March 3, 2025 – Ash Wednesday
Isaiah 58.3-9
Earth, Ashes, Dust
Ash Wednesday 2025
One of my favorite parts of these almost-springtime days is when the earth begins to awaken again and releases that musky scent of the soil and the faintest whiff of green life reemerging. Of course, my dog Circe has a much better nose than I do, and on our morning walks of late she has been a regular sniffing machine, barely lifting her snout off the ground to see what is in front of her – because after all, the scent tells her all she needs to know.
Some of us were talking about Ash Wednesday after church on Sunday, and we reflected how for so many years the day was primarily the property of the Roman Catholic Church. You’d go to school and know instantly who the Catholic kids were, and you might even have had a little FOMO at coming to school without that dusty ashen cross on your forehead. Yet what a transformation we have seen in recent generations! When I began ministry, it was considered a no-no in most Protestant churches to observe Ash Wednesday, and I can still see the shock and worry on people’s faces when I suggested we mark Ash Wednesday with the imposition of ashes. “Ash Wednesday is a Catholic holiday,” my parishioners would reply, thinking that settled the matter. And so it wasn’t until about what – twenty years ago? – that we Protestants started to come around and consider the deep and profound meaning of the day. Yet it is still true that in some Congregational faith communities, Ash Wednesday remains a foreign holiday to this day.
Which is really too bad, if we think about it. As we’ve said before, one of the gross over-reactions of the Protestant Reformation was to throw out every vestige of religious symbolism on the grounds that the Catholic Church was saturated with symbols, and if they did it, then by definition it was wrong. And friends, for many years, that allergy to symbolism included the cross! We really threw the baby out with the bathwater on that one. So one of the things Ash Wednesday does for us is invite us to reconsider the power of the symbol, and I think there are few richer symbols in Christian worship than the ashes of Ash Wednesday.
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” is the phrase the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer uses, “in the sure and certain hope of resurrection into eternal life.” “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” The commingling of earth, dust and ashes is a recurring theme in the Bible, and it is often linked to repentance, contrition and humility. “Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord,” Abaham said in Genesis, “I who am but dust and ashes.” After God responded to Job’s questions, Job replied, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you, therefore… I repent in dust and ashes.” David’s prayer of repentance in Psalm 102 laments, “I eat ashes with bread, and mingle tears with my drink.” And we heard from Isaiah a few moments ago, “Is this the fast that I choose, a day to humble yourself? Is it to bow down your head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?”
And Isaiah goes on to describe the kind of fast that God actually desires:
“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly.”
For Isaiah, to fast is not to refrain from certain practices, but rather to go the extra mile, to live out God’s justice and mercy in every aspect of one’s being. These things that connect us with one another, that bring us together, these things we hold in common and strengthen the bonds of covenant, are what make for an acceptable fast.
And on this Ash Wednesday one of the most basic bonds of humanity is that we come from common ground. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” One of the earliest examples of this in the scriptures is the story of Adam, the first human being, after he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,” the Lord said to him, “until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The first human being – indeed humanity itself – has come from the earth and will return to the earth. If you read Mary Luti’s introduction to this year’s UCC Lent Devotional, you’ll remember her reminder that we need not only look up to find God, but downward as well. God can be found in “the abysses, valleys, caves and bedrock, gorges and graves” as well. These are the very places from which human life has sprung. Genesis 2.7 makes this abundantly clear: “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” It is even more explicit in the Hebrew: “Then the Lord God formed man – adam – from the dust of the ground – Adamah.” Humanity sprang from the earth and will return to the earth. We – you and I – are part and parcel of creation. We are of the earth, of the dust and the dirt – we are of the ashes. Ash Wednesday reminds us that we are all created from the same source, the same mother earth. We belong to the ground from which we have sprung. We are God’s creation no more and no less than every other living being, every other created life, yes, even the “abysses, valleys, caves and bedrock, gorges and graves” of which Mary Luti wrote.
Ash Wednesday is more than just a time for a confession of our sin and contingency. It is also a confession of who we are as part of God’s creation, who we are in relationship with one another, who we are as children of the earth. It is a confession that we all come from the same stuff, from the same cradle, from the same dust and earth and ash and dirt. There is a reason why the aromas and scents and fragrances of springtime’s reemerging earth call out to a place deep in our souls – these are the vestiges of the source of our being. It’s like a whiff of your mother’s perfume, the scent of your father’s aftershave, it reminds us where we came from – and our ultimate return. From earth to earth – from ashes to ashes – from dust to dust – in the sure and certain hope of resurrection into eternal life. Let us be sure to remember this last part, because as much as we have sprung from and belong to the earth, so much more have we sprung from and will return to the One who created us, who breathed into this clump of dust and brought the breath of life.
Jan Richardson wrote in her “Blessing the Dust” printed on tonight’s bulletin cover, “This is the moment we ask for the blessing that lives within the ancient ashes that makes its home inside the soil of this sacred earth. So let us be marked not for sorrow. And let us be marked not for shame. Let us be marked not for false humility or for thinking we are less than we are but for claiming what God can do within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made and the stars that blaze in our bones and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear.”
The smudge we bear: the earth, the ash, the dust, the ground of eternal life. Amen.