February 18, 2026 - Ash Wednesday: An Unlikely Amalgamation

February 18, 2026  Ash Wednesday
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Genesis 2:4-7
“An Unlikely Amalgamation”
Douglas T. King

Welcome to Ash Wednesday and Lent, the day and the season in which we are reminded of how deeply flawed and imperfect we truly are and of the depth and perfection of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.
 
In a few minutes all will be invited forward to receive ashes on our forehead or hand and be told, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  It is a stark reminder of our fragility and mortality, of all the ways, that no matter how much we accomplish, or how well we dress ourselves up, we are vastly limited creatures.  

Our scripture reading from Genesis provides us with the image of being created from dust, from what is lifeless and inconsequential.  But this story teaches us that we are not solely dust; that what animates us, what gives us life, what lets us live and move and have our being, is the very breath of God’s Holy Spirit blown within us.  We are the most unlikely of amalgamations.  We are a sui generis combination of seemingly worthless dust and the transforming power of God’s Spirit.  In the first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul describes us in this way, “do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God and that you are not your own?”

If you turn to our bulletin cover, the poet Jan Richardson says it like this,

All those days
you felt like dust, 
like dirt,
As if all you had to do 
was turn your face
Toward the wind 
and be scattered
To the four corners 
or swept away
By the smallest breath 
as insubstantial-
Did you not know 
what the Holy One 
can do with dust?
This is the day 
we freely say 
we are scorched.
This is the hour 
we are marked
By what has made it 
through the burning.
This is the moment 
we ask for the blessing
That lives within 
the ancient ashes,
That makes its home 
inside the soil of 
This sacred earth.
So let us be marked 
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked 
not for shame.
Let us be marked 
not for false humility
Or for thinking 
we are less 
than we are
But for claiming 
what God can do
Within the dust, 
within the dirt,
Within the stuff 
of which the world 
is made, 
and the stars that blaze
In our bones, 
and the galaxies spiral
Inside the smudge 
we bear.
 
The creation account in Genesis, Paul, and Jan Richardson remind us of the paradox of our existence.  We are created out of near nothingness but we are inhabited by the creator of the universe.  We find ourselves living in the midst of a tremendous juxtaposition.

As we gather together on this Ash Wednesday we are called to be penitent; to honestly acknowledge all the ways we are broken and sinful. But we are not called to be mired in shame and self-loathing.  We are not called to believe our mortal condition leaves us helpless and incapable of change.  We are not called to bow our heads and slink home feeling worthless.  We are called to carry two realities simultaneously. Yes we are imperfect. And yes, we are filled with God’s abiding Holy Spirit.  This means that despite our personal failings, we are capable of remarkable things.  

Master musicians usually own very special instruments, handcrafted works of art with which they produce stunning music.  If you hand that remarkable instrument to someone who is all thumbs they cannot offer any music from it.  But if you hand a master musician an inexpensive assembly line instrument they can coax beautiful music from even a rather pedestrian object.  

And so it with the likes of you and me.  We are far from being works of art in our lives. But the God who inhabits us can coax the most beautiful music, even through our imperfections.  Each and every one of us is an instrument of God.  

In her book, Things Seen and Unseen, the writer, Nora Gallagher shares this about the time she cared for her friend Ben as he was dying.  

“In the midst of it, I learned something about faith, its mucky nature, how it lies down in the mud with pigs and the rabble.  When Ben realized he was dying, he asked me to be his ‘alternate health care agent.’  As I signed that section of his living will, I imagined standing in the hallway of a hospital with perhaps a few doctors in white coats making compassionate and elegant decisions, gracefully.  

I did not imagine what came to pass.  Instead of that antiseptic corridor, I sat in Ben’s living room, jet lagged, shoveling Chinese take-out food into my mouth, my own house strewn with dirty laundry and used cat litter boxes.  I was deciding whether or not to ask a doctor to get a new drug that would help end Ben’s life.  I had not imagined being so tired I wanted Ben to hurry up and die.  In short I imagined a better version of myself.  Instead, I was the same old screwed-up woman.

In that time I learned that everything is God’s: my screwed-up self, my dirty laundry, my harrowing inability to be perfect for Ben.  Everything is God’s: shame, suicide, assisted death, AIDS.  Because God is inside everything, findable in everything, because I am convinced—I would not have made it through Ben’s death without God.  God is not too good to hang out with jet-lagged women with cat litter boxes in their dining rooms or men dying of AIDS or, for that matter, someone nailed in humiliation to a cross.  God is not too good for anything...”

And so even as we gather on Ash Wednesday to be reminded of our imperfection we are also called to know that we are instruments of God’s perfect love.  

Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God, indeed.  Amen.