REMEMBER YOU ARE DUST

        We observed Ash Wednesday this week.  I find the Ash Wednesday service to be the one of the most difficult services for me personally.  Ministers get to do a lot of things: celebrate births, officiate at weddings, baptize believers, dedicate babies, comfort families at funerals, and visit hospitals and nursing homes, (and preach sermons) but nothing is more difficult for me than to place ashes on the forehead of a friend (and when you have been around as long as I have, everyone in the church is my friend) and say the words, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  

        I am basically telling people they are going to die.  And I find that hard to do. 

        Twelve years ago in March of 2000 we were in Israel for Ash Wednesday.  Dr. Bill Leonard from the Wake Forest Divinity School was on that trip with us and he and I talked about having an Ash Wednesday service for our group.  The problem, that we did not anticipate, was where to find some ashes.  The correct way to prepare the ashes is to save the palm branches from the previous Palm Sunday.  You burn the palm branches and mix them with olive oil.  (Not cinnamon like the Lutheran Minister did one year for the community service.   People went around town for a week with a cross burned into their foreheads!)  

        We certainly didn’t pack any old palm branches to carry with us to Israel.  You don’t go into a store and purchase ashes, not even in Jerusalem.   We didn’t know what we would do. 

        The night before Ash Wednesday (Fat Tuesday) we noted a Catholic group staying at our hotel gathering for an Ash Wednesday service.  Bill talked to the priest and discovered that they were flying home the next morning and therefore were observing Ash Wednesday that night.  Bill explained our dilemma and the priest graciously said we could have all of his remaining ashes.  I don’t know if Bill told him we were a Baptist group or not!

        Ash Wednesday was a beautiful day in Jerusalem.  We visited the Garden of Gethsemane, one of the most sacred sites in the Holy Land.  There is a beautiful church, “The Church of All Nations” that rests over the traditional site where Jesus prayed, “Not my will, but thine be done.”  On the steps of this church, in the very garden where Jesus prayed and then was arrested while his disciples fled, we prayed, sang hymns, read Scripture and received the imposition of ashes. 

        Standing on the very site where Jesus yielded totally to God’s will, within sight of the Temple Mount and the old walls of Jerusalem, we received the ashes as we heard the words, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” 

        Never had I felt so vulnerable and weak.  One day I will surely die and I will return to the dust. 

        But then I will hear the words, “I am the resurrection and the life, the one who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.  Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die!”

        Thanks be to God!