It's Good to be Dust," a sermon for Ash Wednesday by Dr. Anthony D. Baker, Assistant Professor of Theology, given in Christ Chapel on March 1, 2006

Readings: Isaiah 58:1-12, 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Why do we need a third Isaiah? Did they come to the end of the first two and suddenly realize that they'd left some of the really important bits out?

Critical Scholarship, if you are not aware, cites two major breaks in the prophetic text, one at chapter 40, another at chapter 56. The breaks are obviously thematic, and there is strong evidence that they're also historical: the first section is composed under the cloud of the Northern Kingdom's doom, the second written during the period of the Southern Kingdom's return from exile in Babylon, and the third written perhaps a generation or so later. Here, in case you're interested, is my shorthand summary of the three Isaiah's:

First Isaiah. The people are walking in darkness.
Second Isaiah. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.
Third Isaiah. The people walking in darkness saw the light, gave it some thought, and then apparently decided that they found the darkness to be preferable.

What's most interesting for me about these three sections is a clear intentionality in their ordering: they repeat motifs, they refer back on each other, they sometimes lift whole sections of text out and scat on them. This may seem like a sloppy compilation; in fact, Isaiah is secretly staring at us from all three heads.

Early on, with the Northern Kingdom doomed to exile, the prophet warns the Southern Kingdom that her sins too will find her out, and her day of doom and exile will soon be at hand. And then 39 chapters and perhaps 200 years later, after Judah has, in fact, fallen, there comes the unfathomable moment of grace. Babylon has fallen to a foreign king, and the poets of Judah can remove their harps from the willow branches by the river and come back home. This celebration concludes with the unforgettable image of the welcome home party that knows no end: mountains will burst into song when Judah walks by, and the trees will stand and applaud, and peace will reign in God's holy land.

And then a third beginning, that carries us through today's reading: "Announce to the people their rebellion, their pretentious fasts, their lack of faith." What happened to the bio-cosmic curtain call? Why are we back to judgment and repentance? If the second Isaiah ends in eternal blossoming of myrtle and cypress, why do we need a third?

A possible answer, which obviously can only speculate on a lost textual tradition, is that the later readers of the prophet needed to know who they get to be in the story. Given the choice, I'm sure they'd have preferred to stay with that bit where the trees clap their hands (however exactly that's done). But the fact is, they were stumbling their way back into old habits, the sorts of prideful faithlessness that had been the occasion of that original dramatic calling of the cranky prophet in the first place. They are measured and found wanting, which means, as the prophet had said way back in the year and chapter that king Uzziah died, that they stand in danger of being uprooted. And of course what's uprooted has no hope of staying alive, short of the desert bursting forth with springs of water-which in fact happens in chapter 41. So, while these mid Second Temple Jews stand with an eye on the bliss of Second Isaiah, and both the ears bombarded with the new judgments of Third Isaiah, they're shuttled like a pinball all the way around to the beginning of First Isaiah, and called to repentance all over again. This is no haphazard compilation. This text has been grinning at us the whole time.

We begin a similar return to the beginning today. Ash Wednesday, as the Rev. David Boyd says, is a day of contradictions. On no day is it more evident that the last will be first, and the one who loses her life will save it. And, of course, the day that Jesus preaches on hygiene is the only day that we get our faces dirty on purpose.

I'll tell you what I want, more than anything else in the world: I want Easter. I want the mountains to sing and the rocks to cry out, the dead to rise, the trees to clap their hands, and the cypresses and blue bonnets to burst into bloom. And Isaiah tells me the same thing the church calendar tells me year in and year out: I can't have Easter. I stand here with one eye on the eternal and cosmic procession of joy and peace wondering how I measure up, and I hear the words spoken to me this morning . . . and the text messes with me: "Shout loud, do not hold back --" OK, this sounds good: the mountains and hills are going to burst into praise around me; it's the Easter of restoration for me, I just know it -- "Lift up your voice like a trumpet --" angels play trumpets all the time: now they're going to join all the earthly creation in welcoming me into the peaceable kingdom!... And then the dagger: "Shout loud, do not hold back, lift up your voice like a trumpet, announce to the people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins." And just like that, I'm whisked back under the 39 chapters of judgment, where I am reminded over and over again, in so many ways, that I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips-no offense to you all.

And I get the same bad news from today's Collect: "God hates nothing he has created --" great! I'm about to be affirmed! Easter morning, here I come. And then I'm invited to lament my sins and bewail my wretchedness. And just like that, I'm whisked back around through 40 days of penitence and fasting.

Lent reminds me of who I am, of who I get to play in the story. And woe is me: I get to be the man of unclean lips.

Easter evades us, because people with unclean lips don't get to look the God of Hosts in the face. The problem here is that we've got such a short memory. We were baptized into the exile of Christ's death, and the miraculous restoration of the resurrection, and sealed as Christ's own forever. That ought to engrain our name in us pretty deeply. That should send us straight to Easter morning. But we've been offered other names along the way: "Be the one who lusts for power and prestige. Be the one who is disloyal to those who trust you. Be the one who refuses companionship. Be the one who prefers bitterness to reconciliation. This is who you are." These names are offered to us, just as new names were offered to Christ by the Tempter; he refused, we accept. We believe in sin, rather than believing in our baptism. We accept the tempter's names because it's easier than believing in the one given to us in baptism. To believe in pride, and even to believe in despair, is easier than to trust in God's mercy and grace.

And so, when the joyous procession leaves for Jerusalem, we find ourselves still weeping in Babylon. When the fog has lifted outside Christ's tomb, we find that they've taken our Lord away, and we know not where.

But there is grace hidden in the withdrawal of Easter, just as there is grace hidden in the messianic overtones toward the end of today's Old Testament reading: the broken walls will be rebuilt. Today we are told the deep and mysterious secret of our true identity: you are not who the Tempter tells you you are. But neither are you simply wretched. The sin of despair is every bit as destructive as the sin of pride-reference the Devil's suggestion that Christ throw himself off the cliff. Today, we learn that none of that is true. You are not your disloyalty, you are not your lust, you are not your wretchedness. It's much better than that. You are dust.

Dust this was shapeless, lifeless, nameless. Dust that could not sin because it could not love. And God breathed on the dust, and it became a living soul. That's who you are: nothing but dust… Dust touched by the breathe of God.

It's good to be dust.

And thus, as Isaiah says, will the dry garden flourish, will the ancient ruins be restored, will the broken walls be rebuilt. Only as we acknowledge and bewail the drought, the ruins, the brokenness that we ourselves are, will we be healed. Not by not by a heroic refusal of penitence, but only our knees.

So be dust. For 40 days, while the kiss of Easter withdraws from our unclean lips, remember who you are. Fast, repent, cast off the false names that you have believed in far too long. And then, perhaps, we will pass together through the 40 days and 39 chapters of the curses and threats and judgments, even through a dark Friday night of exile weeks from now, to a miraculous morning when new shouts will come to us, even while we weep by the rivers of Babylon, inviting us to sing the songs of Zion with the mountains and hills and all of creation: "Christ is risen!"

But for today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, let's be dust. And then in the quiet posture of penitence, maybe we'll hear a whisper, every so faintly, that will sustain us through these forty days and nights like a spring of water in the dry and barren wilderness: "It's good to be dust." Because the life that blows through this dust is the life of God, and the love that ignites this dust is the love of God, and the grace that covers this dust from head to toe is the grace of God. It's good to be dust. Thanks be to God, it's good to be dust.

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