If I’ve heard it said once I’ve heard it said a thousand times: “No, it isn’t right.” I heard it just this morning when standing at my kitchen sink. My hands deep in a pot of soapy water, trying to scrape off the pasta from last night’s dinner, which should have been dumped into the trash 14 hours ago, because now it was stuck dry and crusty to our good pot. But I wasn’t going to do it. No, no, I told myself. She—she being my wife—she said she’d take care of it. It isn’t right that she didn’t. I get that it’s just a pot of pasta. I get that a little boy in her class at school found out three days ago that his dad—his dad that has never really come around since the day his son was born, but his dad that the little boy still wished upon the stars for every night—his dad was murdered. And that’s not right. Standing at the sink I tried to remember that it’s only Wednesday and already the week must feel like an eternity for that little boy, and for his teacher, my wife. Standing at the sink I tried to remember just what isn’t right, and why it was better that my wife fell asleep early last night while reading bedtime stories to our son and before she could get back to that pot in the sink. But I swear this happens every time we eat pasta.
Down the hall from where I stood in the kitchen, I heard my daughter let out a loud grunt—ugh—followed by an instant sob. It was crazy hair day in the 1st grade today. Poor Lillian though, her hair is so fine and straight that crazy is hard to do. And besides, her mom had already left for work and she was stuck with me.
“Can you just put my hair into a bunch of ponytails,” she asked me?
“Absolutely,” I assured her.
So I started to brush this way and that until I had about 8 ponytails coming off her head in every direction.
She looked in the mirror and began to cry again. “It isn’t right,” she exclaimed.
“What are you talking about?” I asked her. “It’s crazy hair day. What’s not right on a day like today?”
“You. You’re not right. You don’t know what you’re doing!”
I felt sad for her and mad at her at the same time. “No, I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m trying.”
I was practically crying now too. “Of course it’s not right. But what’s right?”
Her younger brother, all of 5, in preschool and a bit of a swindler, had his own answer to my question. “Maybe we should just all stay home from school today.” Like what could be more right.
No, it isn’t right. But what’s right? I think this is the question we are stuck with on this day of days. Because we all want to be right. Presidents want to be right and news reporters want to be right, and protesters want to be right and protesters of the protesters want to be right, and preachers want to be right, and little girls want their hair to be right, and parents want to do right by their children. And for all of this we have come to know the one thing that can be known, which is that we can’t all be right. Not if we continue to insist upon playing, each of us, by our own rules. Not if the best we can come up with is a choice between a pot of day old pasta and showing mercy to those we love. In a world of petty competition and flimsy ideals, not everyone, and maybe no one, can be right, which is just another way of saying, we need to find another way. So please, would someone please tell me there is another way.
There is. It is the way of dust and ashes. On this day of days we often hear read the story of God at creation, of how God chose to make the first human being from the dust of the earth. “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” 
Not out of gold or silver. Nor out of some ivory tower with lots of knowledge in our heads. Not out of a great mansion that we might be wealthy masters. Nor out of some cotton field that we might have to know ourselves to be poor slaves. But out of the dusty ground God raised us up to life and human dignity.
It’s a story that would come to be repeated by Jesus himself many thousand years later, when he wanders out to find John the Baptist in the desert by the Jordan River, to have John pour the water of God’s anointing over his head. But the story goes that when John sees Jesus standing in line with everyone else, John tells him, This isn’t right. What wrongs have you done? What do you need to come clean of? And John tries to tell Jesus to switch places with him, to have Jesus do the baptizing. But Jesus tells John, No, this is right. It is right that I should stand with the sinners. It is right that I should be counted among the least, a
nd be alongside the sick and those who can’t afford to pay for a doctor. It is right that I should know what it’s like to be with the hungry, to wait in the breadline. For I am dust, and you are dust, and it is right that I should bear the mark of God’s blessing with everyone else.
So, on this day of days it is not necessary that any of us be right. It is only necessary that we believe we can be made right. And for that all we need do is to get in line beside each other and confess that we are, each of us—no more and no less than anybody else—the beautiful, precious, God breathing dust of new creation.
PleaseGrace 