As I stand with a family in a cemetery or in the church’s columbarium, I often speak words that are taken from the final verse of this passage from Genesis: “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother, John. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, earth to earth. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, says the Spirit, for they shall rest from their labors and their works shall follow them.” These words are actually the first piece of a regular liturgy that I memorized, along with the Lord’s Prayer and the twenty-third Psalm. I feel that I should thank my preaching professors for ensuring that I learned these words as well as I have. They remind us of different aspects of life, one of which is that life itself is a finite experience.
If we were not in the midst of the craziness of this pandemic, today would be a day when we would invite people to church for a service that would include marking the forehead with ashes in the sign of a cross. I grew up in a tradition where I would hear, “You are but dust and to dust you shall return,” as a reminder of the words from Genesis. At Peachtree we use different words: “With the sign of the cross, you are marked as a follower of Jesus.” The difference in these two ways of using ashes staggers me. In the first one, we focus our hearts and minds on the fact that we will only be alive upon this earth for a time. In the second, we look toward hope in a future where we will know the presence of the Lord for all eternity.
As Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the forty-day season that precedes Easter (and does not include Sundays, by the way), we have a choice in how we approach this time. We can focus upon the finite nature of our lives, or we can look toward the hope of eternity. I prefer to consider this time as one when we can reflect on the blessings God has bestowed upon each one of us. I like to think that this period of forty days is not just a time when we deprive ourselves of things we want but instead a time when we seek to draw closer to the Lord: “For it is by grace that you have been save, through faith—and this is not for yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”