“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
There’s something jarring about having ashes smudged on your forehead while hearing these words. It’s not exactly the motivational message our culture typically embraces. Yet every year, millions of Christians worldwide participate in this ancient ritual that boldly confronts what we spend most days desperately avoiding – our mortality.
This year, I’m not leading the service or preparing the liturgy – I’m simply showing up, forehead bare, waiting to receive the ashes like everyone else. There’s a strange vulnerability in being reminded rather than doing the reminding. In stepping out of ministry and into the pews, I’m experiencing these ancient words with fresh ears.
The Sacred Honesty of Ash Wednesday
When healing doesn’t come the way we expect, when prayers aren’t answered in our time, our faith journey takes an unexpected turn. I’ve written before about my family’s journey through cancer and deployment, about finding joy in life’s hard places. That journey taught me that sometimes the most faithful response to suffering isn’t blind optimism but unflinching honesty.
That’s what Ash Wednesday offers us – sacred honesty.
The ashes on our foreheads aren’t just a religious ritual. They’re a countercultural declaration in a world that worships youth, productivity, and endless progress. They quietly proclaim: You are finite. Your time is limited. Your body will one day return to the earth.
It’s easy to love a God who does what we want, to understand a deity who swoops down to tidy up our mess with miraculous healings and answered prayers. But that’s not the God of Scripture. Healing doesn’t always come. Prosperity and happiness aren’t guaranteed rewards for correct prayers or faithful tithing. Tidy faith crumbles in the face of tragedy.
Yet paradoxically, acknowledging our limitations can be profoundly liberating.
Dust as Divine Invitation
The same God who reminds us we are dust also breathed life into dust to create humanity. Our dustiness isn’t shameful – it’s the very material God chose to love, to inhabit, to redeem.
In the words of John Leeland, “Persecution, like a lion, tears the saints to death, but leaves Christianity pure: state establishment of religion, like a bear, hugs the saints, but corrupts Christianity.” Perhaps our modern obsession with comfort, with avoiding suffering at all costs, has corrupted something essential in our faith.
Lent calls us back to a Christianity that isn’t afraid of suffering – neither our own nor our neighbors’.
Lent in the Margins
This 40-day journey toward Easter isn’t just about personal spiritual growth (though it certainly includes that). Properly understood, Lent should draw us toward the margins – the very places Jesus consistently showed up.
When we fast during Lent, we voluntarily experience a small fraction of what many face involuntarily through food insecurity.
When we sit with our mortality on Ash Wednesday, we join countless others confronting death through terminal illness, violence, or lack of healthcare access.
When we practice self-examination, we’re invited to confront not just individual sin but the systemic injustices we participate in – often unwittingly.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The ultimate question for responsible people to ask is not how we are to extricate ourselves heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live.” Lent challenges us to look beyond our personal spiritual journey to consider how our practices shape the world around us.
Justice Begins in the Dust
I’m finding that true solidarity with those in the margins starts with acknowledging my own place in the dust. When I remember my own frailty, my own dependency on grace, it becomes harder to judge others struggling with poverty, addiction, or displacement.
The Jesus who announced his ministry by proclaiming “good news to the poor” and “freedom for the prisoners” is the same Jesus who submitted to death on a cross. His path to justice and healing ran straight through suffering, not around it.
When healing doesn’t come as expected – whether physical healing, societal healing, or systemic healing – we’re faced with a choice. We can demand our preferred ending, or we can trust that the God who brings life from dust is still working, even (perhaps especially) in places that seem barren and lifeless.
A Lenten Practice for the Margins
This Lent, I’m challenging myself – and inviting you – to practice a different kind of fast. Beyond giving up chocolate or social media, what if we:
- Fast from quick judgments about others’ situations
- Fast from solutions that don’t involve listening to marginalized voices
- Fast from theologies that promise prosperity without confronting injustice
- Fast from comfortable faith that never leads us to uncomfortable places
And what if we feast on:
- Stories from those different from ourselves
- Practices of solidarity rather than charity
- Theologies that make space for lament and questions
- Faith that follows Jesus to the margins
The profound beauty of life’s middle places is that God dwells there with us. Though He isn’t painting over our mess with picture-perfect solutions, He’s present – orchestrating both the pain and the promise. This is the God who said no to His only son’s plea to avoid the cross. The God who wraps His arms around us without turning away from our suffering. The God who wept at his friend’s grave.
From Dust to Resurrection
As we begin this Lenten journey marked with ashes, remember that the cross on your forehead is not just a symbol of death but a promise of resurrection. We acknowledge our dustiness not as an end but as the very material God uses for new creation.
In the margins – those uncomfortable, messy, in-between spaces – we discover a God who doesn’t just offer temporary healing but ultimate restoration. Not just for individuals, but for communities. Not just for souls, but for systems.
The journey through Lent teaches us that there is no resurrection without the cross, no Easter without Good Friday. But it also reassures us that death, limitation, and suffering never have the final word.
Joy isn’t the absence of sorrow. It’s deeper and richer because of the pain we’ve walked through. And justice isn’t arriving when everything is perfect – it’s the long, faithful work of loving our neighbor in their dustiness while acknowledging our own.
Reflection Questions:
- How might acknowledging your own mortality change how you view and treat others?
- What Lenten practice might help you connect more deeply with those in the margins?
- Where are you waiting for healing – personally or societally – that hasn’t yet come? How might Lent offer a framework for that waiting?
Have you observed Ash Wednesday or Lent before? How has it shaped your faith journey or your approach to justice? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.