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 Sermon
03/14/2010
Remember That You Are Dust ~ by Reverend
Thomas Cary Kinder
March 7, 2010 Third Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Genesis 2:4b-9, 15
Selected Scripture Readings
on Spirit and Dust
All are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. (Ecclesiastes 3:20)
Then God formed a human from the dust of the ground,
and breathed into its nostrils the Spirit of life. (Genesis 2:7)
O God, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
When you take away their breath, they die
and return to their dust.
When you send forth your Spirit, they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground. (Psalm 104:24, 29b-30)
No one can enter the realm of God without being born of water
and Spirit.
What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of the
Spirit is spirit. (John 3:5-6)
Those who live according to the flesh
set their minds on the things of the flesh,
but those who live according to the Spirit
set their minds on the things of the Spirit.
To set the mind on the flesh is death,
but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. (Romans 8:5-6)
The realm of God is within you. (Luke 17:21)
That which you have within you will save you
if you bring it forth from yourselves.
That which you do not have within you will kill you
if you do not have it within you. (Thomas 70)
It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in
me. (Galatians 2:20)
It is I who am the All….
Split a piece of wood, and I am there.
Lift up the stone, and you will find me there. (Thomas 77)
The glory that you have given me I have
given them,
so that they may be one, as we are one, I
in them and you in me,
that they may become completely one. (John 17:22-23)
I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. (John 10:10b)
We have this treasure in clay jars,
so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power
belongs to God and does not come from us. (II Corinthians 4:7)
Remember That You Are
Dust
Remember that you are dust, and to dust
you shall return. Remember God has formed you
from the dust of the ground, and breathed into your nostrils
the Spirit of life.
Remember it is not
you who live, but the Spirit who lives in you
and through you. In
all life it lives, the true life of all
that was and is and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.
Remember
that you are dust. Imagine
dust
swirling up from the ground to form your body
as if a magic wand had lifted it
and with a flick aligned the particles
into your human shape, and then God breathed
the Spirit into you, and you awoke
and started living out the role your dust
was given in the ever flowing stream
of Spirit coming into being here.
Imagine if you could see this flow through time,
the history of earth in one short film,
the star dust particles afloat in seas
devoid of life, primordial, first swirling
into a pulsing one cell living thing,
and then the swirls of fish with scales and fins,
and then the fish with legs that crawled from ooze
and started dry dust swirls that rose and fell,
that rose to walk or fly as dinosaurs,
or rose as giant ferns as tall as trees
or soared through dripping fronds as dragonflies
with six foot wing spans, and all the while new dust
was rising and old returning to the ground.
And now how many billion human lives
have risen in this world, each one unique,
each one its own configured set of gifts,
yet each one bearing in it one same spirit,
one meaning, purpose, destiny, one love?
That whole long story is of one same life.
Over the human ages different peoples
have called life’s common spirit many names,
a thousand names of God in our attempt
to understand the part of us we sensed
within our dust, the part that speaks in silence,
the part we see eyes closed or in our dreams
or in our glimpses through the door of death.
Once in the wilderness a desert father
came seeking wisdom from a holy elder.
He told him how he prayed, gave alms and fasted,
and asked what more to do.
The elder stood
and raised his hands up high and every finger
shone like the sun, and showed the fire within.
He said, why aim for less than being all flame?
Mystics, we call those people who can see
the Spirit present in the world of dust,
who have a gift, night vision, you could say,
who witness and interpret for us all,
and holy elders, those who turn all flame,
and though a part of us says, yes, and knows
that what they say is true, yet somehow dust
seduces us to thinking it is all,
and in each human mind the ancient story
replays itself, of Eve and Adam’s fall.
They shared the vision of all flesh as one,
their naked bodies in the garden shone
transparently God’s love and life and light,
till dust seduced them with its tasty fruit,
and changed the way they saw the world around them
and changed the way they saw themselves within it.
Dust made them want to be like God themselves,
to be themselves the purpose of their lives,
to have their brief expression of God’s breath
be not part of something greater, but the greatest,
not something doing its small part for God
as one with all life forms in all creation,
but separate, an end unto itself,
self-serving, self-concerned, the dust as God.
And so we shape our lives and human cultures
as if we were in competition here,
as if the goal were not to love and serve
the one life found in all life-forms on earth,
but fight with others, fight the earth, fight God
to make them yield to us what we desire.
So we can eat while other people starve.
So we can launch our wars and give no thought
to people just like us, with our same spirit,
our selfishness is killing.
