Imagery for Ash Wednesday

I have been thinking about Ash Wednesday, specifically about the imagery of ashes.  Many of us will hear an Ash Wednesday sermon that emphasizes our ultimate destiny, the ashes to ashes, dust to dust approach.  Some years, we need that reminder.

This year is not one of those years.  Most of us are watching the world in despair, although the sources of our despair might be different:  eminent climate collapse, the world that we once knew vanishing each day, geopolitical shifts, the resurgence of diseases and other forces for ill that we might have once thought were vanquished.

I was looking for a different approach for my Ash Wednesday sermon.  Last year I talked about decomposing stars as being part of what comprises our dust.  Tonight's sermon will talk about the value of ash to a garden:  it can enrich the soil while killing weeds and diseases.

I thought about using more garden metaphors.  I planted bulbs in the fall, a week or two after the remnants of Hurricane Helene devastated the region.  I had bought 50 bulbs with a plan to share them with a friend and to help her plant them.  But in the summer, she had a stroke, and she's still in the skilled nursing unit.  Even though I paid for them all, I felt weird about planting the bulbs in my yard, but in the end, I decided that it would be more of a tribute to our plans to plant them, to let them live.

I thought about trying to work that story into my Ash Wednesday sermon, but in the end, I couldn't really make it work.  I like to think that the story is still there, an invisible scaffolding, informing and supporting the sermon.