Marked as Christ’s Own Forever

The calendar of the church year is one of the church’s wonderful gifts to us. The calendar prescribes the seasons and holy days of our common life and worship. Lent, intensifying into Holy Week, preparing for and followed by Easter. Pentecost. The seasons of the nativity and of the Epiphany. The different qualities of emphases of these seasons teach us about the nature of God and about the different facets of our relationship with God.

One consequence of being a church that follows the calendar year after year is that, to some degree, you know what to expect when you come to church in any given season. You know what the primary theme or focus will be. Given that, I wonder why would anyone come to church today… Ash Wednesday.

You know what you will hear on this day. Each of us will hear, spoken directly, personally to us, the words: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." This is Ash Wednesday. Remember that you are dust. Dust. Think about dust. Dirt. Without beauty. Without individuality. Without substance. Dust. Remember that you are dust.

In other seasons of the church year, we hear other messages. I think we have a tendency as we live through the church calendar, and as we live throughout our lives, to view life as sort of roller coaster. Beginning in dust, but rising, most of our lives lived on some more interesting track well above the dust Yes, cosmically in the dawn of creation, all human kind was created out the dust. And in our individual lives in the time before we became self-conscious… dust may be a graphic image, but we do know that our conscious existence had a point of beginning. And although we may glance down at the dust from time to time on Ash Wednesday, we really don’t seriously expect to descend again to the dust until our mortal life ends. And it will end.

This day reminds us of our mortality, and that is good. But there is more. This topographic image of life really is not a good one. The suggestion that we are dust only at the beginning and end of our lives is an illusion.

You ARE dust. These are the words we hear. You are dust. Now. Dust. Dirt. Without beauty. Without individuality. Without substance. Dust. Today and everyday. Every day. You are dust.

But, you know, there are other words we hear in church today. St. Paul’s words to the Christians in Corinth. They were facing some difficult challenges. And Paul says: see, now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation. We are treated as dead, yet we are alive… as having nothing yet possessing everything. Now is the day of salvation. Now.

That doesn’t sound much like Ash Wednesday does it? More like Easter. But it is the epistle reading appointed by the church calendar for this day, Ash Wednesday. As we live through the church calendar, we experience the seasons in sequence, and that helps us focus and learn. But actually, the truths the seasons teach is cumulative. We never leave behind Ash Wednesday’s dust. Without the grace of God we are dust every single minute of every single day. Do not deceive yourselves. We are no more than dust. This day and every day. The cross of ashes on our foreheads never goes away.

But now, this day, is also the day of salvation. And as you feel the cross of ashes on your forehead remember another time a cross was traced on your forehead, that time in chrism, the sweet oil of baptism. And remember the words that were said then. "You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever."

Sealed as Christ’s own forever. Forever. Every day. It is not Ash Wednesday one day, Easter another. It is both everyday. Remember that you are dust. And you are marked as Christ’s own forever. We carry both of those crosses on our brow every day.

Why come to church today? Not to be driven down into the dust. We are already there. We come to learn that we, even as dust, are redeemable. We are redeemable and redeemed. As we feel the cross of ashes may our awareness of the cross of chrism be renewed. From the nothingness of dust, I am redeemable; I am redeemed. Remember that you are dust. Always dust. And marked as Christ’s own... forever.