This article is the lead story in the March issue of The Mennonite. Subscribe today for more thoughtful feature articles like this one. 

Photo: Karina Palos, a junior social work major from Goshen, places an ash cross on Jacob Zehr, a junior music major from Carthage, New York, during an Ash Wednesday service at Goshen College on Feb. 10, 2016. Simon Weaver, a junior molecular biology/biochemistry major look on. (Photo by Brian Yoder Schlabach)

I grew up on a farmstead about 10 miles north of North Newton, Kan. My great-great-great-grandparents settled there during the mass Mennonite migration of 1874, and my family has lived there ever since. My brothers and I would spend hot summers playing in the hayloft of our family’s barn, now over 100 years old.

A rope and pulley track ran along the peak of this completely vaulted barn, to open and close the hay door at the end. We’d swing from one stack to another of straw bales covered for decades by pigeon droppings. Along the very middle of the floor of the barn, running the whole length of the barn, there was a mound of pigeon droppings that reached almost a foot high, from the pigeons that perched on that pulley track.

It’s staggering to think of just how long those pigeons must have had to work to create such an amazing monument.

Many years later, as my wife and I were preparing to lead our first Ash Wednesday service together at Grace Hill Mennonite Church in rural Newton, Kan., we were in panic mode the day before when we discovered that we had no ash for Ash Wednesday, and the palm fronds from the previous year’s Palm Sunday weren’t anywhere to be found. Then I told Katherine, “Don’t worry; I’ll take care of it.”

I went back to the old hayloft, chipped off a big section of pigeon dropping-encrusted straw bale, took it outside and burned it. The aroma was sweet and earthy, and when the burning was complete, it left behind a beautiful, deep charcoal-like ash, perfect for smudging up foreheads. For seven years now, I’ve been smudging foreheads with ash from straw grown in a Kansas field, and at least a pinch or two of pigeon droppings, composed of the remains of mulberries and grains the pigeons found to eat around the farm.

When creation care theologians speak of the importance of using local sources for the elements of the focal practices—the signs and sacraments of the church—I’m not sure this is what they have in mind, but nothing proclaims place quite like a pinch of pigeon poop. We literally wear the place we live, in which the local creatures refuse to be excluded and leave enthusiastic reminders of their presence behind.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Repent and believe the gospel,” I repeat over and over, as I smudge the mark of the cross on forehead after forehead. The liturgy is a mashup of Jesus’ first words in Mark’s Gospel, as well as the story of Genesis 2-3.

Unfortunately it’s often lost in translation, but when God created the first human being from the dust of the earth, it reads in Hebrew that the Lord God formed the human being, or adam, from the earth, or adamah. It’s a pun. Adam from the adamah. I’m still chuckling inside. If they were speaking English, God might have created Dusty from the dust. Or for academics, humanity from the humus.

In the world of creation, there’s a playfulness to human existence, and also a place-ful-ness. We are tied to place, to earth, to dust, for our existence; and we are tied to God, who breathes life into us.

Unfortunately, Adam started taking himself too seriously; he forgot both play and place, and God had to remind him of the joke, “Hey Dusty, you took yourself too seriously, so here’s another pun: You came from the dust, and you’ll return to the dust.” Not that Adam exactly died laughing when he heard it.

And thus we have the liturgy for Ash Wednesday. But the use of ash is interesting, isn’t it? Why not use dust? We do hear of ash and dust together, perhaps most often at the graveside: “Seeing that the earthly life of our sister has come to an end, we commit her body to be buried, cherishing memories that are forever sacred, sustained by a faith that is stronger than death, and comforted by the hope of eternal life. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, may we be confident of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

In our ritual, dust and ash become symbols of the transience of human life. We come from a place. We return to it.

But these symbols are also connected, in some ironic way, with human privilege to confront Almighty God. God decides to let Abraham in on the plan to destroy Sodom, on the basis that Abraham is to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice. When Abraham hears the news, he questions God, “Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?…Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.” What if 45 remain, or 40, all the way down to 10? The judge of all the earth listens to what dust and ashes—to what place, transient though it may be—has to say. Incarnational theology hardly begins with the New Testament.

The stories of the founding families portray biblical faith lived out on the borderland. They are sojourners, not settlers, never fully arriving. The literary structure sets Abraham and Sarah’s hospitality to the “three men” (Genesis 18:2) in stark relief over against the inhospitality with which the settlers at Sodom meet them. Abraham, ever the sojourner, is here regarded as a model host. In response to Abraham’s hospitality, the mysterious guests promise him descendants, a promise God connects to Abraham’s righteousness and justice. The way of righteousness and justice is the way of God, which is the way of welcome to the outsider.

In her study of this remarkable story, Elisabeth Robertson Kennedy concludes, “Establishment [in a place], the guarantee of a viable future…is shown to be dependent upon opening, rather than guarding, the boundaries against the Other.” How might something like an Ash Wednesday service open itself to the Other and thus express a greater fidelity to place?

In practicing hospitality expressed as justice and righteousness, we can come to a greater fidelity to our dusty existence and to our call both to playfulness and placefulness.

Peter Goerzen is campus pastor at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas. This article is the lead story in the March issue of The Mennonite. Subscribe today for more thoughtful feature articles like this one.