Reflection on Matthew 6:1-6, 16- 21

Yesterday, I did a funeral for a 28 year old woman. It was a sad day, especially for her father who said outright,

“She isn’t supposed to be gone. I was supposed to walk her down the aisle. I was supposed to hold her first child. She was supposed to take care of me when I got old.”

But, none of that would come to be. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust;” as the dirt falls on her coffin.

“Pastor, I’m not going to say I’m a religious man. I’m not, though I do believe in Jesus and his salvation. But I…well, what I’m trying to say is that I made sure that she got baptized. She was baptized Lutheran, and now, with you here, she dies Lutheran.”

As I drove home, I started thinking about dust. At the start of life, God forms us out of the dust, mixing the dust with the grace-filled water of baptism to mold a child of God. And, at the end of life, we fall apart and the dust blows away while the pastor again speaks words of grace and eternal life. Our life…the beginning and the end…is surrounded by dust and God’s Word. And, rightly so, because without God’s Word the dust would never be molded in the first place and the dust would not be given new life at the end. We are God’s, from beginning to end.

Somehow that truth is easy to forget in the meantime…the time between birth/baptism, and death. That was one of the father’s unwritten worries; that there was little contact with God for either he or his daughter. He sensed that, somehow in the middle of life, they had somehow gotten lost between the two
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Now, it would be inappropriately easy to throw some guilt in his face and mention that there are churches in every part of town; it is not like there was not opportunity. But, Jesus stops us cold before we can even open our mouths. Even the most devout of people, Jesus says, can get lost in the meantime…in that middle time. In fact, most of us do.

Religious people may give to great causes, and that is all well and good. But, if one cares more about the giving than caring for the recipient, or caring about the one who gives us all gifts in the first place (God), then we have become lost in the meantime.

Religious people may pray eloquently and may even remember to do it daily, or more, and that is all well and good. But, if one cares more about prayer than caring for the ones for whom the prayers are lifted up, or caring about the divine one who listens to them (God), then we have become lost in the meantime.
Religious people may fast from the things that distract in life, and that is all well and good. But, if one cares more about the practice of fasting, than caring for those who could use our undistracted, undivided attention, including God, then we have become lost in the meantime.

Jesus could go on and on I am sure, listing off the ways that even those of us with the best of intentions tend to wander away from God in the meantime.

You get the point: being religious in no way automatically excludes you from the numbers of people who forget about God and neighbor in the meantime.

“We are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you, God, in thought word and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.”

This is why Ash Wednesday exists. It is a time when the dust at the beginning and the dust at the end touch somewhere in the middle.

Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber puts it this way:
"If our lives were a long piece of fabric with our baptism on one end and our funeral on another, and we don’t know the distance between the two, then Ash Wednesday is a time when that fabric is pinched in the middle and the ends are held up so that our baptism in the past and our funeral in the future meet. The water and words from our baptism plus the earth and words from our funerals have come from the past and future to meet us in the present. And in that meeting we are reminded of the promises of God: That we are God’s, that there is no sin, no darkness, and yes, no grave that God will not come to find us in and love us back to life. That where two or more are gathered, Christ is with us. These promises outlast our earthly bodies and the limits of time." (Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People)

 On Ash Wednesday, the dust of our beginnings touch the dust of our ends, with the dust of today right in the middle in the form of a cross on our foreheads. It is a reminder, in the meantime, that we are nothing but dust, if not for the love of God through the Word who breathes life into that dust, mixing it and forming it with the waters of grace. Remember, that you are dust, and to dust your shall return. Remember that you are, and will forever be, Christ's dust.