It's Terminal: Meditations on Ash Wednesday

Some folks die in offices
One day at a time
They could live a hundred years
But their soul’s already died…

We are living souls
With terminal hearts, terminal parts…
It’s Terminal, It’s terminal
–Jon Foreman

“It’s Terminal.”

Devastating news. Nothing can rock our world quicker. I recently had a friend’s family member get this horrific news. It made me think about the temporality of life. How this life is so transitory, evanescent.

The life of mortals is like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall.
–1 Peter 1:24

On Ash Wednesday each year, we remind ourselves that we are “dust and to dust we shall return” (Genesis 3:19). Although most find this dark holiday concerning sin and death strange and uninvited, I always find it wonderfully refreshing. It is a day each year where we are finally honest with ourselves.

We are broken. Things are not as they’re meant to be, as they were originally created to be. In this image-driven, perfectionistic culture where we know our masks better than our own faces, it feels freeing to finally declare, “I am not okay, and that’s actually okay.”

We are sinners, not because we sin, but because it is who we are. We are rotten to the core. At least we come by it honestly. God reminds the first humans that they were created from dust and to dust they will return after they break their relationship with God by sinning. Death, a permanent severing of relationships, enters the world. Sin, death and the devil cause the world to decay back to dust. All of creation is forever broken, desperate for a fix (Romans 8:18-23).

But, death doesn’t get the last word. We need not despair. Peter continues,

For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. The life of mortals is like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever. And this is the word that was preached to you.
–1 Peter 1:24

We not only celebrate that we were marked for death on Ash Wednesday, but that through Christ and our baptism we are marked for life. We must remember that through Christ we are no longer perishable, terminal, but imperishable, recipients of the greatest gift, eternal life. Ash Wednesday is not the only day we tangibly place the sign of the cross on our foreheads, we do the same during our baptism.

We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life…for if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His.
–Romans 6:4

In Baptism that brokenness and darkness dwelling deep within each of us is drowned, so that we might be rescued, resurrected and protected from a return to dust, redeemed, reclaimed and renewed.