I have a worksheet I use for preparing each sermon. For the readings from the Old Testament (or Acts) and the Gospel, I list a brief statement of the law and the gospel in each text. Another way to say that is that I list what the people are doing (law) and what God is doing (gospel). I then find a common denominator between the law and the gospel in the the Old Testament (or the First Reading) and the Gospel readings. These become the fundamental core of the message.
The worksheet also poses the question “What puzzle is present in the texts that will not resolve in my mind?” It is often the case that along with the core from the boiled-down law and gospel dichotomy, my answer to that question informs how the sermon unfolds. In 2006, my notes for preaching on Ash Wednesday contain this puzzle I could not solve: Why is the Day of the LORD darkness and gloom?
The Prophet Joel is the one who makes the assertion that “the day of the LORD is coming… a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness!” How shall the people respond? Joel lays out the need to fast, give offerings, and assemble for prayer. The people should beg the LORD with weeping: “Spare your people… and do not make your heritage a mockery…”
Well. Isn’t that about where we are today? On this Ash Wednesday we face desolations of all kinds. We have no reason to believe that a new bird flu pandemic will be met with sensible medical advice because our scientists, laboratories, researchers, and health advisors have lost funding for research and the means to alert us. We have no reason to be confident that no nuclear accident will rend our lands and waters as unusable as Chernobyl because the watchdogs of our nuclear industry have been let go. We have no reason to rejoice that wildfires will be suppressed quickly, or flooded villages and cities will be restored because forest firefighters have been laid off and FEMA’s viability is threatened. There is more devastation than these but so destructive are the changes to the infrastructures we had in place to protect our planet and bring health and healing to our people that we rightly on this day call upon the LORD to spare us. These are the problems we need the LORD’s help to rectify, even though we do not know how to successfully oppose the powers that have taken away the systems we had developed. Every time I see another mudslide in California, another hurricane in the Caribbean, another parade of tornadoes or excess drought or precipitation, I hear Earth crying out to us: Stop! Stop! Stop!
The Apostle Paul calls us to heed that cry. The disciplines of fasting, giving, and praying turn us inside out, bring our dustiness to our attention, and help us to take our lives, our responsibilities, with greater seriousness. Scientists who show us our dusty selves in astonishing images thrust upon us an intimacy with the dust that runs rampant in the universe. The NASA spacecraft called “Stardust,” launched in 1999, returned in 2006 with cosmic dust. The spacecraft carried fantastic cubes of a silicon material called aerogel––like hunks of jello that are 99.8 percent empty space. Flying through a comet named Wild 2, the spacecraft’s empty space caught tiny, tiny bits of comet particles: stardust. The empty space held the dust bits suspended and unharmed.
Back here on Earth, each grain of dust is being sliced into sections so thin that it would take 25 of them to equal the width of a human hair. What do the astro-scientists find? They will learn how the things in the universe come together and how they fall apart. They will learn from the dust. The dust will reveal something about who we are in ways we cannot yet imagine.
The Day of the LORD comes in darkness because God’s good creation is susceptible to its goodness being dismantled. We human creatures are free to wreck not only what we have created but what God gave us in the beginning. Our ashes remind us that we are on a one-way journey in our individual lives, that we come from dust and will become dust once more, and that on that journey God has given us the means to keeping God’s creation viable. We know that we also have the means to destroy everything we’ve been given. We cannot know exactly what that will look like or what it will feel like. Death will take us to what God has in store for us after our bodies die. And the death we wreak upon Earth will likewise take us to what God has given us the freedom to do.
Where is the remedy, O God?!
We learn from Matthew and much of the rest of scripture that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” This is a day when we are called to look at our dustiness and ask ourselves: What, really, do we prize? If we prize our lives and those of our loved ones, shall we not prize the very dust from which God formed us? Will we take even these forty days of Lent to fast, give to the well-being of others, and pray? Will we value our relationship with the Hebrew people––who our Easter Vigil bidding prayers remind us were the first to hear God’s word––enough to cry out against the destruction of Gaza? Will we embrace silence and withdrawal in the face of losing the battle against environmental destruction? Will we allow even more of the cities and villages of our world to be turned to dust by bombs?
An essay on the image of ashes by a Jewish scholar tells us that “when Ash Wednesday comes, though it marks the beginning of the season that perhaps most exemplifies the Christian experience of mystery, the ritual gesture of signing each other with ashes also underscores how Christianity is linked to its sibling, Judaism.”[1] Sackcloth and ashes mark the sorrows of the First Testament when whole peoples turned to the LORD with repentance. We are linked to them, as Rabbi Permutter says, through the sign of our essential selves. Our bodies through all the ages come from dust and return to dust. We come from Earth and return to Earth. We and Earth are one. When we disregard the dust from which we were made, we turn away from the One who brought it all into existence.
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Hymns to consider:
In ELW:
#731 Earth and All Stars!
#738 God Created Heaven and Earts
In All Creation Sings:
#1049 Before the Waters Nourished Earth
#1050 Sometimes Our Only Song Is Weeping
#1078 There is a Longing in Our Hearts
[1] H.G. Perelmuter, “Ashes: A Biblical Sign for Jews and Christians,” Liturgy 15, no. 1 (1998): 1–4, https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.1998.10392426.
Rev. Dr. Melinda Quivik
Twin Cities, Minnesota
Melinda Quivik, an ELCA pastor (who served churches in Montana, Michigan, and Minnesota) and former professor of worship and preaching, is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly journal Liturgy, a writer, and a preaching mentor with Backstory Preaching at backstory-preaching.mn.com. Her most recent book, Worship at a Crossroads: Racism and Segregated Sundays, is a response to Lenny Duncan's Dear Church. She calls all churches to learn why worship ways differ in our various traditions as we seek to be more welcoming.