercy, to send them away from the garden, but not before pronouncing these famous words: “Dust you are and to dust you will return.”
So, when the reverend pronounces these words on Ash Wednesday, he is first inviting us to consider, like Adam and Eve, our own waywardness and brokenness and estrangement and sin, and to remember our own experiences of hiding and not letting ourselves be known.
I know it is hard. The Gospel is bad news before it’s good news, says Frederick Buechner—the news that we are evil in the imaginations of our hearts, God help us—and I say all this not to be mean, nor to pile on shame, but simply because it is an essential part of the truth. Confession is cleansing. To cut the delusions and wishful thinking we have about ourselves and to soberly acknowledge our sin and its consequences is to die to them. And last I checked, dying is a prerequisite for resurrection.
Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return. It’s an invitation to look forward as well as backward. Read Ecclesiastes 3:19–20 again.
How many of your grandparents can you name? Great grandparents? How many generations do you have to go back before you can’t name them all? Three generations? How many before you can’t name even a single person? Four generations?
My seventh great grandfather was named John Dent. He was born 348 years ago, in 1674, in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. He died when he was 59. Without him, I do not exist, and yet those few facts are all I know about him, which also happens to be exactly what his gravestone knows about him. But consider: this man had a family and a life. He worked and played and loved and lost and did things that became stories that created the family culture I come from, but I don’t know anything about any of it. And neither does anyone else.
Here’s the bleak truth for pretty much all of us: we will die and barely a century will pass and we’ll be nothing more than names on gravestones. Not even the memory of us will be left. “Remember that to dust you will return” is another way of saying, “remember that neither you nor what you do will last forever.”
This can either be despair-inducing or liberating. It sort of depends on what you expected in the first place. If we had illusions that what gives our lives value and purpose is their longevity or accomplishments or memorability, Ecclesiastes equals despair! But if we trust that all is in God’s hands, hands that span the generations and cause all things great and small to come together for His good purpose in its time—whether the individual components endure or not—then we’re free.
So, on Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent, as we start the long trek toward Easter, we have the opportunity to look without flinching at the fact that the movement of our lives is, in some measure, a movement from a past of waywardness, estrangement, brokenness, and sin to a future of death.
But true as that is, we’re not done looking. This isn’t where the Ash Wednesday reflection has to end. We’ll pick it up again next week.
Silent Reflection
Response
Are there things that keep you in hiding?
What is God asking you?
What do you hope for your future?
What do you think is the way for a person to leave a lasting impact on anything?