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Curated Sermon Illustrations from Genesis 18

Explore powerful illustrations to bring Genesis 18 to life. Discover stories, analogies, humor and more as you illustrate the timeless truths from scripture.

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Just a stain in the soil

Author

William Rowley

There’s a TV show that was popular in Britain called Time Team. Basically, a group of archeologists would descend on a site (usually somewhere in Britain) and excavate it for three days. For archeology nerds like me, it’s entrancing. It’s not all gold coins, Roman temples, and incredible mosaics. In fact, it rarely is.

As is inevitable (if you dig enough), Time Team unearths the dead. It’s pretty common, actually. Burials all across Britain turn up from across its entire history.

Watching the show forcefully reminds you of the true meaning of, “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The dead are of all sorts. Princes, chiefs, monks, lepers, infants. Death came to all of them. Some were buried in just a winding sheet. Others were buried with incredible treasures. But today, those treasures amount to some corroded pieces of iron and bronze, with interspersed pieces of glass and gold.

Some of the dead are nearly complete skeletons. Others are shattered by years of ploughing. Some are little shards of cremated bone and ash. Perhaps the most poignant are those that are just stains in the soil.

Those have truly returned to the dust. It is not uncommon for the archeologists to scrape the sod away and see the outline of an old grave—just a patch of soil that is colored differently from the rest. As they shave away the layers, there is only dark soil, a tooth, a bone fragment, or an odd trinket that testifies that once a body lay here. Between the weather, microbes, and the soil chemistry, nothing else remains. There is just dust.

Sooner or later (should the Lord tarry), that will be us.

Remembering this helps us to connect with the themes of mortality we dwell on on Ash Wednesday, at funerals, and when we need people to remember that our life, consequential as it is, is brief, turning to the Lord and making a difference is a matter of urgency.