Not Just Dust
No Longer Glued to the Floor
Psalm 119:25-32
Pastoral Prayer: Gracious and Holy Father, remind us that we are no longer glued to the floor, clinging to the ground. Your Word makes us alive, so speak Jesus to us, the Living Word who rescues us and makes us alive. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. And all God’s people say, Amen.
Kerry Livgren, from Topeka, Kansas, was working to hone his acoustic guitar skills. More accustomed to playing the electric guitar, he developed a picking style and added some chord changes in the process. His wife walked by as he was playing and suggested he write a song in that style.
Livgren had been reading a book on American Indian poetry and came across a line that stuck out. “All we are is dust in the wind.” When their 1977 album Point of No Return came out, the rock band Kansas included the ballad “Dust in the Wind,” a song Livgren was reticent to share with the band, as it was not their usual style.
The American Songwriter website offered this assessment of the song,
The song begins by focusing on the micro: I close my eyes / Only for a moment and the moment’s gone. Those moments add up to a lifetime that speeds away from us: All we do / Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see. And any efforts to stop the process are folly: It slips away / And all your money won’t another minute buy.
Which leads to the inevitable conclusion: All we are is dust in the wind. Not exactly uplifting, but insightful. And, at the time, not exactly typical of Kansas. But, as it turned out, as successful as anything they ever released.
Notice the logic.
Not typical but successful.
Daleth, the stanza of Psalm 119 that begins in verse 25, which Carolyn read just moments ago, begins,
My life is down in the dust.
The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, offers a more vivid sense,
My life is glued to the floor.
The sense of the line is that life can bring us quite low. Barely clinging to life, knowing that none of us gets out of this life alive. We are glued to the floor, living under gray skies.
The thing is, dust is what we have always been. Reading the poetic description of our beginning story in Genesis, we hear,
Then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.
Pulverized soil is dust. That is what the odd ancient word indicates. The word play in the verse is even more startling. There in Genesis, the word for ground is adamah, and the word for man is adam. Put more literally,
Then the LORD God formed the adam out of the dust from the adamah.
Dust we have always been.
Dust we are.
Dress us up anyway we want, and we are still dust. Magnify all the best that we are, and we are still dust. Create your online personas, fill them with pictures of your best life now, all your vacations, and achievements, and we are still dust.
Yes, it is an inglorious thought, one that keeps us glued to the floor, very close to the dust to which we cling and will return.
Now you know why Kerry Livgren was not so keen to share his song with his band. Not exactly uplifting, as assessed by the writer at the American Songwriter.
The interpretation of Dust in the Wind since that day, by many, is that we should live to make the most of the dust that we are. Live our best life now.
We have been headed here since long before 1977, when lyrics were added to the musical score. But, like most things, the world has accelerated its capitulation to the idea that this life is all there is. Making meaning of our lives is left to us. Some appear to be at ease with the idea and chart their course. More often than not, in the lonely moments of life, we find ourselves glued to the floor. Anxious.
Rather than find in the Way of the LORD God a life that needs no repeat beginnings but is bound up in the One who gives life and revives the lives we have in Love, the world has sold us the line that not only must we make the best of the life we have, but we are the ones who determine a morality and ethic that will support our goals - making the most of the life we have since we are dust in the wind. Our motto, then, is: “Don’t get in my way,” or “Don’t tread on me.” Leave me alone.
Are we really just left clinging to dust?
Late one evening, a member of the very religious order that, from early on, sought Jesus’s death paid him a visit under the cover of darkness. Many of us are so familiar with Nicodemus because we have reduced his story to a formula. That is, we memorize a verse in the long narrative provided in John’s Gospel without much thought to the world-ordering rupture he would experience that led him one day to be among those who took Jesus’s body from the Cross and placed it in the virgin tomb.
“We know you are a teacher come from God, for no one could perform these signs you do unless God were with him.”
