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Ash Wednesday
Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made and dost forgive the sins of all those who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Ash Wednesday
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Scripture citation(s): Joel 2:1-2,12-17
A Sermon by
on
Joel 2:1-2,12-17
✛
An Ash Wednesday Sermon by the Archbishop of York
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Yet even now says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your garments.
The focus of this day, Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent is that simple yet profound symbol of the imposition of the sign of the Cross in ash on each of our foreheads. It reminds us both of our beginning and also of our ending – “dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return”.
Recall if you will the Genesis account of the creation of Adam – “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”. That was “in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth”. And it is precisely this text which again is echoed in our own departure from this world – “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” – or in the words of the Russian Orthodox Contakion for the Dead – “We are mortal, formed of the earth, and unto earth we shall return”.
So today we are all of us confronted by our mortality. Today, in the midst of life, we are in death. For the only certain fact in our being born into this world is that sooner or later we shall be born out of it.
Today then Ash Wednesday and this season of Lent is a call amidst all the multifarious and diverse range of people and things which crowd in upon our lives and our time, the pressures, the tensions, the stresses and the strains, the increasing pace and rate of change in the world, the sheer drivenness of so many of our lives – today comes as a rather sudden and dramatic call to us by the Church to call a halt – to stop – to look – to listen. It is a God-given opportunity to be seized by us, when given the mood of the season, the purple vestments, the more restrained style of the music, the words and the prayers and the readings – an altogether more penitential atmosphere – we can take stock – fully and honestly – of our lives, of who and what we are before God and not least our sheer wickedness and sinfulness.
“Rend your heart and not your garments” –
These are the words of the prophet. And the stark reality of Joel’s exhortation came home to me very forcibly in a piece in The Times newspaper just ten days or so ago by the Chief Rabbi in the United Kingdom – Jonathan Sacks. He wrote – “The greatest danger to the future of our world is not weapons but those who wield them. The problem is not “out there” in laboratories and weapon caches, but “in here” in the human heart … the ultimate weapon of mass destruction is mankind”. Such a statement should not come as any surprise to us bearing in mind Jesus’ own teaching that it is that which comes from within which defiles and destroys a person.
Each and every one of us needs urgently therefore to take advantage of this season of fasting and prayer traditional to the forty days of Lent.
Now lest you should be beginning to conclude that what I have set before you is altogether too dispiriting, gloomy and negative – nevertheless the reality certainly as the Bible sees it of who and what we are – the downside as it were of our human nature. But then thanks be to God we are not so left to our worst selves. The journey which this Lent sets before us is not one of unrelieved gloom and darkness but rather of hope and of promise. For today in the words of the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann is the day when we take those first steps into the “bright sadness” of Lent. We see – far away – the destination. It is the joy of Easter. It is the entrance into the glory of the kingdom. And it is this vision, a foretaste of Easter that makes Lent’s sadness bright and our Lenten effort a spiritual spring. The night may be dark and long but all along the way a mysterious and radiant dawn seems to shine on the horizon”.
“Rend your heart and not your garments”.
So then as we set out once again on the solemn season of Lent, because we are so easily and readily distracted, it is as well that we do have some rule, some framework, some guideline, something to which we are committed by way of a bias towards the deepening and renewing the life of the spirit within. And we have to face the fact that if we are truly to give the prayer and the fasting, the almsgiving, indeed our stewardship generally, as well as our participation in the sacramental life of the Church and the reflection on Holy Scripture, the clear priority which is needed for our soul’s health then some things will need to take second place for a change. Ask yourself what are the priorities for your life? Am I really seriously committed in the full light of God’s graciousness and goodness to me this and every day to make once again or perhaps for the first time some realistic space and time day by day, week by week, this Lent so that I may indeed grow in that holiness of life to which in Christ we are all called – to allow the light of Christ the more to penetrate and permeate the dark places within, indeed to surrender myself and my whole life so that it may be the more conformed to Him and His likeness.
And, of course, we shall fail; but the real failure will be if allowing my failure today I am thereby totally disabled from picking things up from tomorrow. For the enduring good news of the Gospel is that we have not been left to our worst selves; rather that God in Christ is ever and always with us and alongside us no matter how far we may find we have strayed from him; and that ever and always he is at work rooting for us so all that – which is you and me right now just as I am – may slowly but surely in the crucible of His love – that self-giving, self-emptying love ever set before us in these Holy and Sacred mysteries – this dust of the earth which is each one of us before God – maybe transformed and forged into the gold of His glory. It is the paradox which the English poet T S Eliot sets before us in the Four Quartets – Little Gidding – “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from”.
So as we hear those words – “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” – rejoice in the context of this Great Thanksgiving, this Eucharist, that Christ through His Church is calling you, contemplating your ending, to a new beginning, to a fresh start, for today is the first day of the rest of your life – that life which already is hid with Christ in God – for ever and for all eternity. To the same God then be all praise and thanksgiving now and to the end of the ages. Amen.
