Sermon quotes on dust
Thomas Cranmer
In the midst of life we are in death, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.
Found in David Teems, Godspeed: Voices of the Reformation, Abingdon Press.
Benjamin Franklin
Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble.
C.S. Lewis
I am perfectly convinced that whatever the gospels are they are not legends. Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has based any doctrine on it. And the act of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is purely a modern art.
Readings for Meditation & Reflection, HarperOne.
Marya Mannes
The incredible new medical technology has made it possible for highly disciplined teams of surgeons … to keep stricken organisms alive even if the brain is irretrievably damaged or lung and heart incapable of functioning without mechanical help. Now it is not dust to dust, but human to vegetable.
F.B. Meye
Fall on your knees and grow there. There is no burden of the spirit but is lighter by kneeling under it. Prayer means not always talking to Him, but waiting before Him till the dust settles and the stream runs clear.
Eugene Peterson
The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word ‘humble.’ This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust – dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eerdmans, 2008.
Stephen De Staebler
Clay can be a metaphor for many things. I made it a metaphor for flesh and earth, and these are two kinds of generic givens of life, if you look at it poetically, biblically, the idea of the life of beings, of man, being transitory, the earth abides-ashes to ashes, dust to dust-man returns to earth, grows out of earth like a flower, wilts, goes back to the earth… We are frail, transitory creatures with aspirations of immortality, conscious of our inevitable death, and we have to deal with it somehow.
A. W. Tozer
He remembers our frame and knows that we are dust. He may sometimes chasten us, it is true, but even this He does with a smile, the proud, tender smile of a Father who is bursting with pleasure over an imperfect but promising son who is coming every day to look more and more like the One whose child he is.
Taken from Tozer on Christian Leadership, Christian Publishers.
Pablo Picasso
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Carroll Stuhlmueller
Silently lost in adoration within the dust before God is preparation for the ultimate answer to all questions: one’s becoming a new creature in Christ Jesus.
The Spirituality of the Psalms (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002)
Ursula K. Le Guin
“If you see a thing whole-it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives…But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life is a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance…The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
The Dispossessed
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