From the Dust

Jonnie Guernsey, Worship Committee Member

This Lenten season, each member of the worship team chose a common element to consider, and I chose dust.

I grew up in a land of dust and sand, in the Sonoran Desert, when the cities were small and the desert was all around us. When the stars were so clear we could see the milky way. My childhood home was a few blocks from my school, and behind that was a cotton field, and then the desert stretched for miles, interrupted only by irrigated farm fields and ranches. None of the alleys were paved in my neighborhood, so every time a truck (usually a truck—everybody’s dad drove a truck) went down the alley, a cloud of dust headed straight for all the houses, and my mother would sigh with exasperation. It really was impossible to keep the house dusted, especially in the era BAC (Before Air Conditioning).

According to google maps, I was able to ride my bike from my house to the desert by traveling across 2.4 miles in about 17 minutes. And ride my bike I did, to sit among the creosote and prickly pear, to tease the vultures, and to watch for lizards and creatures we called horny toads because of the rough pointy bumps on their tough skin.

I loved the desert, and at that time, children were emphatically taught important ways to cope out there. But being a teenager, I made some dumb choices, like the time I rode out in my shorts, tee shirt, and sandals along a dirt road lined with cottonwood trees and got caught in a sudden and violent sandstorm. Before housing developments and shopping centers and freeways swallowed the desert, sandstorms could whip up quickly and out of nowhere. I did what I was taught: curl into the tightest ball you can, face down, and cover your nose and mouth with cloth. I hitched the hem of my shirt over my face, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried not to breathe. Sand roared around me, whipping against my skin, and I knew it could kill me. When it was over, red pinpoints of sores covered my body, and a fine layer of dust powdered me from my hair to my toes. But instead of feeling hurt and afraid, I felt incredibly alive. You could say it was a baptism by dust.

The Bible has a lot to say about dust. In fact, there are 112 references to this element in the Bible.
The four liturgical readings from this morning run the gamut from life to death.
In Genesis, God forms humans from the dust of the ground. Life.
Two of the verses give us advice on how to live our lives.
In one of my favorite verses from Matthew, Jesus tells the disciples that if they are rejected, they need to shake the dust off their sandals and move on. Get rid of anything that might cling to you, that might hold you back, and keep going. Don’t give up.
And Hannah sings that God raises the poor from the dust, lifts the needy up from the ash heap, and seats them on a throne of honor. The poor. The people we so often pray for, and in this church, work for.
Job laments that God throws him into the mud and reduces him to ashes. Death.

I love the idea of a God who, right after creating the earth, starts digging in the dirt to get humanity started, shaping us for who we were to be. A down to earth God! We all know that this chapter from Genesis is a not necessarily a 100% accurate report on how things began. It’s a creation story that is told with some variation in many world religions and cultures. We need these stories to bring us together, and for me—a gardener—this story is one to ponder as I dig in the soil with my bare hands, bringing life to the plants I grow.

We are told that we are made of dust, and in the end, we will be dust again. We are all of humble beginnings, and in the end, no matter our station in life has been or what we have done with our lives, we all return to the same humble place.

But in thinking about a God who gets busy with dust as creation, perhaps I can move past fears of dying and come to understand that our dust—the dust we are told we become when we die—will nourish this beautiful planet.

Job says that he was ‘tossed aside like dust.’ In our culture, we toss aside so many people. We treat the marginalized like dust. Like dust, they are all around us, but unless we look closely, we don’t see them. The idiomatic saying ‘treated like dirt’ applies to our cultural response to the poor, the isolated, the hungry. And it’s not just in America—it’s everywhere in the world. It’s inexplicable.

I recently quite literally sat in the dust by a railroad track with a fellow named Craig, whose throne was an upturned plastic bucket, and whose message was that our only purpose on earth is to advance our souls, to do the work of understanding our own true path so that we can keep going and get back to God. By the way, he told me very firmly that he is not homeless. He rakes his encampment like a Japanese Zen Garden. In his rambling and unstoppable way, he asserted that we are nothing but dust and will go right back there when we die, so we need to, as he put it, “pull my boots up from the straps” and keep moving. Because, he said, God is waiting for us, and that’s what God wants us to do.
In his own way, Craig was singing Hannah’s song:
The Lord brings death and makes alive;
He brings down to the grave and raises up.
The Lord sends poverty and wealth;
He humbles and exalts.
He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
He seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor.

Science has proven that we are made of the same stuff as the dust of the earth and the stars and all the life on this planet. The same glorious molecules. I love the intersection of science and religion. So, isn’t it possible to also find some grace in the fact that once we leave this precious life, we return to that dust? Could it be that the sandstorm that had the power to smother me and leave me lifeless on that dirt road also had the power to bring new life? Imagine the possibility of dust giving life!

I think it’s no coincidence that the founders of the capital city of my home state called it Phoenix after a mythical bird that rose from the ashes of a fire. And in our scriptures, we have a story about a fellow named Jesus who rose from the dead, from the ashes, so to speak. If this isn’t a story about dust as creation, I don’t know what is.

So, I don’t want to think about dust as an ending, but as a beginning. Perhaps we can even think about dust as a way to remind us to start anew when things aren’t going so smoothly, when there are hard times. If I am facing a tough challenge or rejections big or small—and believe me, writers face a lot of rejection—I hope to remember to shake off the dust and keep moving. We are made of the same dust as the stars and the Earth after all.

AMEN.