Lent, Creation, and Calling
Genesis 2:7 7 then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.
Each year, as Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, we gather together as the Church to be honest with ourselves and God about where we are in our walk with God, to confess our sin and the devastation it causes, and to repent and allow God to begin the work of bringing new life in us. On Ash Wednesday, we acknowledge that we are scorched earth, but we are also reminded about our creation. God created us out of dust and breathed life into us. The dust seems, at first, empty and lifeless. Think about all of the images that we associate with dust—a desert, a ghost town, the dust bowl, an abandoned home. The dust means the absence of life for us. Yet, what does God do with dust?
God takes God’s own hands, and lovingly molds the human form and shapes it out of the lifeless dust of the earth into a creature that was meant to be a companion for God. God was creating humanity to be in relationship with God, to walk with God in the world that was about to spring up. Think about the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2. God speaks the universe into existence with only words, until God comes to humanity. God doesn’t speak humanity into existence. Humanity is the only thing that God lovingly shapes with God’s own hands. Everything else, God speaks or wills to create. Yet humanity is the one creation that God gets God’s hands dirty for.
However, God did not stop at the dust. The dust was lifeless on its own. God could have spoken to bring the human to life. We know that God has that power. God spoke and brought the rivers, plants, and animals to life. Yet, God did not command the dust creature to breathe. God breathed God’s own breath into the first human forever connecting our life to God’s own life.
We are created out of dust and breath—dust, lovingly formed by God’s own hand; breath, the air in our lungs from God’s own mouth. The dust and the breath came together to form us for relationship with God, and later one another. This is what we were created for. However, we tend to put things on ourselves that moves us away from this purpose. We get away from the dust and the breath. We get away from the hands and the life of God. We pile stuff on ourselves that we think will make us whole or make us better. We pursue our own agendas instead of our calling. We pursue our own success rather than pursuing relationship with our creator. This is especially tough for those of us who feel a call to ministry. We can look at someone else’s call and think it our call, or we can stretch ourselves too thin, thinking we can fulfill our calling on our own.
Each year, during Lent, we are invited to confess our sins and turn back to God. We are invited to take off all of those unnecessary things that we have created for ourselves. The practices of Lent—confession, repentance, lament, humility, prayer, fasting, and forgiveness—help us to get back to the dust and breath. These practices bring us back to the hands of God and the life of God. And just as God was not afraid to dig into the dirt for our creation, Jesus proves God’s love for us yet again in becoming human and dying for us. When we practice getting back to the hands and life of God, we understand that this is what Jesus was talking about when he told Nicodemus that Nicodemus had to be born again. This is what Paul was talking about when he said that the people of Jesus are new creations! Just as God lovingly brought humanity to life in the beginning, God lovingly brings us back to life over and over and over again.