Cleaning the mud off my boots after a recent flood response, I noticed the grittiness of it.
It reminded me of preparing the ashes for Ash Wednesday. Burning last year’s celebratory palms, sieving them fine, mixing them with oil.
I see the impermanence of things, of even life itself, in the mud and ashes.
Ash Wednesday, a day when we acknowledge our mortality and our own return to dust.
Mucking out after a flood, removing what was once treasure that has now become trash.
Too often we overlook the physicality of the Christian faith in our anticipation of Heaven. We focus on the promise of our spiritual future, and, yes, that will be a wonderful thing. No more tears and reunions of all sorts. Wholeness that we can only wonder and dream about.
And yet, though we worship and celebrate God With Us, a peculiar God that took on the stuff of their own creation to be with their creation, we sometimes forget that there is more to the promise than “pie in the sky, by and by”.
The Kingdom of God is now, in the wine and bread, in the water and ashes, in our call to serve and love our neighbor.
The Kingdom of God is even found in flood mud.
No, really.
When we are more like Christ, do we become more human or less?
I believe we become more human, specifically, we become the humanity that God hoped we would be. Loving, caring, invested in one another’s well-being. Trusting in the abundance of God.
Watch what happens after a flood. Neighbors take each other in and make sure everyone is accounted for. Strangers show up to clean out houses, to offer hugs and listening hearts. Food is shared. Help is accepted and reciprocated. Communities mourn their losses as communities.
To quote a recent Welch, WV flood survivor: “We become human again.”
When we take on the ashes of Ash Wednesday or the mud from another flood, we become human again. We recognize our place in the Kingdom; we accept the invitation to participate in it.
Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. Now, go out there and get muddy.
Reverend Deacon Mary Sanders and serves as a minister of word and service in West Virginia and western Maryland. Prior to seminary, she served as an environmental inspector for the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. Her sense of call is to serve the people and environment of Appalachia. She lives on her great grandma’s farm with two dogs and two cats and is surreptitiously planting a food forest around her cabin.