Ash Wednesday 2022, with the following readings: Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 103:8-14, 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, & Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
“Afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger”—if Paul had only mentioned a COVID pandemic he could have been describing the state of our world as found in today’s headlines and newsfeeds. Actually, maybe that is what Paul is describing. After all, there is little that we are experiencing today that has not been experienced in some form by someone else in history.
I don’t mean to dismiss or diminish the suffering that is happening right now, in our time, at home and around the world. I don’t mean that the suffering and death wrought by two years of a pandemic is less horrific when you compare it to the Black Death or the polio epidemic or what have you. I don’t mean that the horrors of what is happening in Ukraine are made any less horrific because more people have died or been more dreadfully mistreated in other wars and calamities in the past.
Comparative suffering is not theologically sound; it’s also not especially helpful to the person suffering. To use a silly example, when I drop a Prayer Book on my big toe, my big toe is going to hurt, even if you remind me that a friend of yours once shot himself in the foot with a BB gun. Yes, that probably hurt much more and had much more serious consequences, but hey—my toe is hurting me! Right now! Comparative suffering denies the humanity in our pain, turning it into a competition instead of an opportunity for comfort and compassion.
What is theologically sound, and I hope helpful, is to stand in solidarity. It is remembering that we’re all in this together. In an odd way, that is what I find comforting about Ash Wednesday. It brings us right back to the bare essentials, the most fundamental truths—that we are all part of this same strange adventure on this same little blue and green planet, that we all have the same beginning and the same end, that nobody, ultimately, is getting out of this alive. The inescapability of death is a universal truth. If we let it, recognizing our shared mortality can be a path toward recognizing our shared humanity, toward seeing every human life as precious because every human being is both unique and finite, and somehow also irrevocably made in the image of God.
When we pause today for our annual reminder that we are dust, and to dust we shall return, I think we are being incredibly brave. It would be so much nicer to live in denial, if we could. And yet something deep within us longs to hear the truth: We are dust. Placed within the context of Holy Eucharist, a service that reminds us that God is in solidarity with us even unto death, those words take on a deeper resonance: we are not just dust, we are beloved dust.
We are beloved dust and someday we will return to the heart of the belovedness that is creation. And everything that happens between this moment and that moment matters. Everything. God loved the dust—the dirt—the humus—from which we were made and God loves us at every stage of this earthly life and God’s love will continue unchanged beyond the grave.
To take this image of dust one step further, I’ll share a sentence I read recently that I keep thinking about: “We are all stardust and stories.”¹ In my mind, the stardust is the material matter, the elemental stuff that makes up our bodies and that links us to the rest of creation, and the stories are what we do with it. Our faith honors both. Our bodies matter. Our stories matter, too.
Tonight’s passage from Isaiah is one of many in Scripture that reminds us that we have a role to play in a larger story. We aren’t just passive victims of whatever afflictions and calamities are going on around us, or even those ones that affect us directly. Paul is talking about that, too—that because we are part of a larger story, God’s story, it is possible to make meaning from our own individual stories. It is possible to find peace and hope and dignity even under the worst of circumstances.
Personally, I find it much easier to hear and believe in Isaiah’s poetry than in Paul’s prose. For you it might be the other way around! But both are reminding us of the same thing. We are children of God. We are part of the Beloved Community. As a community, as a people, we are called to remove the yoke from among us, to stop pointing fingers and speaking evil of one another, to offer food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted. We are called to be repairers of the breach. We are called to live our lives with the courage and integrity, and with enough humility that we will let God guide us.
We’re all part of a larger story. Yes, death is part of this story. So is life. So is joy. So is loving and being loved, forgiving and being forgiven. So is bread and wine, living water and fragrant oil. You are dust. You are beloved dust. You are stardust and stories. Thanks be to God! Amen.
¹From the novel The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern.
