Dust: God's Holy Medium
Notes
Transcript
Dust Creatures
Dust Creatures
From dust you came, and to dust you shall return. These strange words are spoken over us once a year, on this day, as we mark the beginning of the Lenten season. And sometimes they go over our head. They speak to us a very certain word about our frail and mortal existence for sure. And that’s a good thing. It’s good to remember our mortality, because it reminds us that in the grand scheme of the universe, our mortal life is only a temporary reality.
We are people who often have a hard time remembering our place in this world. We are people whose natural inclination is towards ourselves. We are people who find ourselves as the center of our own universe, as the most interesting people we know. We do not take a natural posture of humility.
So to hear “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” really should help remind you that you aren’t the center of the universe. It should remind you that, in this world there is a God… and you ain’t it.
But that’s not the only thing that I want you to take from this worship experience, from the season of lent, or from your walk with Jesus. That’s a good starting point, however we are looking for something more. Something deeper. We are looking to be transformed. So yes, today we recognize our mortality, but we also need to recognize what our mortality means for us. We need to look at what God’s plan for our mortality is.
In the beginning of our Bible, we find this in Genesis 2:7-8
then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
This is the human origin story. From the dust of the ground God formed us, and having formed us, God gave us life through the gift of his breath, his spirit. And this is the fundamental truth about ourselves that we need to remember. Yes We are made from dust, but that dust is some thing beautiful. That dust is what God uses to make God’s art.
The dust is the medium that God used to make the ordinary into something extraordinary. Isn’t that the reality of all art? We take ordinary things and arrange them in a specific way, using our creative intentionality to make something extraordinary.
So God’s creative intentionality comes together, with the mixture of dust and divine breath and human beings come into existence. God looks at the people that he made and he says that they are very good, and then he gives them a very specific purpose. Just a few verses later the book of Genesis says this: Genesis 2:15
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
God’s intention for us was to keep the garden, to maintain God’s world as a place that creates and sustains life: that is the purpose of a garden is it not? But that intention stretches far beyond just life in a garden. That purpose is meant to infiltrate our entire lives.
But what has happened, as King David from our Psalm reading this evening points out, is that we have sinned and naturally rebel against that intention. Even when we mean well we seem to make a mess of things. It doesn’t take long for violence to enter into God’s world. Two brothers, Cain and Abel have a disagreement and Cain kills his brother Abel. And God says to him “your brother’s blood cries out from the dust of the ground.” That dust, which God had used to create the masterpiece called humans, to create and sustain life on earth, now contains evidence of just the opposite. Violence, pain, and death soak God’s medium of choice.
And so David, realizing this about his own existence as well cries out, asking God to restore him. To make something new out of this mess that his life has created. He says this Psalm 51:1-5
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned,
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment.
Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me.
David is a man who is coming face to face with his own reality. God took him from the fields where he tended to a flock of his father’s sheep and made him into a King. God saw in David something beautiful, something that he would use for the purpose of bringing about the life giving and life sustaining gift of order amongst these people called Israel.
And David did that for a time. Until his humanity got the best of him. In a moment of brokenness he saw a woman who was not his wife, took her, slept with her, had her own husband killed, and then suffered the crushing grief of a miscarriage when the woman named Bathsheba lost the child she was carrying because of his sin.
David, after being confronted by the prophet Nathan about his sin, utters this confession before God. A confession that I believe we can all resonate with. We know our sins. We can hide them from the world around us. We know the secret places in our hearts where we harbor discontent towards those that God has called us to love. We know the thoughts we have, the actions we take in secret. But we also know that we worship and believe in a God who sees all that we think we’ve hidden. There is no secret between us and our God. And so we echo with David the reality that our sin is ever before us, that we have done evil in the sight of God.
And this is a healthy reality. It’s a place we need to arrive at in order for God to start to do a new thing in us. Look at what David says later in the Psalm. This is Psalm 51:10-12
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.
Create in me. David is calling back that language from genesis 2. Form me again God. Make a new heart out of this broken mess, and breathe into me a new spirit, a new breath once again. David is saying hey, God, make me new. Take this dust and make something beautiful out of it again. Breathe your breath on me and give me a renewed sense of my purpose here in this world. Help me overcome the death and destruction that I’ve brought into your world.
And for some of us this is an easy prayer to pray. We are all too aware of the mess we’ve made here in God’s world. Some of us have taken from this world. We’ve caused destruction through our behaviors and our lifestyles. We understand David on the soul level.
But for others of us this is hard. We don’t characterize our behavior over the past years as having brought death and destruction into God’s world. Our frailty doesn’t show up quite as obviously. Our sin is less obvious, it’s less clear to us and the world around us. But here’s what I invite you to do if that’s you. Be really honest with yourself about your relationship to yourself or to those you love. Have your words always been inclined towards building up life? Are they always encouraging. Have you ever even been angry with anyone? Because Jesus said that if any of us is even angry with another person we’ve committed murder in our hearts. That if we’ve even looked at someone who is not our spouse with a lustful thought then we have committed adultery. You get the point? All of these are failures, all of them are agents of destruction and death in some way. And so we all stand in need of God to reshape us, to reform us. To make new art our of us.
There’s a form of art that uses reclaimed and recycled junk in order to make something new. I’m sure you’ve seen lots of this around in our modern world. Statues made of motorcycles parts and other things are quite common in our world. There’s one piece that is my very favorite piece of art ever made.
Born out of a conflict that claimed over 1 million lives, this piece of art was formed from reclaimed automatic weapons that were collected and recycled after the Mozambique Civil War. The artists put them together, giving them a new purpose. They breathed a new creative breath into these weapons of destruction that ravaged the land, and this is what came about. (Show picture). It’s called the “The Tree of Life.” It’s a representation of the gift that God placed in the center of the Garden of Eden to sustain human life for eternity. Fashioned out of instruments of death, this art now stands as a beacon of the hope that comes to us in Christ.
This is what we truly come here, on Ash Wednesday, to ask of God. As we recognize that “from dust we came and to dust we shall return” we are inviting God to use us as his holy medium once again. We are saying “make us, melt us, mold us into something brand new. Put in us a new heart. Take our broken pieces God and make them beautiful. Take our instruments of death — our actions, our words, our thoughts, our propensity for selfish and self centered living — and reclaim them. Breathe a new creative breath on them and turn them into life giving and life promoting tools that I can use to fulfill your purposes here on this earth.”
And then when we go, and to dust we return, we continue our God given purpose to create and sustain life. We become the dust of the earth, that from which God creates the next generation of life creating and life sustaining plant life. Our lives, even in death are not our own. God uses them to continue to make something beautiful out of us. God continues to paint with our ashes.
That’s the gift of this time of lent. We acknowledge that we are created to be so much more than we’ve lived up to. But we also recognize that we haven’t reached the end of our road, that we haven’t missed our potential, and that with God’s help, through the journey of Jesus to the cross and resurrection that we can be renewed and restored to live out God’s magnificent purpose in our lives. And it starts with admitting who we are. Divine dust, the holy medium of a God who loves, who creates, and who recreates even the most broken and messy things. A God who makes us new.