ash wednesday sermon on dirt

Dirt

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,

the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,

while the breath of God swept over the face of the waters.

Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.

And later on, the Lord God said, “Let there be dirt”; and there was dirt.

And then the Lord God sculpted a person from the dirt

—scripture says “dust” but we all know

that’s a pretty way of saying mud—

and the Lord God breathed into the dirt-creature’s nostrils

the breath of life;

and the mud became human.

Every one of us is dirty—that is, made of salt and carbon and bits of things

         We are not so different in our essential makeup from a potato or an earthworm

The dust in our houses is, in fact, dirt.

skin and dirt from our shoes and bits of food and hair.

Sure, we’re made of star-stuff like the astrophysicists say

and that’s beautiful but you know what star-stuff is?

Dirt only dressed up in it’s Sunday-best.

         And this is not meant for you to beat your breast

and cry “I am a worm and no man!” as the Psalmist does

         nor is this about a false sense of humility:

                  you know the old joke of the woman who prays to God,

“I’m nothing, I’m nothing!” and another woman hears

and says “Look who thinks he’s nothing.”

         This essential dirtiness is about recognizing where we come from

                  It’s about knowing that God’s breath in our lungs

is the only thing holding us together:

not our 401Ks or stock options,

not our nice house in the suburbs,

not our kids who mostly meet our expectations for goodness,

not the amount of work we do for pay or not

                  we are, in some literal and poetic way, made entirely of dirt and breath

of course, we all know about our essential dirtiness in the other sense

         not just our sexual appetites but all of our dirtiness

         the Episcopal Ash Wednesday rite includes

an extensive Litany of Penitence and lists those dirty parts of us

we’d rather keep hidden

                  our unfaithfulness, pride, hypocrisy, and impatience

                  our self-indulgent appetites and exploitation

                  our anger at our own frustration, our envy of those more fortunate

                  our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts and our dishonesty

                  our negligence in prayer and worship

                  and my favorite, my most favorite one

                           because it’s about our failure to recognize

our innate blessedness and giftedness

                  we confess our failure to commend the faith that is in us

I don’t really want you to see those parts of me.

I hide behind a sparkling clean wall of competence

so you won’t see those parts.

Have you got that wall, too?

         Every one of us is made of dust and to dust we shall return.

         Every one of us is made of dirt

and we spend a lot of time shellacking it so that we won’t return to dirt.

And we spend a lot of time examining the folks we meet

for chinks in their shellack armor,

looking for their innate dirtiness

—this is called gossip, this is called self-righteousness,

this is called prying

This dirtiness we try to hide is the very same stuff that grows our vegetables.

         The dirt that we’re made of is the very same stuff

that supports our feet and houses.

         The dirt that is us is the very same stuff

that children build forts or make clown makeup with.

         The dirt that we try to sweep out of the living room for the umpteenth time

is a reminder of whose artwork we are.

God chose that dirt,

God scooped it up and mixed it with water and made us

and so we’re both the most humble, dirtiest creatures imaginable

and also the most beloved.

In a bit, we’re going to smear some more dirt on your foreheads.

We’ll call it dust and we’ll tell you to remember your mortality,

remember that it’s only God’s breath holding you together.

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Maybe you’re not really ready for that.

And maybe you’re listening to me now and thinking

“it’s no big deal, just a smudge of ashes”

or maybe you’re thinking “Lord I believe, help my unbelief” as did Thomas

no matter where you are right now,

I invite you to begin releasing your hold on that clean wall

keeping the rest of us out

         sit comfortably in your pew

         maybe close your eyes

         and rest your hands on the tops of your knees, palm up.

Close your eyes and clench your hands up tight.

Imagine all the pressures and worries and tensions

you are carrying as you sit here now.

Then

in your own time

gently turn your hands over so that they are facing down.

Imagine God’s hands underneath yours

and slowly open your hands

so that the things you are carrying

fall into God’s hands.

         Allow your dirt-self to show.

You may wish to repeat this several times.

Then turn your hands face up,

but this time with the palms open

and ask God’s Spirit,

God’s breath,

to fill you afresh.[1]

Be gentle with yourselves.

Remember that your dirt-self is both a blessing and a challenge.

Remember that you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Amen.

---

[1] Stolen from the SOS community and then modified.

