Thread by @kennethtanner

This day we mark ashen crosses on our foreheads is a day of remembrance.

We remember three things by this ancient practice, a practice that itself recalls how the grieving would look “ashen” because sorrow kept them from cleansing themselves in a world warmed and lit by fire.

First, we remember we’re made from dust. Our wisdom tells us that when God made the universe, he spoke everything into existence from nothing. When, on the “sixth day,” God made humans, he didn’t speak us into existence from nothing but made us in the divine image from the dust.

The Spirit breathes into lifeless dust and humanity comes alive.

And what a miracle this is. Dust can think. Dust can create. Dust can do justice. Dust can love mercy. Dust can embrace. Dust can love.

Nothing else in the universe bears this image. Not the constellations. Not the oceans. Not the flowers. Not the animals. As remarkable as all things are in their own way, humans alone bear the Imago Dei.

We are dust that builds bridges. We are dust that finds cures for microscopic diseases. We are dust that climbs Everest. We are dust that writes haikus. We are dust that sculpts, paints, and dances, that solves equations that produce microchips and launch satellites into space.

We are dust that brings food from the dust. We are dust that cares for all the woodland, pasture, and desert creatures. We are dust intended to garden and to serve the earth.

There is beauty and strength and courage and ingenuity and stamina in humans.

Yet today we also remember something else about ourselves, something truly tragic about the dust that we are.

This morning I read an account of a female journalist stationed in Beirut who has for several years now covered the nightmare in Syria.

Her story contained a photo of a man holding his twin daughters tight to his chest. The toddlers were strawberry blondes with curly beautiful hair like my grand girl, Lela.

The father was kneeling with them by an open grave where they were about to bury the girls, inconsolable.

They had died in a sarin gas attack on their village.

This past week, we learned that a revered human, a human with arguably unique insights into being human, was at times for decades rather inhuman.

There’s credible evidence that Jean Vanier—founder of the L’Arche communities, which have done some of the most beautiful work that we who are dust can do—manipulated and abused several women, and covered up the abuse of many others.

As a spiritual director & leader of healing communities, he used his position & influence to take advantage of and harm women, and this is especially evil because he (and others) taught that these women would experience emotional and sexual healing by having sex with him (them).

So we remember today that we are dust that has walked away from the Love that is God, the Love that made us and the Love in which we were made. We are dust that now must return to dust.

We are dust that is infected with death.

I am infected. You are infected.

Our crimes may not look like the murders carried out by Syrian leaders, or like the sexual abuse of a beloved authority, but when we inventory our minds, search our hearts, and examine our deeds, if we are honest, we know (or come to know) ourselves as fractured vessels of dust.

Here now is the final startling thing we remember on Ash Wednesday: despite all our crimes God becomes dust to rescue us dusty ones from death.

God so identifies with the dust that he makes human—dust that in the beginning he makes very good, dust on which he imprints his image and likeness, dust into which he breathes his life—that he forever becomes human, not for a moment but for always.

Against every charge that dark spirits make opposing humanity, against our epic record of wrongs, against collective human rejection of all that is human, against our own whispering accusations of ourselves, God becomes dust in order to rescue a humanity returning to dust.

Ponder this: How could God hate what God is, for God is now forever human in Jesus Christ.

He hates nothing that he has made, as the Ash Wednesday collect reminds us, but he also cannot become that which he hates. God loves what God becomes and God becomes what God loves.

Ponder also this: how could humanity as created be anything but good for God cannot become what is inherently evil.

We have done evil, to be sure, and we continue to do evil, but that is not the end of the human story.

Like the Father in the story Jesus tells, God waits along the path to the kingdom on every morning of the world, ready to run toward every human child who returns to him, for in his kindness he desires and loves us even before we repent, even while we are yet on the lam.

And in the Son the Father’s running toward us looks like a human, painfully carrying a cross to the place of the skull.

God becomes dust. And in the walking, talking dust that is Jesus Christ, the human God, God shows us what it means to be human and what it means to be God.

Jesus shows us that what it means to be human and that what it means to be God is to die for the world that God loves and for the humanity that God loves—every last human.

It is not enough to be conceived in the womb of the virgin. It is is not enough to live in constant faithful communion with God. It is not enough to suffer. In order to become human God must die. In order to become human we must die.

The good news of Ash Wednesday is that when the human God dies death itself begins to work backwards. By death God defeats the evil of death, the last enemy of the human who is God, and converts it (as only God can) into an unqualified good, a door to eternal life.

So hear now how these words—“Remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return”—are suffused with meaning, meaning we have not considered, meaning that makes a real difference.

God made us good in the image of his beauty from dust.

In our failure to love we are bound by death to return to dust.

So God becomes dust to rescue us from death that we like Jesus might become human forever by dying for the world that God loves, that we like the transfigured Jesus might forever shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father.

A homily for Ash Wednesday, 2020