Sunday: Ash Wednesday
Reading: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Preacher: Peter C. Lane

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Precarious, isn't it, our predicament? We are dust, and to dust we will return. I did much of my growing up in Iowa, not on the farm, but near it. Sitting in the back seat of our Chevy Suburban, I was always fascinated by the pickup trucks speeding along the access roads next to the highway. Huge plumes of dust would spread out behind their churning wheels only slowly to thin out and settle back onto the road. Dust...
Now those of you who listened closely to the reading from Matthew might be wondering, dust, what kind of exegesis is that! You'll have to forgive me. I am a newly ordained Episcopal priest wedded to the lectionary and Matthew is the text that God has sent down from on high. Actually, in the Episcopal Ash Wednesday service there are themes galore. Ash, duh?; wretchedness, that was tempting; our gospel passage, it seems to condemn our whole practice today, and finally, dust. You know that an Episcopalian sermonette isn't nearly long enough to cover all of that. So, in this old, beautiful, place, we are left with dust.

Dust, stirred up by the knotty tires precariously settling back to the earth. But, we claim something about that dust. We claim that God has done something out of that dust. We claim that God creates, animates, sustains that dust so that it doesn't just sit and wait for the next F150 to pass by. That dust becomes us, lecturing, reading, fundraising, parenting, writing papers, preaching. We have faith, however fragile, that God creates us out of that dust. Our full lives, rewarding and frustrating, interesting and boring, come out of that dust.

Our problem, lent is a time when we get to hear a lot about our problems, our problem is that we forget. We forget that our lives will settle back onto the access road. We forget that we are created, beloved. We forget what the Psalmist says, "That we are but dust." We accept the grace of God in vain. In forgetting, we lose sight of the precariousness of life. It is only the dramatic it seems, the shootings down at the Lane Bryant store, the suicide of a father of three, that flashes the precariousness in front of us. Too often we forget.

And I think that is why we are all here today, quite out of our normal Wednesday lunch routine. We need a ritual reminder of life's precariousness, a reminder of our similarity to dust. We need the ashes to stain our foreheads. We understand, of course, with Matthew, that practicing our piety in public is unbecoming, but we need to remember. These ashes aren't our attempt to impress, to win admirers, to store up treasures on earth. Our cultural situation is so different from Matthew's community that the warnings of flaunting piety seem ridiculous. This building and its larger cousin, Rockefeller, are edifices of the public piety of a previous gilded age. They didn't listen to Matthew. The new gilded age money of this institution is going into temples of science and business. I'm not too worried about the Div school spending day after day on the quad being pompously pious. Our ashes are an attempt to remember. In our Gospel passage, Matthew took for granted that people would be engaged in almsgiving, prayer, fasting. He was advising people how they should do it. Our task, what we are indeed doing today, is just remembering.

God creates and sustains out of the precariousness. Remembering, we can examine our lives and find where they are in dissonance with that reality. We can become aware of mortality and sin. We need to remember; we need the ashes. We need to figure out how we would live if we didn't forget that God creates and sustains our dust. Remembering, we rend our hearts. Using the words of the Ash Wednesday litany from the Book of Common Prayer, I remember that I don't love and rely on God, that I love and rely on myself, that I'm prideful, hypocritical and impatient, that I'm self-indulgent and exploit other people, that I'm angry and envious, that I am negligent about praying and worshipping and that I am too cautious about sharing my faith. Remembering that, I can move to renewal and repentance and amendment of life. Lent is a season of renewal and repentance and amendment of life. The cross of ashes is a reminder to not settle for dissonance.

It is time for us to return to God with our whole hearts. With the Psalmist, we must remember and sing, "Have mercy on me, O god, according to your loving-kindness; in your great compassion blot out my offense. Wash me through and through." In Lent we do it. We wash in our own ways. I'm guessing that few here will go to formal confession during lent. That's cool. In Lent we have a wonderful tradition of assigning ourselves penance. We don't need a priest in black clothes and a white collar to tell us to give up our reliance on coca-cola. We decide ourselves to take on a practice of meditation, to make a point of giving money to Bread for the World, to try giving up the white wine which is masking our precariousness. When we remember that we are of dust, when we cast out that incompatible with God, we can sing, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me." Remembering, we can live boldly, knowing our createdness, our belovedness.

Allow me to end with a story of dust and ash and precariousness. I had a friend once who really didn't have a relationship with her father. The precariousness of his life was all too obvious Yet a freak accident had made their lives intersect. Shortly after that reengagement, the father died. His death brought siblings together in an attempt to make sense of his dust. My friend, alone among the siblings, had been told by the father that he wanted his ashes sprinkled from a tree, an act of abandon that mirrored his life. My friend must be convincing, because the three siblings climbed a tree-not mind you in Yosemite or Acadia-but in a small, somewhat pathetic public park. They each took handfuls of their father, returned to the dust, and threw him into the wind. After a few short minutes, they looked at each other. The ash that hadn't lodged itself in their clothing had made its way back to the dust in this small little patch of the city. The men camped on the benches paid little attention.

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Remember. Precarious, yes, life does eventually settle back onto the road. For now, though, we are created and sustained dust. This lent, let's remember.