The summer before I entered ninth grade, I was given a list of books to read. This was nothing new. I typically spent my summers devouring books while the rest of the neighborhood played out in the southeast Texas sun. But that summer, I had to read a litany of books I didn’t really want to read, and one of them was Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. I didn’t like that book. My innate joy of reading books was sullied by having to take notes in the margins and highlight passages for the first time in my life. One of the main reasons I didn’t care for Mythology was that I didn’t like the characters. I simply couldn’t relate to them at all.
I found the behavior of the gods and goddesses to be appalling. They were immoral. They flitted to and fro between the heavens and the earth, usually interacting with the earthly realm only to wreak vengeance or to produce half-gods. There was too much violence. I had an instinctive distaste for those characters, and I found reading about them to be an exercise in irritation.
Perhaps this is why I have always been mystified by the tendency, if unrecognized, to make the one, true, living God like those mythological gods and goddesses, who spoke not and saw not, who heard not and smelled not, who felt not and walked not, who made no sound with their throats as Psalm 115 tells us. For those who make such gods are simply like them, and what an incisive observation that is.
Indeed, the picture of God with which we are often confronted from the lips of so-called Christians is a god—lower-case “g”—who is very much like the humans who have fashioned a deity in the image of fallible humankind. This god is perpetually angry and wrathful. This god is fickle and vindictive. This god holds grudges and doles out rewards and punishments according to the disposition of humanity. This god also flies to and fro between the heavens on a whim, obviously present sometimes and painfully absent at others. This god is impatient and intemperate. This god looks remarkably like a sinful, frail human person.
In an ironic twist, such a god—who is, of course, no god at all—could give us permission to excuse our own sinful proclivities. If the presumed god is like that, then we can still cling to our grudges and hope that there is an eternal hell and sit under our booths and pout like Jonah when the death row prisoner finds Jesus and all those other self-satisfying human emotions that we sometimes revel in. Such a god might look the other way from our sinfulness because that god is no more than a reflection of ourselves.
The psalmist renders a stroke of genius, then, when penning Psalm 103. Here, we come face to face with the true God, the living God, the God who fashioned us from dust and breathed life into that same dust and will one day raise that same dust from the grave. The psalmist can only speak of God in fallible human language, but in doing so, the psalmist daringly portrays God as One who is not like so many negative human qualities.
God is not quick to become angry. God is, in fact, not capable of anger at all, at least in the sense that we humans become angry. God does not chide us or accuse us, for that is the work of the Accuser, the Devil, the one who is God’s enemy. God does not cling to anger and carry resentments for all the ways in which we have sinned. God does not deal with us according to our sinful ways or consort with us as if we are wicked. It’s as if the psalmist can only speak about God in terms of what God is not. The psalmist understands that by exploring how small we humans are in our sinfulness, pettiness, and fickleness we can, in turn, recognize how vast the goodness of God is.
God is therefore full of compassion and mercy. In the goodness of God, these are not weaknesses, as they are so often interpreted in our tough world. Maybe this is why Christians sometimes resist a God who is perfectly compassionate and merciful. Such a God seems weak, even though Scripture tells us that God’s weakness is God’s power.
As high as the heaven is in comparison of the earth, so great is God’s mercy. As wide as the east is from the west, so far has God set our sins from us. Although a father may pity his own children, God is merciful a trillion times more so. And why is God so? Because God remembers how we were made. God remembers that we are the product of God’s hands. God remembers that we are but dust, not because we are lowly insects groveling on the face of the earth, but because as dust, we are God’s creation. And as dust, we can yet be shaped more into the likeness of God.
The irony of Ash Wednesday is that we look as if through a spiritual microscope at the smallness of our lives so that we can begin to grasp the staggering vastness of God. We examine carefully the minute ways in which we nurse our grievances, pour out our wrath at our enemies, withhold forgiveness to obtain power, are neglectful in our care of the earth, and in general fail to be like God in so many ways. We pore over those ways in which we have eschewed compassion, mercy, patience, forgiveness, and kindness, in which we have been lazy, slothful, greedy, lustful, proud, envious, and angry. We do all this not as a means of self-torture but as a way of trying to comprehend who God is so that we can become more like God. God is not any of those characteristics of sinful humanity, and if we see any of those things in an image of God, we can be sure that it is not God.
The psalmist’s language becomes small so that we might know just how large God is. We reflect on how tiny and constricted we have become in our sinfulness to ask for God’s grace in becoming large like God. The smallness of human ways is pitted against the vastness of God’s perfection, not as a means of putting us down but as a means of lifting us up.
The infuriating thing about the gods and goddesses of mythology is their impatience and inconstancy. They never stayed with the humans with which they interacted in a love/hate relationship. But in Christ, we see in the detail of a human life the immensity of God’s goodness. We see a God who doesn’t visit earth on a whim but comes and abides and stays with us forever.
In the smallness of our imaginations, confined in this unstable world, we may very well mistake self-examination, repentance, and penitence for ends, but of course, they are means to an end. The moment in which the smallness of our human ways is acknowledged and mourned is precisely the moment of the turn back to God, the about-face, the epiphany in which we can give thanks that God is unlike us even as God calls us to be like God.
This moment of recognition leaves no room for excusing ourselves. It doesn’t allow us to continue to be angry, wrathful, unforgiving, vengeful, negligent, or judgmental. It tells us that the dust from which we were made is the same dust that becomes a new creation in the loving hands of God. For as far as the east is from the west, so vastly different from our ways are the perfectly loving, merciful, and compassionate ways of God. But as near as Christ has come to us and as we are to the dust, so close is the God who formed us from that same dust, renews us, and will make us to be big like him.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ash Wednesday
February 18, 2026