This is Ash Wednesday, the day when we remember that we aren’t going to live forever – and yet we hear the promise of life eternal.

This is Ash Wednesday, the day we carry our mortality on our foreheads, yet eat of the bread of life and drink from the cup of salvation.

This is Ash Wednesday, a day we are given each year for our well-being.

There’s a logical disconnect here – remembering that we are dust and to dust we shall return hardly sounds like an invitation to abundant life.

At least it would seem that way.

But it’s always wise to listen harder when it sounds like two opposite things are being said at the same time.

I’ve been listening listen hard to these two opposites for many years, and I have come to fervently believe that remembering that we are dust is, in fact, an invitation to abundant life.

Remembering that I came into this world through no act of my own and that sooner or later I’ll leave this world, hopefully also through no act of my own, is simultaneously sobering and freeing.  Because I know I have limited time on earth I have to consider what gives this time meaning.

For the past several years I’ve spent Ash Wednesday afternoon at the hospital where I work half-time as chaplain.  Wednesday afternoon happens to be one of my scheduled times there.  And it strikes me that a hospital is the perfect place to mark Ash Wednesday.

It is surely a place where we are humbled by the mystery of life and death.

It’s a place where people have to consider how they’ve lived their lives, what changes they need to make in order to be more healthy, more whole.  It’s a place where they may have to think about what people they need to reconcile with while there’s yet time.

Ash Wednesday ushers in the season of Lent, a time when all Christians are called to consider these things, whether we spend some of our lives in hospitals or not.  People who spend time in hospitals just may have a head start on considering the fragile gift of life and the eventual frailty of the body.

For Christians, the words “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” are not words of doom.  They are surely solemn word, there’s no doubt about that.

But God was there in the dust at our beginning, breathing life into that dust from which we were made.

And God will be at our ending, breathing life eternal into the dust we shall become.

And now in the meantime, God is in our living and not just at our dying. Listen to that again:  God is in our living and not just at our dying.

God is calling us to abundant life, to repent of our foolishness, our smallness, our arrogance, our bitterness.  God is in our living and God knows that when we cannot repent of our sin, when we cannot admit our wrong, our life is made less abundant.

So we are given this gift on Ash Wednesday – the gift of remembering that there is yet a little time before we die!

This isn’t morbid! On the contrary!  If we live remembering our death, we might live abundantly and resiliently now.  We might be able to admit we are sinners, standing in need of God’s mercy.  We might go about making needed reparation, asking for forgiveness, calling others to their best selves.  We might “act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with our God.”

Knowing we do not live forever on this earth, we might actually do these things.

And so I ask God’s forebearance and our commitment: may it indeed BE so for us on this Ash Wednesday and Lenten season, 2009.  Amen.

Pastor Susan Thomas

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