Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

3/1/06 - Ash Wednesday

The Rev. Sarah Ball-Damberg

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

Five minutes into the story of Creation, Adam and Eve do the one thing God asked them not to do - they eat the fruit from the one tree in the entire Garden of Eden God told them not to touch. Creation's barely gotten started, and humans have already seized on the first available opportunity to rebel against their Creator.

God gets angry. He gets angry at the serpent, he gets angry at Eve, and He gets angry at Adam. He tells them how much harder life is going to be for them now that they've chosen to follow their own will rather than His, and He gets ready to usher them out of Eden. But before He does He reminds them, "You are dust, and to dust you shall return."

That statement - "You are dust and to dust you shall return" - isn't a threat or a punishment, but a simple fact. The Hebrew word for "ground" is adamah. The Hebrew word for human being is adam. God uses the material at hand, the dusty ground, to make Adam, the first human.

In my life, and maybe yours, there's too much dust. It's what piles up when I'm not paying attention. It's what we had a lot of last fall when the drought dried all the water out of Falls Lake. In its very smallest form, it's what gets up in the air and makes it hard to breathe or in the atmosphere and warms the globe. It's what my clever children write messages in like "Dust me" or, once, on the dashboard of my car, "Mom loves Dad" - which I left untouched until even more dust filled in the letters.

It's hard to think of anything more ordinary and less godlike than dust. And that, of course, was God's point. "Hey!" God was saying to Adam and Eve, "Just because I made you and set you down here in paradise and gave you dominion over the earth and each other for company does not mean you are God! You are made from dust, remember?"

God doesn't say this to make Himself look bigger and mightier than humanity. He is bigger and mightier than humanity and all the rest of Creation. God doesn't remind Adam and Eve that they are dust for His sake, but for theirs. Until they remember who they are before Him, they are doomed to live in a world of their choosing instead of the world of God's choosing.

Why would anyone choose not to live in Paradise? Getting booted out of the Garden of Eden isn't a rational thing to do, which is ironic given how much we humans pride ourselves on being rational creatures. And why was the forbidden fruit within reach anyway? Couldn't God have put it just a little higher, or out of sight, or maybe somewhere else altogether?

This is where that problematic thing called free will comes into play. God didn't need to create humans. God wanted to create humans for communion with Himself, with one another, and with all Creation. God didn't create us as puppets or automatons, but as lively, willful creatures with the capacity to enjoy communion with God.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The flip side of the capacity to move toward God is the capacity to move away from God. And from the dawn of Creation, humans have headed in the wrong direction time and again. Living in the light of God's love is the very best thing imaginable, but we are forever marching down our own path, away from that light, off into the dark. We somehow keep forgetting that God is God and we are dust.

But then -- if we're lucky -- we look up from the path we're on and realize we're not God after all. And - again, if we're lucky - we are stricken with the realization of how far we've managed to come away from God. We're stricken with the devastating understanding of all the ways we've turned our backs on God's unconditional love. At that moment -- if God in His mercy allows it -- we understand we are dust.

It isn't until we begin to recognize the depth of our own sinfulness that we can begin to grasp the depth of God's mercy. The first step in understanding how forgiven we are is understanding how sinful we are. Remembering we are dust is a fine place to start.

Back when I was in college in Vermont, Mt. St. Helen's erupted in Washington state. For months afterward we had extraordinarily beautiful sunsets. Mt. St. Helen's spewed volcanic ash into the air which then settled into a blanket of dust in the atmosphere. Every evening at sunset, the sun's rays would hit the little particles of dust way up in the air and -- because of the way the dust refracted the light -- the whole sky lit up with incredible pinks, and reds, and oranges, and golds.

Even dust can be transformed.

In the very beginning, when God created the heavens and earth, He stopped at the end of each day and looked at what He had done. And at the end of each day, God saw that it was tov, as it says in Hebrew. God saw that it was good. Until the sixth day. On the sixth day, God created humankind in His image, and at the end of that day, God stopped and looked at everything He had made and saw that it was tov mah tov - He saw that it was good, really good.

When God looks at Creation and the dusty humans standing in it, He sees good. In God's eyes, even dust can be transformed.

May God in His mercy help us to remember that we are dust and that to dust we shall return. May He help us to stand in the transforming light of His love. In His mercy, may God grant us true repentance and the grace to return to Him. And may God grant us the joy of knowing we are His, now and forever. Amen.

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