Ash Wednesday sermon--Joel 2:1-17

[play clip from The Mummy Returns: composite clip of the army of Anubis arising from the sand and fighting the human army]
That’s a clip from the movie The Mummy Returns
—it’s a fun flick, not particularly deep,
but this bit with the rag-tag good guys
going up against the powers of darkness—it’s very moving.
There’s no way they can survive,
no way to endure the endless onslaught
of the army of the Egyptian god of the dead,
yet they stand their ground,
refusing to give in to the forces pulling them down
into despair and death.
And it kind of looks like the Old Testament.
We all think of the Old Testament as angry and judgmental, right?
That reading from the prophet Joel—how much of that did you take in?
It was a bit long, I know…
It talks about invading armies like darkness,
destroying everything in their path
God at the head, leading them on, calling for bloody recompense
—that reading from the prophet Joel doesn’t help, does it?
God just seems so cranky in the Old Testament,
so violent and approving of violence
and we go with it, don’t we?
There’s some good stuff there, but it’s mostly blood and sand
and angry people fighting each other in God’s name
It’s convenient to forget the violence in the New Testament
The places where Jesus throws the vendors out of the Temple
with harsh words like a lash
The places where Jesus curses a fig tree for not having figs,
even though it isn’t fig season, which the text points out
The place where Ananias and Sapphira, Christian converts,
sell their land and give the money to the Apostles
for the well-being of the church.
And, because they hold some of the money back
and lie about it, they drop dead. Right there.
And then Peter launches into a sermon on the spot.
Don’t tell me the New Testament doesn’t have it’s share of violence.
Don’t say Jesus is all sunshine and comforting stories,
because you’ve missed the point.
Absolutely Jesus shows us a different way, brings hope and comfort
Absolutely he brings and is good news!
But there’s a darkness mixed into the message as well.
We see the anger in the Hebrew prophets
We see the weirdly abrupt shifts of mood in the Psalms
And we don’t get it
we see them as evidence of God’s capriciousness,
God must be this vindictive, when we don’t do as God asks, right?
Scripture says it, so let’s take it seriously for a moment.
Tremble in fear, says the text, and we reject that out of hand.
We oughtn’t fear our God who loves us like a parent.
Yet the scriptures are full of language describing God as awesome
…and not like most of us use it now.
Awesome as in worthy of awe,
so inconceivably large, so powerful, so beautiful,
so overwhelming that all we can do
is crash to our knees and gape.
Maybe pray.
Maybe cry in joy and fear.
If God is omnibenevolent and omnipresent
and omniscient and omnipotent,
maybe we’d better be at least a little scared.
Joel writes, “Truly the day of the Lord is great; terrible
indeed—who can endure it?”
If God sends the armies, seriously, who would survive?
There’s a new book out that I’m eager to read
It’s called Love Wins
and author and pastor Rob Bell says in the promotional material,
“What is God like? …Millions and millions of people were taught that the primary message, the center of the gospel of Jesus, is that God is going to send you to hell unless you believe in Jesus. So what gets subtly caught and taught is that Jesus rescues you from God. But what kind of God is that, that we would need to be rescued from this God? How could that God ever be good? How could that God ever be trusted? And how could that God ever be good news?”

What is God really like?
How does God act in the world?
Seems to me that these are the questions
that scripture, at the very least, is trying to answer
What is God like?
In verse 12 of the Joel reading, we get a sudden shift
Invading armies, fear and trembling, yadda yadda…
—yet! “God is gracious and merciful
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
and relents from punishing.”
This is the God we know from every sermon ever
This is the God we long for, the God who we love and are loved by
This is the God from whom we can believe good news
But what if they’re both God?
What if God is both angry and forgiving?
And what if God isn’t bipolar, as my friend Ross suggested last night,
but is complex and not easily understood?
At the risk of describing God in too small a way, I offer an example
I have a 2-year-old and she’s delightful
I would go so far as to quote God from last week’s Gospel
“this is my daughter, my beloved,
in whom I am well pleased”
being 2, Abby is innately curious and exuberant
and, being 2, she has no filters yet,
and so any roadblock is a huge crisis
by “huge crisis,” I mean, “reason to throw herself
on the floor and scream and cry”
so, the other day, we were watching Toy Story as we often do
and Abby had a cup of juice without a lid
now, this may have been my big mistake, the no-lid thing,
but she’s a big girl and often can drink unaided
I said, “be careful with that cup, Ab”
And she said, “OH-kay!”
And I said, “I’ll be right back—don’t sit on the couch”
And she said, “OH-kay!”
And from the other room I heard her say “more juice”
And I looked and she’d spilled it
All over the couch
And the floor
And my papers
And I was angry
—angrier than I ought to have been, probably
But I would never, absolutely never ever hurt her
In that moment I was both angry and forgiving
I was both frustrated with what had happened
and deeply in love with my daughter
we forget that much of scripture is poetry
—the prophets and the Psalms are experience and art
not history or biography
Joel is a poet, translating what he sees in the world into verse
Seeing his country, his faith, his enemies, and his blessings
through the lens of metaphor
Joel is writing not about a specific invasion then or now
But about every invasion Israel had had to that point,
about the fear in his gut at seeing an army arrayed on the horizon,
ready to descend,
about the experience of being at war
and he’s writing about invasions of locusts
which, by all accounts, were fairly common in Israel
locusts which, when swarming, make a sound like a raging fire
locusts which destroy an Eden-like landscape in minutes
locusts which might seem like an army,
which might seem like divine retribution for our sins
Joel is writing a poem where God’s anger is the invading armies
and it is the devastation of locusts,
and where all of that fear and despair becomes,
in the blink of an eye,
hope
This is not the work of some dumb desert-dweller
who only saw God as angry,
nor is it a literal picture of God
leading heavenly armies to destroy us now
This is a painting of a multi-faceted God
who loves us
and is annoyed by us
and who created us in the beginning for community and love.
And who relents.
Who does not hurt us, no matter how often we say
“it’s God’s will” in response to something bad
who scatters the invading armies like so much sand
and who calls us back every week, every day,
every hour, every minute
to faithfulness, justice, compassion, and prayer
What if the imposition of these ashes is our responding to that call
Is our saying that we ourselves have been the invading armies
to someone
and that the armies we see invading us
—whether Islamic extremists, Christian extremists,
Communists, the British, secularism, conservatism, etc.—
these armies, like us, are but dust, and to dust they shall return.
What if the imposition of these ashes is us standing our ground,
Like the guys in The Mummy Returns
Receiving these ashes is our refusal to give in
to the forces pulling us down into despair and death.
What if the imposition of these ashes and the communion that follows
Are a gift from God of patience and strength
and protection and deep, abiding love
What if these ashes signify humility—of course—and also new life?
[play second clip from The Mummy Returns: composite clip of the human army preparing to face a second wave of the army of Anubis, the sand-army rushes forward and at the last second disintegrates into black sand which disappears. The humans rejoice.]