Reading Luke Together #30 – Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday. The day we remember we are dust, and to dust we will return – a cause for humility and repentance, the hope of mercy and even joy. Luke tells us about Jesus sending out the twelve (9:1-6), and then a larger contingent – 70! (10:1-12). In both, he tells them to travel light, and gives space for them to “shake the dust off their feet” if they are rejected.
So let’s ponder dust. There’s what’s in the air only the fastidious notice. The opening of Bernanos’s novel Diary of a Country Priest offers us this: “The world is eaten up by boredom. You can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine… But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be forever on the go.” Does Ash Wednesday acknowledge the sheer boredom of even a life on the go, and offer something slow and richer?
The dust on the ground: it’s what you’re made of. Genesis 2: God wet some dust and made people, with impermanent bodies. Genesis 4: Cain was marked on the forehead by God with dust – a sign of his terrible guilt for killing his brother, yet a sign of protection by God. Mercy works like that.
Years ago, I bought a beautiful 100 year old prayer rug in the old city of Jerusalem for my daughter Sarah. I was a little embarrassed that it was dirty, caked with dust over countless years. She was asked to give a sermon at our denominational conference and she spoke of that dirty rug: “It was tempting to take the rug to be cleaned. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Every time I lay it out, it leaves a thin film of dust on the floor that I have to sweep up. But that’s the dust of Jerusalem. Those are grains of sand from the Holy Land. I will probably never get that rug cleaned because its fibers are shot through with dirt that Jesus walked on.”
“But I’ve thought about the Jerusalem dust collected by my prayer rug. It isn’t just holy ground; it is also the ground from which Abel’s blood cried out to God. It is the dust of Palestine that missiles send exploding into the air, the sand of hills on which illegal settlements rise, the grain that is more than a speck in the eye of people who worship the same God but cannot see the humanity of their neighbor.”
She went on to reflect on dust we walk on trying to be holy, and dust migrant workers choke on trying to survive, mud we throw at one another in church… You, we all are dust, the dust could tell stories glorious and haunting, courageous and humiliating. And to dust we will all return.
This is Ash Wednesday. I hope you get some dust on your feet. Jesus said to shake it off. When you do, see the marvel and the morbid, feel the mercy and the guilt – and that God is there, remaking you and me into new people, down in the dust, which doesn’t just fall but also rises.