Ash Wednesday

Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews

Lent begins in dust and ashes. It ends in the grave, as Jesus’ body is laid in the tomb. Bookending the season are reminders of our mortality: the dust from which we come, and the grave to which we move.

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

 The ash tells us we will die. That we are mortal, finite creatures. That we get sick, and that sometimes we don’t get better. That we mess things up and can’t find a way to mend them. That we are not God.

 Remember you are dust.

 There has always been something truthful about Ash Wednesday that cuts through the avoidance of death in our society and culture. But this year, we don’t need the reminder so starkly. This year, we have all had to remember we are dust.

 We’ve known it in the figures, the numbers of the dead too big to wrap our heads around. We’ve seen it on our screens: the rasping breath, the beep of the machines, the bodies stacked up in makeshift mortuaries. For some of us, the starkness of death is measured less by the frightening, seemingly inexorable rise of lines on a graph than by the particular, the absence around which we fit: the person missing from the table, the party, the conversation.

 Remember you are dust.

 We’ve remembered it in the fear that’s kept us locked down, apart, hands and surfaces sanitised and scrubbed. But we can’t scrub off this dust, this mortal flesh. We may evade the virus, but we cannot evade death.

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

 Lent moves from the ashes on our foreheads to the coldness of the grave. It marks our mortality.

 And what do we do with this reminder of death? We can try to avoid it – lots of people do. We can busy ourselves with work and family and projects. We can distract ourselves with screens, take the edge off with alcohol, comfort ourselves with food.

 I do a bit of all of those. Perhaps you know, or perhaps it won’t take too much self-examination to recognise, what it is that you use to avoid the remembrance that Lent invites us to. When you do, you’ve found from what you might fast.

 Fasting helps us to recognise a deeper hunger. If we’ve stopped avoiding the remembrance of our mortality, perhaps we recognise in ourselves a hunger for meaning, for connection, for purpose or forgiveness. Perhaps, in that space we’ve so often filled with other stuff, we recognise that we hunger for love.

 And in that hunger, with Jesus in the wilderness we remember that we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

 And from the mouth of God we learn that the dust we are is loved. We do not remember we are dust in the face of blind fate or unfeeling nature. We remember we are dust that is created and taken and formed by God, who breathes life into us as he did when he formed Adam from the dust of the earth, and as he breathed new life onto his disciples when they gathered stunned by the horror of death and the finality of the tomb.

 To remember we are dust is to remember we are created, animated by the breath of God. For all our gifts and labour, our plans for self-improvement or good works, we can’t make things out of dust. But God can. From the dust of the earth he forms Adam, humanity, to share his life with. When Adam disobeys and rejects God, God reminds him he is dust, and to dust he shall return.

 But that’s not the end of the story. For God himself takes on flesh, becomes a creature of dust, and goes to the grave, to the dust of the earth itself, to bring us back to him. In the stillness of the grave the divine breath animates a new creation as Jesus’ mortal body puts on immortality, and dust finds its destiny.

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

 Lent’s given to us as a season to learn how to live as mortal, created beings, made for relationship with God. With Adam we breathe in God’s Spirit. With Adam we disobey and struggle with our mortality. With Adam we die. And with the new Adam, Jesus, we are made anew in that place where dust and death have no dominion.

 So how will we keep this Lent? By self-examination and repentance. By prayer, fasting, and self-denial. By reading and meditating on God’s word. By remembering we are dust, but dust that is created and loved and redeemed. And so by turning from sin, and being faithful to Christ.