Ash Wednesday
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”
For a few weeks now we’ve been preparing to undertake a journey, one that we’ve taken before – some of us perhaps many times before – and today we set out on that journey, this pilgrimage that we call Lent.
For three weeks we’ve been hearing about what this journey means and what it requires, that its basis is charity or love, the thing that undergirds our whole lives and from which all of our thoughts and actions should proceed. We’ve heard about how this time and how the spiritual life in general is like an athlete running a race with eyes fixed on the prize, the end, the goal. And that there is work to do within us and our hearts, work to till the soil so that it is good and fertile for the Word of God to be planted so that we can bear fruit.
Now, some find it distressing or discomfiting that all of this preparation culminates in today and the coming forty days, a time of strong and intense language and imagery – ashes, penitence, wretchedness, sin – words that make us squirm a bit, ways we don’t like to think about ourselves.
But I think at the centre of it all, the centre of this day – Ash Wednesday – is a notion of ourselves that the Scriptures, the church, and our calendar wants to make clear: an understanding of our dependence on God; that we are not enough, that we aren’t going to hack it by ourselves.
Like new years’ resolutions we sometimes commit ourselves to something for Lent – fasting, taking up a prayer discipline, giving more generously to the church – and soon after find ourselves failing, unable to live up to our own expectations.
This is because Lent, maybe more than any other season, reminds us both of how deeply intertwined our souls are with our bodies, and our bodies – as we all know – just like our cars, are prone to failure, and it reminds us that we alone simply aren’t enough.
But Lent is about learning that we can gain greater mastery over our spiritual lives when we gain greater mastery over our bodies and our appetites and our desires. This is one reason why fasting has always been a part of Lent: it helps us to see that it is often our bodies and our desires that hold us back from a deeper relationship with God.
Our hearts are a place, as we have talked about recently, where there can often be conflicting desires. We’ve all betrayed a friend in big and small ways before, or perhaps been on the receiving end of a betrayal between friends. We know how easily our hearts can get pulled in various directions because of our conflicting desires, as Paul says we are often drawn to doing the things we know we shouldn’t, and not doing the things we ought to do.
We always have conflicting desires within us, in our bodies, and they can sometimes seem like they are at war. If you’ve ever committed yourself to a diet but kept a pint of ice cream in the fridge, then you know exactly what I mean.
We can even betray ourselves when we try to do good, as Jesus points out in the Gospel today where he warns us saying that when we fast we shouldn’t make it obvious, don’t make it about you; when you pray, don’t do it on a street corner so everyone sees how pious you are, do it quietly and alone; when you give, don’t make a show of your giving or boast of your generosity, pinching the hundred dollar bill by the corner so everyone sees you giving, do it quietly.
Lent is a time of recognizing our failures and our burdens, and our insufficiency alone because this is how repentance begins. Ash Wednesday is a day on which we should be remembering our frailty, remembering and recognizing how weak we truly are. Now the point – as I said earlier- isn’t that we re-live the shame of our failures and feel miserable; shame should never be confused with being repentant or feeling guilt.
Guilt and repentance is about feeling bad for what one has done and trying to amend it, shame is about feeling bad about who you are, and what we know from the Scriptures is that God is not unhappy with you who we are, as we are created in His image, but God is unhappy with the things that we do and think which pull us further away from Him, because we are the target, the aim, of God.
Lent is a season of repentance, a time of turning, not only away from those things for which we need to seek forgiveness but away from all of those things that keep us from the transformative love of God.
It’s a good night to call to mind our failures tonight because this service, every service, and indeed this whole season of Lent is an opportunity for healing, for growth, and for change. We turn from God all the time, many of our failures are a result of our turning away from God.
But Lent is an opportunity to turn back to God and to recognize once again that despite our repeated failures, despite our betrayals, despite the ways we have disappointed ourselves, our friends, our families, and the ways we think we have disappointed God – God has never once turned away from us.
Just remember what it is we are journeying towards through these 40 days.
It’s not a journey towards nowhere, but rather towards the empty tomb of Jesus who, even whilst dying on a cross, gives us a supreme example of love and forgiveness and asks the Father to forgive those who betrayed and murdered him. Imagine, then, what God thinks of your failures. He knew you before you were knit together in your mother’s womb, he knew who you would be and all that you would do in your life, the good and the bad, and he died for you anyway.
The ashes we receive today are not ashes of death, but of transformation. They represent the sadness we ought to have over the ways we fall short of God, but also the fact that we belong to God, and through Him we are being changed from one glory into another.
These ashes are symbolic of the possibility for renewal and for a new, living, and hopeful relationship with God made possible through our repeated turning back to God, and through His faithfulness to us.
