Did you say this rhyme as a child?
Ring around the rosy
A pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
I remember distinctly grabbing hands with unidentified friends and twirling around and around in a circle, changing the rhyme and falling down.
Ashes ashes we all fall down.
Today the season of Lent begins and we remember the 40 days that Jesus spent fasting and praying in the desert. He walked out there immediately after his baptism and he sat down in the dust and prayed to God. It is hot in the deserts of Israel, hot and dusty. Dust gets everywhere, in your shoes, all over your hands, in your pores. After a week or two of fasting, I bet Jesus began to think about how his body was formed of that dust and what would happen to his body if he died right then and there from starvation or exposure or something else. Nothing can change the fact that the human body turns to dust. Abraham Lincoln's body turned to dust just like the common man's body. That's what happens to the body of a human being. So we sit with Jesus in the dust and we remember that is what we are.
I am battling a strange phenomenon here at the Cathedral and at every church in which I've served. People always call the body or cremated remains of a person by the person's name. "Oh, Sally is in my office." "George was buried here." "Let's go visit Angela at the grave." But if you stopped at Ash Wednesday. If there was no cross and no resurrection, then those statements would make sense to me. But if we, who are nothing but dust, if we are risen, then surely we are not to be contained in a box under the ground. Surely it is inadequate to say that our loved ones are present in those remains. They are just the body.
But we must begin at the beginning, sitting in the dust with Jesus remembering that without God's redemption, we are are nothing but dust, and we all fall down.
It is only God who can make us more than dust. Only God.
