One of my favorite things about learning Biblical languages is catching all the little inside jokes and plays on words that are in the Bible. There are dozens of them, sitting there in the Hebrew or the Greek, but we read over them in English, completely unaware that they are there.One of the most clever examples of this is in Genesis. Everybody knows what the first man's name was, right? He was called Adam. But do you know what his name means? In Hebrew, the names almost always mean something, and Adam's name is no different. His name is derived from the word "dirt," which is "adamah." So in Genesis 2:7, God is literally forming the "adam" from the "adamah," the man from the dirt. Right there at the beginning, humanity is linked with the earth God made us from.
The point is underscored a little later in Genesis, when God tells that very same Adam that "by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground; for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (3:19). The word the NRSV is translating "dust" here is the same word from earlier: "adamah." The scripture is warning us: don't forget who you are and where you come from.
These are the words we hear today, on Ash Wednesday. "You are dust, and to dust you shall return," we are told, with the imposition of ashes. It's a reminder of our mortality, and of the fragile nature of our existence, and of the limited amount of time we have here in this place. God has formed us from the dirt--the same stuff that the world is made from--and someday we will end up back there.
But Ash Wednesday is not about fatalism or nihilism. It's a call to purposeful living, to an honest assessment of our place in the world. We can read it as a call to ecological awareness, since it's right there in the first pages of our Bibles that even our bodies are part of the earth's ecosystem. But most of all, let's let Ash Wednesday be a call towards the understanding that our lives are held in God's hands, and that all our affairs--whether in our individual lives or our lives together--are intertwined with God and this beautiful world that God has created.
Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust--and thank God for that.
