On this night when we start the journey with Jesus to Jerusalem…on this night when we join our journey toward Easter with Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness…for 40 days and nights we are invited to a season of prayer, repentance, humility, and, oddly enough, hope.

It is very unfashionable these days in the church to talk about sin…unless of course we are talking about someone else’s. It always seems to be so much easier to see what others do…or don’t do…that isn’t right. But for us…not so easy, is it? After all, we don’t intentionally set out to harm anyone or to defy God…the things we do…or fail to do…all have wonderful reasoning and justification behind them.

The tough reality is that we are entering a season where religious leaders used just that kind of logic to send a blasphemous rebel to his death. For in this season we remember when power and fear overtook…at least for a brief time…the better angels of our natures…and the followers of God killed the very one who was and is their greatest hope.

This Psalm is sometimes thought to be a meditation by King David when he is confronted with the error of his ways with Bathsheba and the blood on his hands in the death of her husband, Urriah the Hittite. David, like the leaders of the church in Jesus’ time, had power and abused it…and the result was death…the work of their hands…is dust…

Whether it records the words of David or not, tonight’s Psalm is the plea of one who finally understands how he has abused the blessings God placed in his hands. It is the lament of one who knows that apart from God…the one who created us in love, the one who calls us into relationships of compassion and loving care, the one who makes a gift of each breath, each sunrise, each embrace, each heartbeat…apart from this God…we are nothing…dust.

The psalmist speaks as one who fears that it is possible to lose God…speaks as one who is desperate for a restoration of the Divine relationship… Standing on this side of the Easter event, of Christ’s ultimate demonstration that nothing…not even death…can overcome the love of God…the renewing power of God…it is difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of the one who speaks these words so desperately…

But that is part of our invitation tonight…to open ourselves to true repentance…stripping away the justifications and rationalizations…and even, for the moment, the comforting knowledge of our place in the resurrection to come…and seeing and knowing that without the God who breathed us into being…without the God who came among us…to live…to die… we are little more than dust.

I said that was PART of our invitation…humbling ourselves. But it is not where tonight’s journey ends. We’ve talked before about the fact that in the Hassidic Jewish community…children are taught to keep two slips of paper in the pockets of their coats. One slip says: "I am only dust and ashes." The other "For me the whole universe was created."

Remember, tonight we don’t throw ourselves on the ground and cover ourselves with ashes as the repentant of old did…tonight we wear the ashes of our repentance as a Cross...a sign of humiliation turned on its ear…a sign of someone as dead as dust rising again. It is our proclamation both of our emptiness without God…and of our celebration…that the one who was murdered on that cross by human fear…lives again…and that his living….his dying…his resurrection…was for us…for us all….that all the world might know a love stronger than death…and be freed to let go of the fear and the power and all that is dust and death in our lives…

Tonight…let us take the ashes and know what we would be if we were on our own…but let us take too the cross…that reminds us that we need never fear that we ARE on our own…for we are God’s…

And so the journey begins.