An Ash Wednesday Sermon on 2 Corinthians 5.20-6.10 preached at St. Aidan's Episcopal Church in Boulder.
One sometimes surprising fact about me is that I studied civil engineering as an undergraduate. Where I went to school co-oping was a really big deal for engineers. The summer after your freshman year you went to work for a company as a sort of long term intern. From then on, you’d alternate semesters of study and work.
If you’re interested in being an engineer, it’s a wonderful way to make the connection between career and classes. Through co-oping you graduate on time, end up with a year of work experience, and a connection to a potential full time employer.
If it just so happens that you didn’t actually want to be an engineer, co-oping turns out to be a very helpful, if somewhat painful, tool for vocational discernment.
I co-oped with a company called Ethicon, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, where I did environmental engineering work at a factory where they made hypodermic needles and absorbable sutures. There I learned rather quickly that I did not, in fact, want to be an engineer.
The factory was a converted textile mill in Cornelia, Georgia. Cornelia is a tiny town in north Georgia, which is a part of the state known as 'Not Atlanta.' It’s close enough to Gainesville that you can smell the chicken plants, but far enough way that you don’t get to enjoy the amenities that come with being the chicken processing capital of the world. That summer I shared a cubicle with my boss, a rather unpleasant man experiencing his first southern summer after migrating from Massachusetts. The cubicle we shared was in the basement of the factory. We had one little window at the top of the wall above our desk that looked out onto the ground level of the parking lot. On my first day someone covered up that window with a piece of plywood, as roof maintenance began that lasted the rest of the summer.
To be brutally honest, I hated that job and I hated that summer. The work itself was tolerable and my co-workers weren’t unkind. Rather this summer was the first time that I was forced to face and wrestle with issues of depression and anxiety.
One of the perks of this job, besides its spectacular pay for a college sophomore, was that the company provided housing. They did that for me. I had a one bedroom apartment in Baldwin, an even smaller town than Cornelia, just one town over. Everyday that summer I’d go to work, where I mostly made rounds by myself, checking flows and counting barrels of chemicals. Then at five o’clock I’d go to sit by myself in my apartment until I could convince myself to fall asleep, wake up, and face another day of walking around the basement of the factory.
It was an intensely lonely three months. Throughout the summer I thought enviously of friends working at summer camps, in summer classes, working at home, surrounded by people who knew and cared for them. I wanted out. I wanted desperately for that summer to be over. I wanted anything except for what I had.
Somewhere in the middle of that summer I heard my father-in-law, who is a Lutheran pastor, mention something about praying by repeating one short phrase over and over. I confess, my personal prayer life is usually a growth area, but I was desperate. So, I tried it. Everyday as I made my rounds in the bowels of the old textile mill, as I summoned the strength to get out of bed, and searched for the strength to not literally run out the front doors of the factory and never return, I repeated the phrase;
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Over and over, each day, tucked away behind chemical vats, in closets inventorying safety equipment, I prayed;
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
This prayer and the ashes we smear onto our foreheads are a call to repentance. They acknowledge the brokenness of ourselves and our situation. They are a powerful reminder of our mortality and sinfulness.
But my prayer in the bowels of a converted textile mill and our prayer in this place is ultimately a prayer of hope. It’s the hope that now is the acceptable time, that now is the day of salvation. The ashen cross confesses that the world is not as it should be, but it also proclaims the hope that our brokenness shall be returned to dust from which it came and out of those ashes God will bring life.
Wear the ashes and know that while we are dying, we are alive; that while we are sorrowful, we are always rejoicing; that while we have nothing, we possess everything. This is the symbol you are called to bear. Do so earnestly. Do so with undying hope. Amen.
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