An Ash Wednesday homily

An Ash Wednesday Homily

For the people of First Baptist Church of Austin

February 22, 2023

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

On Ash Wednesday, we gather to reflect on the changing seasons, a time to recall our mortality, to remember the ends and the beginnings, all as we prepare for the death and resurrection of Christ. The constant rotation of the church calendar cycles on, even if our lives aren’t in sync with it and yet, lent returns each year ready to remind us that we are stamped with an unknown expiration date. And in the midst of so much death around us, preparing for lent this year has me pondering my own mortality in ways I hadn’t before.  I’m coming to terms with the fact that I too, will cease to exist one day, no matter how much I love living life and am determined to live to age 100. Death is a reality I cannot control. 

But with death, life is the prerequisite. There is no death without there first being life. Nothing can die without having first been given a start, or else it’s just a glimmer of hope in one’s eye, a potential, a possibility not yet carried out.   So when we think about our life, we have to remember that it got its start from somewhere. As Christians, we believe that start is with a God who cares to know us, who creates us in God’s own imagine, special and set apart.  Therefore, it’s a privilege to live life. We are given the chance to be present in this reality, to do something in response to the gift we’ve been given. Even if our days are not guaranteed, with each breath we give thanks when there is another to follow. 

But what will we do with these breaths? Will we wake ready to fill our lives with joy, happiness, and meaning?  To love and be loved? To slow down and take in the inspiration of the beauty all around us? We will slow down enough to notice the emerging buds of growth on trees that persevered a winter ice storm and give thanks that life continues on despite the loss of a few limbs? Will we forge new friendships with members of another generation, knowing that their life experience can teach us so much about our own? We will stand up for the rights of those who are being dismissed as outcasts, branded unworthy of basic human rights? Will we step into the hard spaces of humility and forgive those who have wronged us? What will we do with these breaths?

Will we notice God in the messy, the dirt that we try so hard to sweep under the rug, to keep out of our homes, lest we be judged for the mess? Or will we step outside the conventional to see the beauty in the mundane, the art that god has created for us, to nourish us,  that God continues to create from over and over again. 

Tonight, we will mark our foreheads with dust, with the ashes that remain from the charred palms of that jubilant Palm Sunday last year, remembering all the energy and excitement in this sanctuary on that morning. We will remember the sounds of the trumpets and the loud Hosannas.  The children waving palms down the aisle. The songs being sung.  These ashes that remain represent the cycle of the human experience, the highs and lows, and that we are back here now to remembering our morality.  We are thinking about all the last year brought to us- the good and the bad, the messy and the challenging, the beauty and meaning, new life and the loss of old friends.  All of this contained in a single smudge across our foreheads. 

One smudge- a testimony to what survives after the smoke clears. 

We all know that there is potential in the dust, for God created something so beautiful as our universe out of it. Neil Degrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, calls us to “recognize the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules.  [They] are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high-mass stars, that exploded their chemically-rich guts into the galaxies enriching pristine gas clouds with their chemistry of life.”  God has created us from the very dust that has existed throughout the entire universe, that existed for longer than we even comprehend as finite beings. We are connected to every single living thing on this planet, since we all come from the same space dust.  What a beautiful imagine of connectedness, “to each other, biologically, to the earth, chemically, and to the rest of the universe, atomically.” 

In the dust there can be new life, a life filled with potential, with love at its core, enduring  when all seems lost. In the smudge, we can start over and dream up something new, bringing beauty into a dark and hopeless world, showing compassion to those who need it the most. 

And we are doing it together, whether we find ourselves in the wilderness, or in our safe place.

Lent is a time for us to notice that beauty, to see the potential of the dirt, the unpretentious, the inexperienced, the novice, knowing that it contains the essential elements of life. We are created from dust but are given this moment now to reflect on what lies ahead.  

How will we use this new season we have entered into to reflect on the reality that we are not in control of very much in this life and that the only guarantee is that we will return to dust? How will we use the gift of life that we’ve all been given, even if it lasts for only one breath more? How will we remember that God created us out of this dust, out of the ashes, with love as the fundamental building block?  How will these truths challenge us on our lenten journey to the cross and ultimately the resurrection? 

Amen.

Remember that you are created from the beautiful dust, filled with the potential of life. Go now and create beautiful things out of the dust.