Ash Wednesday Reflection - A few days late

Good afternoon.
Sometimes Ash Wednesday feels like a downer. All that darkness and confession and reminders of our mortality. I like to think of the Ash Wednesday refrain: Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return as being surrounded by a deeper promise, an affirming, hopeful commitment by God to us. It is the blessing that is part of a baptism or confirmation.  Those words of promise are: “ ______________, you are a child of the covenant, sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” The inevitability of dying is swallowed by the promise of life and life and life and new life. Amen?
If you like poetry, here is a poem that wonderfully expresses the promise that is buried within Ash Wednesday.
 
All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if you all had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial

did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning

This is the moment
we ask for blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside of the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside of the smudge
we bear.

Blessing The Dust - Jan Richardson