Remember … you are dust

Ash Wednesday reminds us of both our immortality and our potentiality

I am remembering this morning, something I find myself doing frequently at this stage of life and in my own peculiar experience of finding a new way of life following my wife’s death. It was thirty years ago this day that I first observed what Christians call “Ash Wednesday,” the day which begins the liturgical season of Lent. I say “first observed,” because that is factual, but it was also the first time I had ever led an Ash Wednesday service as a pastor.

The tradition in which I have my spiritual roots did not observe “manmade” rituals like Ash Wednesday, eschewing such displays of external piety as far too “Catholic” for their sensibilities. The communities where I grew up and attended school through high school, however, were solidly Catholic and Lutheran, so once a year I would ogle classmates who returned from a lunch-time church service with soot smeared across their foreheads, shaking my head at what I perceived to be their empty, misguided ritualistic acts. After all, I was born again, I had Jesus living in my heart, and I had no need for such odd religious behavior.

I had no need for this ritual until I did.

When my life in the denominational family of my childhood, youth and young adulthood no longer had a place for me, I felt the first most crushing experience of my young life. I was a new, single pastor trying to find my way in a small pool filled with larger fish, fish whose pedigrees had certain family names and connections which I did not possess. Because I was single at that time, no churches were interested in “calling” me to serve, and because I had no graduate degree at the time, larger congregations weren’t interested in employing me either.

Through a series of painful steps, I had to acknowledge that the institution I had loved and had vowed my life to serve within had no purpose for me. I was floating adrift, not because of my own desire but because of a marital status I could not mitigate, so I went back to school to earn my Master of Divinity. It was a heady time in my life, juggling a very full life. Through the week I worked half-time for the General Mills Corporation in suburban Minneapolis, went to seminary classes in the evenings, and in that process of becoming open to all sorts of new things, fell into my current denominational home.

I use those words intentionally, because it was not my plan to forge a way in what was then considered mainline Christianity. I had heard enough sermons and read enough sectarian literature to believe that the mainline was apostate, the veritable whore of Babylon foretold in the Revelation of St. John.

And then, out of the blue, I received a telephone call from an elder statesman of a small congregation in my home town. He introduced himself, told me he was aware that I was in seminary and wondered whether I would consider preaching for a few Sundays while they attempted to find a permanent replacement for their previous pastor who died from cancer after a long pastoral tenure. (Although in my denomination pastors are deployed by Bishops to our “appointment,” in this case the district superintendent allowed some latitude for the congregation to pursue someone because there was limited pastoral availability at that time in the “appointment year”).

I considered the invitation, heard the rumblings of memory castigating those of a “liberal” denominational attachment, and then, pragmatically said to myself, “Why not?” What started as a “few Sundays to fill the pulpit” led to nearly two years in that small church, where I was lovingly embraced and respected. Having experienced so recently the pangs of rejection from my first denominational family, I knew within a few months that I had found my new home. Each weekend for those years I traveled 150 miles each way to be their pastor, following a week of working during the day and attending classes in the evening.

It was not until my first “official” appointment two years later that I was in a location to observe Ash Wednesday. I read the rubrics from the United Methodist Book of Worship, procured my ashes from Cokesbury (the denominational publishing house), prepared a brief liturgy for the service, and set out to impose (that is the exact, liturgical word used for the process) ashes on the foreheads of my parishioners.

I made, however, one rookie mistake (and probably others, but this is the most notable): I mixed the ashes with water, in an attempt to better secure the substance to foreheads. I did not know that ashes + water = lye, a caustic substance that burns a mark on the skin. On the following Sunday, one of my dear elderly parishioners asked me what I had mixed with the ashes. I told her, and then she smiled, pulling back her bangs to show me the fading red cross on her forehead. “Did you know that water and ashes make lye?” She asked with a twinkle in her eye, knowing my inexperience had caused parishioners to “wear” the cross of Jesus a little longer than solely that Ash Wednesday.

I’ve learned since then, fortunately. And I’ve learned that unlike the tradition of my first spiritual years’ acquisition, I did, in fact, need a day like Ash Wednesday, because in the grander scheme of things life is short. I need to be reminded that even when my aspirations crumbled like dust, the Creator was actively engaging opportunities for me to embrace in my ever-emerging life.

Tonight I will, for the 30th (or more) time, impose the incinerated remains of dried palms upon my parishioners’ foreheads. With each imposition, I will utter one of two phrases: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” or “Repent, and believe the gospel.” I will receive the imposition of ashes on my own forehead, and then, after praying together and hearing from the scriptures, we will step out into the February darkness that is winter in Minnesota, to remember that life is short, but that each day is a new opportunity to love and serve God and neighbor.

We will remember that we are dust, and then we will go forth to live another day in the sway of a Lover who cannot let us go.