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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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postPriority: 2primaryPost found for date: 2016-02-10 with ID: 6994 (Ash Wednesday)
A Sermon by
Fr. Spurlock
✛
Babies in the River
There is an African way of speaking about getting to the root of a problem that is told as a parable. If African women, working alongside the river, see a baby in the river they send for the men of their village to dive in and save the baby, and they bring it in and take care of it. If they see a second baby in the river they send their men to dive in and save that baby, too, and they bring it in and take care of it. But if there are anymore, they ask, who’s throwing babies into the river? Then they send the men up river to seek out and confront the people throwing the babies in the river.
Beginning with his forty day sojourn being tempted in the desert and leading right up Calvary’s hill, Jesus embarks on a journey upriver to confront the root cause of a problem that for us is, literally, a matter of life and death.
In just a short time, many of you will come forward and receive ash on your foreheads, and you will be told that you will die. If we think about this like going to the doctor, we might say this is the recitation of your symptoms. Or, it’s the baby saved from the river.
But I hope that is not why you came here; to hear a recitation of your problem. I hope you have come here to be healed. When I go see my doctor I don’t go to hear a recitation of my symptoms, or for her sympathy. I go to be set right, to be made well, to be healed.
But to be healed, we have to seek out the root cause of what ails us. It’s not enough to treat symptoms; we need to destroy the disease. We have to go upriver and find out why we are in the condition we are in. For our purposes, the reason we have ash smudged on our foreheads, and we must endure this business of being told that we will die is because of sin.
This confrontation with our disease can seem a tedious business. And it can also be frightening. We don’t want to confront our sins because we fear God’s reaction to them. Sometimes, we try to convince ourselves that they are very small things after all, too insignificant and tedious to contend with. But like grains of sand, multiplied, and shoveled in a sack, and accumulated, all that seeming insignificance and tedium suddenly presents an adequate barrier against the sea. Or, we might try to convince ourselves that time will make our sins go away, but time doesn’t do that. The longer you live with your sins the worse they get. The remembrance of them is grievous; the burden of them is intolerable. What can we do then?
We repent, which basically means, we dare to turn back and face God again. But we are afraid to face God and we are afraid to show him our sins, which is a simple way to talk about confessing them, because we fear his reaction to them. But that fear is groundless if you look at God’s reaction to showing him our sins.
Those of you who do come forward and receive ash on your forehead won’t just get a smudge as a reminder that you are dust, and you will die. You receive ash in the form of a cross. And it is in the cross that we see God’s reaction to sin. We see his self-sacrifice made to wash sin away, and to bind up the wounds inflicted by them, and to heal us in the deepest recesses of our being. Turning back to face God and being willing to show God our sins and ask his forgiveness for them throws open all those dark corners in our souls and sweeps them clean.
You see, the ash reminds you that you will die, yes: that’s the hard solemn business of this day, and the season at hand. And this season set before us is a forty day trek upriver to seriously confront our sins, and through acts of self-examination, and self-denial, sacrifice, and generosity, repentance and confession, to root them out. But at the end of this journey, we will find a cross. And the cross reminds us that Jesus has already made this journey ahead of us, and has conquered sin and death, and has prepared the means of mercy and forgiveness, so that we may get about the real business, not of dying, but of living the life he sets before us.
