“You are dust, and to dust you shall return."
I was startled to hear those words from Genesis 3:19 the first time I attended an Ash Wednesday service.
The words from the Bible were familiar to me, but this time their message hit home in a new way, as a Lutheran pastor marked a cross on my forehead.Pansy and I “just happened” onto the Lutheran church in downtown Savannah, Georgia, about noontime. An usher was standing on the church porch, welcoming people in for the service.
I trudged up the stone steps with Pansy, and we went inside for the service that challenged us to reflect on the obvious fact: We are not made to live forever on this earth. An obvious fact, perhaps, but not one we like to dwell on. But the pastor was “in your face” with that reminder as he put the ashes on my face.
Oh, the minister wasn’t rude or harsh. He said the words simply and kindly. But
they roared like Rudyard Kipling’s description of the coming of a new day in his poem, “Mandalay”: “the dawn comes up like thunder.”
Those words on the first day of Lent are calculated to make us think seriously, soberly, about the direction our lives are taking. In the Roman Catholic tradition, such reflection often is accompanied by “giving up something for Lent.”
At the deepest level, giving up is much, much more than staying away from chocolate for six weeks or skipping a meal now and then to take off some weight. For our health, we may need to trim some pounds off those thunder thighs and bulging bellies. But whatever we give up -- if we give up anything at all -- our goal in giving should be to draw nearer to Christ who made the ultimate sacrifice in His death on the cross.I’m a Baptist minister, and our history as Baptists in the South has not included Ash Wednesday. It’s a new thing for most congregations.
It was brand new today at my church: First Baptist in Anderson, South Carolina. Our two younger, associate ministers -- Josh Hunt and Amy Brown -- led austere services at noon and night:
No musical prelude. No hymns. Mainly Bible readings and silence. We’re accustomed to hearing the Bible read, but we don’t manage silence very well. We ended with a litany of confession. We don’t do public confession of sin very well either. But we endured, and I think we were the better for it.
About forty-five gathered for the evening session, including some seventeen teenagers. As we went forward, I noticed some of the youth had to push their bangs or curls back from their foreheads for the “imposition of ashes.” Afterward, their hair fell back in place and hid the ashes. Some of us adults may have wished we could hide the crosses on our faces as well.
I heard some hundred fifty adults showed up for the noon service and all but one or two went forward for the “imposition.”
“Imposition.” That’s a term worth considering. For some, it probably is an imposition in the sense of someone imposing on us, putting us through something we’d just as soon skip.
Lent isn’t a lot of fun. As someone said, “If you’re doing that in parts, you can leave my part out.”
Don’t tell me that I need to change my life.
And, whatever you do, don’t remind me, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return."
I remember the first funeral I assisted with as the associate minister in my first church after seminary. Vergie Sharpton was a dear elderly lady (not as old as I am now, but awfully old to me at the time) who had been a Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, women’s circle regular. I got to know her on a close, personal basis when she attended a weekday Bible study with other homemakers.
Our senior pastor did most of the service. I read Scripture, said a few words, and led a prayer. But the mere fact of helping bury a faithful Christian whom I had known and taught and visited in the hospital in her final days -- all that made an impression.
A day or so after the funeral, I was talking with one of the teenage boys in our church. With thoughts of Mrs. Sharpton still weighing heavily on me, I started thinking out loud about the uncertainty of life, the inevitability of death. Then I asked a question, mostly to myself, that I probably shouldn’t have asked in the hearing of a hardy, handsome lad: “Have you ever thought that every day you live brings you one day closer to the end of your life?”
Donny’s answer was a two-letter negative. But that “No!” exploded with the message: “I haven’t thought about it. I don’t want to think about it. And I don’t appreciate your bringing it up.”
We may be like Donny. We may make his response ours as Lent begins. But, in this season, if we trust Christ to help us make necessary changes, come Easter, we may say with St. Paul in Second Corinthians 5:17--
Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he [or she] is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.
