As I write this, it is Ash Wednesday. I’m sitting in my office, the smudgy ashen cross on my forehead becoming further smudged after I mindlessly bury my tired face in my hands.
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Bob had said these words over me a few hours ago, as he dipped his finger in the charred remains of last year’s Palm Sunday fronds and traced the cross on my forehead. Bob is a member of my church. I call it “my church,” but it’s not really mine; I just have the privilege of being its pastor. And Ash Wednesday is the day, perhaps more than any other day in the year, when I marvel at God’s gracious wisdom in creating the Church and calling his children to be part of it.
You see, today I got to speak those ancient words about dust to Bob and to every other member of the congregation, as I traced on their foreheads the shape that has come to represent not death but eternal life. Remember, I told them. Remember that you will die.
Most of the members of my church are older, in their 70s and 80s. I will probably officiate many of their funerals. That reality turns what is already a powerful moment into a profoundly intimate one. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” I say, knowing that one day I may well cast earth on their caskets.
I’ve spoken these words to children. I’ve spoken them to a young widow in her 30s who had buried her husband just weeks earlier. I’ve spoken them to newlyweds and new parents, to people of all ages and stages who are trying to learn what it means to be faithful to Jesus in the various circumstances of their lives. “Remember that you are dust,” I tell them, “and to dust you shall return.” And I use ashes, this biblical symbol of death and mourning, to imprint the shape of the cross on their bodies. A cross—the symbol of Jesus’s death, yes, but more than that of the resurrection power of his life and love. A cross of ashes, of dust—a testimony to the hope of the gospel, captured in the words of poet Jan Richardson: “did you not know / what the Holy One / can do with dust?”
This is why Ash Wednesday moves me to gratitude for God’s gift of the Church. Because there is nowhere else that we get to experience this—this strange and powerful thing that happens when we gather, day by day and year by year, as God’s people. There is nowhere else that we get to embody with and to one another the mystery and paradox of our lives in Christ: that we die and yet we will live; that we are sinners and we are saints; that we are broken and we are beloved. There is nowhere else that, in the very substance of our relationships with each other, we both proclaim and experience the gospel truth that we are great sinners and we have a great Savior.
The Church comes in a multitude of forms and expressions—and that diversity itself is a grace of God. No one type of worship or community or mission can capture the fullness of the Body of Christ. Even so, there is no substitute for the value of belonging to a particular local expression of the Church. It is only in the reality of life shared with fellow disciples—in the reverence of worship, the intimacy of prayer, the messy necessity of repentance and forgiveness—that we glimpse the beauty of God’s plan for the Body of Christ: that the God who came as one of us still comes to us in one another, and that the gospel not just proclaimed but embodied by God’s people has the power to transform lives.
Tonight, I’ll go home and wash away the ashes that mark my forehead. And as I do it, I’ll give thanks for the Church. Because it is through the Church—the words and actions, the faces and hands of my fellow disciples—that God has marked me with something far more lasting than a cross of ashes. It is through the Church that God has marked me with the indelible mark of grace. The grace that calls me and calls all of us to remember that though we are but dust, we are loved, redeemed, and claimed by the One who makes beautiful things out of ashes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erin Bair leads ReNew, a team within ChurchNext that accompanies Christian leaders on the journey to freedom in life and ministry. She loves offering spiritual direction, retreats, and other forms of spiritual care to Christian leaders. In addition to her work with ReNew, Erin is an Anglican priest and serves as the pastor of St. Michael’s Anglican Church in Gainesville, VA (in the DC metro area). When she’s not working, Erin loves reading, cooking, hiking, watching British murder mysteries, and being an aunt to her nieces and nephew.
The quotation in this piece is from “Blessing the Dust” by Jan Richardson.