Remember that you are Dust - 5 March
Sung Eucharist for Ash Wednesday 5th March 2025
‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.’ Words that will accompany the ashing that gives this day its name. Ash Wednesday. Dust and ashes. You will pick up an echo of the funeral service; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. One way or another this is where we will all end up. Earth, ashes, dust.
This year we are marking 1700 years since the adopting of the Nicene Creed in 325 AD. The creed which has at its heart these words:
‘For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven,
was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and was made man’
Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God was also human and mortal.
He, too, was made of dust and to dust he would return.
Being dust doesn’t count for much. We dust our furniture to remove those particles of dust which cling and stick. In the middle east, the home of Jesus, dust gets everywhere. You walk in dust and wash the dust from off your feet. There are storms of dust, dust from the desert. In the story of creation the first man is named Adam, from the Hebrew Adamah which means ground. And he is made from dust for which the Hebrew is Aphar. Adam from Aphah. Dust of the ground. Eve, at least, has the dignity of a human origin.
In the different story of creation we get from science, we learn that the elements of our bodies: carbon, oxygen and iron were born out of exploding stars. We are made of stardust, the dust of life.
So today is a day to remember our mortality, to remember our Lord Jesus Christ coming down from heaven to save us, to remember that dust comes from the stars, and that the first man, Adam (as St Paul tells us at the end of 1 Corinthians) was born of dust, while the last man Jesus comes down from heaven.
We remember we are dust today because we are always in danger of forgetting it, denying it, concealing it. In our mostly affluent world, we try to buy health and longevity, by diet and exercise and good habits of mental health. But there’s no escaping the dust in the end. The dust we come from and the dust to which we return. The dusty ashes we receive today are a message of who we are and what we are.
They tell us to live in awareness of death, to recognise each day, each person as precious and fragile, and above all to trust in the one who came down from heaven for us and for our salvation.
In our Gospel Jesus is caught up in a public scene, a woman taken in the act of adultery. He is supposed to condemn her, to judge her, to join in with stoning her to death, as still happens in parts of the world. First you dig a hole and then you put her in it, etc.
But while men cry out for death, Jesus bends down and writes on the ground, writes in the dust. This is Jesus who came down from heaven for her and her salvation. Instead of condemnation there is silence. He writes the sentence in the dust and the condemnation is turned on the accusers, who slink away quietly away.
This Lent, remember that Christ looks with mercy on the dust you are, with kindness on your fragility, that your dust is precious in his sight. And this time on earth, however much or little is granted to you, will prepare you for the great transformation, the share in the nature of the man from heaven. If the ash is about life now, the wafer of bread, the sip of wine, are a taste of portent of what is to come. It was towards the end of life that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote these startling lines:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and this
Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, match, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
Angela Tilby