Sermon: You are Dust

We have just listened to one of the most enigmatic of all gospel scenes:  Jesus writing in the dust while the angry crowd drop their stones and their judgement and walk away. 

When he wrote up his reflection on 9/11 Rowan Williams called his little book, ‘Writing in the Dust'.  There was a lot of it about that day. Much of it was the dust of building rubble. But mixed in with it was stuff that takes to the air when flesh and blood and bone and hair are burnt.

That's the trouble with dust. You don't know what it made up of.  All sorts of things blend in its powder.  It's an uncomfortable, messy mix.  Dust is the ultimate form of dirt.  The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously said that dirt is just material that is in the wrong place. There is place for everything but when things are out of place they are dirt. I had a hair cut this morning. Pity the poor hairs that were cut. One moment they were finery; the next dirt.  Hair in your head is good. On the floor it is dirt. It has lost all meaning and dignity; even the smidgen of beauty it could once call its own is gone.

Dust is always dirt. There is no good place for dust to be.  The only pace for dust is in the dustbin which is in emptied into the dustcart.  Dust is trash. Worthless and to be got rid of. Even animal effluent fares better, ending up on the roses. Dust is dirt, squared.

When we read Genesis chapter 2 and we discover that it is dust of which we are made.   ‘The Lord formed man from the dust of the earth'. It is our beginning and our end. When Job is feeling down he said that God formed him out of clay and protests against being returned to dust. (Job 10.9)  As well he might. The prospect does not flatter us. It does not tell us what we want to hear about our destiny.  Dust is sensible entropy. The breakdown of order than we can perceive.  Seen symbolically, dust prophecies the end of the cosmos in a long whimper.

But Job's protest came too late.  Genesis chapter 3 tells us the story of disobedience, blame and punishment. The serpent is cursed to go on its belly and eat dust, the woman has her labour pains exacerbated and the man is doomed to toiling the ground - which is itself cursed - for a subsistence diet - a mere crust. ‘By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken; You are dust, And to dust you shall return.' (Gen 3.19)

So when we speak of dust we speak of our beginning and our end and we imply the sinful middle.  It is not a happy story.  Indeed without the steadfast love and mercy of the Lord it is the tragedy of tragedies.

George Herbert once wrote this: ‘Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back/ Guilty of dust and sin'. Dust was a big word for Herbert.  He used it to freight in the Biblical background that I have just been outlining. For him the individual person is a ‘crumme of dust' destined to be ‘crumbled onto dust' at death.  The word ‘dust' awakens us to the mortality than runs though our veins like dark blood.

Herbert wakes us up to something paradoxical when he says we are guilty of dust and sin. Guilty of sin we might accept and understand but ‘guilty of dust'?  Maybe it is an allusion to original sin: the sin that we can neither commit nor avoid. There are many explanations and pictures of original sin in the old curiosity shop which is the history of theology and preaching. Few of them have been very convincing in recent generations. We are much more interested in saying ‘I'm Okay , You're Okay' or to find ways of sharing unconditional positive regard than in speculating about how it is that Adam's disobedience  tumbles down the generations to me.

But ‘dust and sin' remain combined, despite our cheery optimism.  The primordial sin is known as ‘the fall' and the one thing that we know about falling is that it brings us down to earth with a bump. When we fall, we end up with dust and dirt all over us. Falling also hurts. And when we hurt we remember our mortality. And when we remember our mortality, we recall our limits and we remember that we are but dust.

One of the points of Lenten discipline is to help us feel our mortality. Give up chocolate and chocolate is what you will fancy. Give up beer and your will feel like a wander down to the pub. Try fasting and you will be thinking about food all day.  It seems crazy. But we are human beings and not angels.  We are Christians not Gnostics. For us, the spiritual path starts with learning how to be a bodily person. Learning how to be a person of clay who will one day become a small bucketful of dust is our first spiritual project.

But it is not the only one. Spirituality also involves learning how to be truthful, merciful, kind, humble and how to struggle for justice, peace and reconciliation.  Put like that spirituality might seem a tall order. No wonder Hindus and Buddhists see it as far too big a challenge for one lifetime and so give themselves a terrible excess of lifetimes. But Christians recognise that there is only one life time for all this work. And Ash Wednesday tells us that today is the day either to start or restart our own personal project of bodily spirituality.

Not that there is a need to rush. There is urgency but there is no need to panic.  A few years ago I gave myself the unusual Lenten challenge of giving up grumbling.  Now that was a long 40 days. At least it was for me. For the people I spend time with, it just flew by. My equally off-the-wall idea this year is to give up rushing.  I am going got try to slow down a bit. To arrive a few minutes early. To give myself ‘adequate' rather than ‘just enough' time to prepare something.  I am going to try to live as if God in his wisdom has, after all, created all the time in the world. It sounds rather obvious when you put it like that. You can even get a good pun out of it. ‘Are you fasting today?'  ‘Not only that, my friend, but I am also slowing.' Slowing down. Down. As we slow down so we get closer to the earth, to the dirt, to the dust of our lives. As we slow, so we become more fully who we are, we become more real. 

Ash Wednesday is the gateway into Lent, the season of bodily spirituality. That is appropriate as it leads to bodily death on Good Friday which is itself the gateway into bodily resurrection and another season of bodily spirituality. There is not getting away from it: for we are dust, and to dust we shall return. That is why we must turn from sin and follow Christ, who is not merely a good idea, but is the word who was made flesh to dwell among the children of Adam, the earthlings, the  people of dust.