As someone raised in the Church, I have heard these words every Ash Wednesday for over fifty years. As a pastor, I have had the sobering privilege of declaring these same words to penitents for nearly twenty-five years. These words remind us, just as God first spoke them to Adam in the Garden that, were it not for God’s grace, we would be nothing but ashes. The very name adam, in Hebrew, means dust from the ground, and we know that, following death, our body sooner (cremation) or later burial) returns to dust. Ash Wednesday reminds us of our mortality.
I recently saw one of the better movies of my life, The Bucket List starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. It’s a story about two men facing death, who make a list of things they yet want to experience before "kicking the bucket." The movie ends with the ashes -- the dust -- of these two oddly-matched friends being placed on a mountaintop "with a majestic view." One of the memorable lines from the movie exhorts us to "live with our hearts open."
May I suggest that the only way to do that is to live your life for God? Lent is a wonderful opportunity the Church gives us each year to experience God more fully -- "to live with our hearts open." It may seem odd that the way to start to live life more fully is to reflect upon your own mortality, but I believe it is the proper, maybe even the only, place to begin. When we glimpse the preciousness of life, only then can we start to appreciate the gift God has given us -- and live it the way God intended us to live it.So today, as we remember that, were it not for God's intervening grace, we are nothing but dust, let us thank God for giving us the gift of life -- abundant and eternal life -- and then live that life in response to such an opportunity.
~ Jeff Johnson
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