So we can hurt
a child, a spouse, an animal, a climate,
and never see the life we hurt is ours.
The world exists divided since the fall,
since we first lost the vision of the truth,
dividing in many ways what should be one.
But some still see, and though their names of God
may differ—Allah, Adonai or Christ,
Great Spirit, Brahman/Atman, sacred Tao,
even one woman’s “inner Righteous
Babe”—
all those who see the Spirit in all dust
are really one, divided only from those
who do not see, and this division is
the one that matters most.
The great world struggle
of all time is this—between God-vision
of oneness, love, compassion’s golden rule
that spans the universe with no exceptions,
and dust’s blind vision, full of fear’s mistrust,
that fights for certainty, security,
superiority of its own dust.
Dust seems so strong, and Spirit seems so weak,
and yet the truth is just the opposite,
if only we would choose that way and trust.
A white man in the segregated south
sat at a counter with a group of blacks
asking that they be served as equal people.
An angry crowd of whites formed at their back,
screaming their hate and rage and deadly threats.
Two days the sit-in held its peace and seats,
when suddenly the white man on the stool
felt himself grabbed and swung around and saw
a Bowie knife-point inches from his heart
and heard a voice hiss, “I’ll give you one minute
to leave, you n— lover, or I’ll run
you through with this.”
The man thought, this is it,
at least I have one minute left to live,
and forced his eyes up from the knife to see
a face more hateful than he had ever seen.
There was no time to think through his response,
what came from him came from a life of training
to see and love the “that of God” in all,
as Quakers say. He
looked hate in the eye
and said, “Well, brother, you do what you feel
you have to do, and I will try to love you
all the same.”
Nothing happened for a minute.
Then the knife hand began to shake, and then
it dropped, the hate-filled face turned, walked away,
trying to hide its tears.*
Divided dust
met love, it met the truth that we are one,
and just the gentle touch of that truth-force
was all it took to heal its hate-filled vision.
This is the hope, as it has always been:
the Spirit in us gives us power and guides us.
It has a will that we can join our dust to,
and when we do, we have the power of God,
the power of love to heal and make things new.
Poor Eve, poor Adam, if they could have trusted,
the Spirit of all life could have provided
the things their dust required, food, peace, warmth, love;
as Jesus said, strive first for the realm of God
and all these other things will be given you.
Why? Because the
Spirit wants our dust to live,
because our life is God’s eternal life
rising again in us for our brief time
till dust returns to dust and we flow on
with God forever in that eternal stream.
Where is it going? God
knows. We cannot.
But this we do know: what our dust must do.
The purpose of our dust is loving service,
each using our unique creative gifts
to help the Spirit live in every form,
to help all dust see that we all are one,
to live in peace and kindness, to feel joy
as God flows through us making what God wills
out of our dust, to use our unique gifts
to serve the unique time and place that’s ours,
to help the Spirit keep transforming dust.
This is why Jesus trekked the wilderness,
because the Spirit drove him there to find
the freedom from temptations of the dust
so he could unify his dust and Spirit.
And he emerged all flame, all full of power,
and started teaching unity and love,
and healing the oppressed, feeding the poor,
unveiling, everywhere he went, God’s realm
on earth, a culture of nonviolence,
compassion’s actions, things that make for peace.
Christ taught the way that we could have that power.
Paul saw and chose to let Christ live in him,
to let Christ’s Spirit live through Paul’s
life-dust.
St. Francis saw and let go all he owned
and Christ-like love flowed through him to all beings,
to birds and fish, to deadly wolves he tamed,
to lepers whom he hugged and kissed and healed.
Gandhi saw Christ and disciplined his dust
to focus on the Hindu names of God,
mute prayer, his greatest weapon, as he said.
The Spirit flowed through him to lift the poor
and free his people from their long oppression.
Today, an Afghan woman, beaten by
the Taliban, defies death threats to lead
her people toward democracy and peace,
ideals she finds in Islam and Koran.
Look! Everywhere we
turn, if we will look,
we see the Spirit’s fire turn dust to light,
we see the power of love to heal the world,
we see self-sacrifice defying death.
If we align our lives with God by choosing
to trust this vision of reality,
and live what we believe, and drop dust’s lust
to make the ego God and give that up,
then we will come to see there is no death
when we return to dust.
How could there be?
We are not just this part of us that dies.
The Spirit that is our true life lives on,
and all we need is to consent to it.
So choose it now, before the chance is gone.
*story
from Michael N. Nagler’s book The Search for a Nonviolent
Future, p. 75
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