Salvation comes not by formula but by revelation. Jesus reveals God to Nicodemus, and whoever the we Nicodemus has in mind when he speaks to Jesus. Maybe without realizing it, Nicodemus draws attention to the world’s existing condition. That is, if this is all there is, then why does God need to show up? What good would signs do if human existence is learning to make the best of the dust that you are before returning to dust?
We cannot escape the long history of ancient Israel waiting for the Messiah to be revealed. Apart from the promise, they had nothing to look forward to. Truly, the Psalter characterizes all that is left to think of life;
We are clinging to dust.
Yet, there is a promise, and Nicodemus is aware of it, even if he does not know how it will be fulfilled. Under the gray clouds of the Roman regime, he notices a light invading the world’s darkness. Nicodemus gives us flesh and blood, as the flesh and blood of the Incarnation is given to us in John’s Prologue.
The true light that gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.
Nicodemus’s observation, based on what he has witnessed of God’s revelation in Jesus, is that the good Jesus came to do, as seen in the signs he saw, exposes the lack of goodness in the world. Put another way, if Jesus is the expected Messiah, then the world’s condition is exposed as needing a Savior. That is why turning the story of Nicodemus into a formula in which the climactic verse is considered John 3:16 misses the Good News that it is for those who are dust, those who are glued to the floor, those who are face down on the pavement.
Apart from the Promise entailed in the Story of God now revealed in The Incarnation, the Word Made Flesh, human beings eventually realize we are dust, and it is not uplifting.
But there is yet a Promise and a Promised One who is the Promise in the Flesh.
Yes, God so loves the world.
And in the Love That is God, it is revealed that the dust we are is no longer condemned, but by and in that Love That is God, we are saved.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.
Dust is what we are. Dust with a beginning. And the Story of God is that the One who gave us our beginning, even a new beginning, that One will also give us fulfillment. Or to make it rhyme, if the LORD God gave us our beginning, then it will be our LORD God that will give us our end. Yet, it is not the end of dust, but it is our telos, the aim for which God made the world and gave us our beginning that we might be with Him.
that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in Him might have everlasting life.
And we cannot overemphasize that everlasting life is a qualitatively different kind of life and one that is fulfilled when we are discovered to be in Christ!
Which takes us back to Daleth.
My life is down in the dust.
We are down on the pavement.
We are glued to the floor.
Or, if you are so inclined,
We have fallen, and we cannot get up.
Down - davaq.
Yet by the Gift of the Gracious God, the Promise gives us His Word. So with the Songwriter, the Prayerbook warrior, we ask.
Revive me through your word - dabar.
Quicken me through your word.
Make me alive through your word.
Yes, we are dust, but the breath of life has been breathed into our very being such that we are not just dust destined for nothing.
Instead, the Word that makes us alive is the Living Word of God, Jesus. We hear the Songwriter speaking Jesus to us. And hearing Jesus, the One Who gives us the Father, we hear the Good News of Life off the floor, up from the pavement. When that Good News gets into our ears and into our hearts, we are quickened, made alive.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.
Jesus notes that condemnation stems from a lack of belief. Or, we might say, to persist in dust, insisting that there is no Promise or Promised One Whose Love gives life.
The salvation of the LORD, in Jesus, means more than forgiveness of our sins and freedom from the Power of Sin and Death, but also a new way of ordering our lives in the world.
Now we cannot stop talking to and with the One Who makes us alive!
Confession -
I told you about my life, help me understand, teach me your statutes. I am weary from grief, keep me from the way of deceit. I have chosen the way of truth, I have set your ordinances before me, I cling to your decrees, LORD, do not put me to shame. I pursue the way of your commands.
Promise Fulfilled -
For you answered me, so that I can meditate on your wonders, strengthen me through your word, graciously give me instruction, for you broaden my understanding.
Jesus makes us alive, makes the dust live, gets us up off the pavement, and we are no longer glued to the floor.