Ashes to Ashes

The Seattle Times' website has an interesting article today called Where do Churches get all the Ashes? If I know what I'm doing, which I don't, at least when it comes to creating links, you can find it here.

I happily admit that yes, I purchase our ashes from the local Catholic bookstore. I have absolutely no guilt about this.

I'm more intrigued by a quote in the midst of the article, where a professor at Loyola Marymount claims that most Catholic churches have replaced, "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return," with the less-offensive, "turn away from sin and be faithful to the gospel."

I can understand the impulse toward that sort of spin. Seriously - who wants a blunt, direct, no-soft-edges reminder that you're going to die? Someone asked at a bible study the other day - a study on Job - whether we still say, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord" at funerals. (Somehow, this is one of those verses which really requires the King James for full effect.) No, I said. Now we focus on baptism; we have died with Christ, and so we shall be raised with him. "That's good," she said. "That's more positive." Maybe, I thought.

Any preacher worth his or her salt knows that we live in a culture obsessed with ignoring death, and there's no need for me to go into great detail about it. My favorite small example of this is the fact that so few obituaries actually say that the person died. "Grandma Smith went on to a better life," or "Jim is now with the angels," or "Elaine departed this life on..." One of the few direct requests I have made about my own obituary is that it says, flat out, K died on said day. This probably gives you a clue as to my feelings on "turn away from sin and be faithful to the gospel"'s coup over "remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return."

Last Sunday's Transfiguration gospel used that "departure" language for Jesus' death. As I understand it, that word would be better translated "exodus," and - as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it in a Christian Century article here, "with Moses standing right there, the parallel is hard to miss." For Jesus, death is something he is not only going to suffer, but an event he is going to accomplish - and it's not just Elijah and Moses being polite on the mountain, trying to talk around the fact of his eventual, brutal, death. This death has a meaning and purpose that no other human death ever has, or ever will. On the other hand, our feeble attempts to pretend that death is a force under our control certainly does little to connect our quite ordinary deaths with Jesus' extraordinary one.

The thing I love best about Ash Wednesday is exactly the brutal honesty of that simple verse: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." It gets to me every year, standing up in the front of the church smearing (purchased) ashes on oily, bumpy, wrinkled foreheads. I make the sign of the cross on a man who is living with a brain tumor that is scheduled to kill him in the next five years. I make another cross on the forehead of his nine-year old son. I make a cross on the forehead of a woman whose husband of sixty years died last spring, and she is still barely able to mention his name without weeping. I make another cross on the forehead of a tow-headed toddler who has no idea what I am doing. Finally, someone makes the sign of the cross on me, and there we are - a bunch of dying sinners for whom the only lasting truth is this: the one who died on the sign we carry, who took our death into his own body, is the only one who knows the truth about us all, and who has promised to lift us out of the grave one day and lead us into the promised land.

Why would you want to substitute that kind of pure, unadulterated grace with the command to "be faithful to the gospel"? Don't misunderstand me - I'm all for the reminder. But Ash Wednesday is not about the kind of life you lead - it's about the kind of death that is going to find us all, one of these days, and facing that truth. It's like saying to someone, "I love you," only to have them say back, "and I love spending time with you." This is not satisfying. It's a pale imitation of your desire.

I don't normally wallow in meditations on my own mortality (or anyone else's). Lent is not, for me, a season of perpetual self-flagellation. But if you can't tell, and hear, the truth at the beginning of the whole thing, what's the point?

Only if you know you are dust can you hear the good news of Ezekiel's valley of dry bones. Only if you say you are dust can you listen as God breathes life into the earth and makes of it an earthling in Genesis 1. Only if you say, "I am dust," can you hear the stone rolling away from the tomb, raining gravel bits down onto the empty grave. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. No matter where you found the ashes.