Ash Wednesday – evening
Wednesday 6th March 2019
Ash Wednesday – evening
2 Corinthians 5. 20b-6.10
John 8. 1-11
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
Facing up to our mortality is not something that any of us finds easy. But this is the one day of the year when we simply cannot avoid the topic. One day we will all die. You could even say that life is a terminal condition!
Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return; turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ Jesus.
Those are the words I will be using as I inscribe a smudge of ash on the head or hand of those who come forward today. Two lines drawn with blackened ash, so that we can see and show and feel the mortal remains that we will all someday become. It is a reality that has been brought home to us all this year especially. For those of us in ministry, because this year we have had to officiate at far too many funerals. Almost as many in the first couple of months of 2019 as in the whole of 2018! Our community in the village has been hit particularly hard. And also because we are all aware that nationally, we have seen the tragedy of so many young lives cut short through needless violence. Sobering thoughts indeed.
In the light of such inescapable facts, the giving up of chocolate, alcohol, sugar, newspapers, social media etc., are acceptable, even welcome, but essentially trivial responses to Lent. But we also know that these Lenten disciplines can serve as a soft option from facing the ultimate issues that confront us. “Humankind cannot bear much reality” says TS Eliot, speaking of “one end, which is always present.” – which is usually taken to mean our own deaths. And this is all too evident in the way in which we privatize, sanitize and medicalize death in our western culture. We cannot bear too much reality – unless it is neatly packaged and made into TV entertainment of course!
But Christians, whose sign is the crucified and risen Lord, and who live under the cross, should of all people be willing at least to reckon with death, believing that death is the necessary dark face of coming alive.
The 40 days of Lent (Sundays are excluded as feast days!) represent the 40 years that the people of Israel spent wandering in the wilderness on the way to that land God had promised they would occupy and settle. It was to serve as a preparation, a training ground for them and then for Jesus himself, spending 40 days in his wilderness. Free of all external distraction – wild beasts notwithstanding – it is where the bare issues of existence can be confronted. No more playing at hide and seek with God. We are exposed. Laid bare.
We can of course respond that “we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Yes, but believing in a shared statement is not the same thing as living our lives as though we really mean it!
The thought of death – of ceasing to exist and no longer having any place in this world to call our own, can be every bit as frightening for religious people, Christians included, as for non-believers. St Paul himself felt the fear of death’s exposure even while he longed to be clothed in his ‘heavenly dwelling’. We can be frozen in fear, immobilised, by the terrifying inevitability of death, even if we have hopes for an eternal life to follow.
The answer is not to seek for grief support or counselling, or even to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death at a Grave Talk event or Death Cafe, – as useful as these may be. There is no self-help that will assist us to overcome our fears. Instead, Lent is the season when we return to God, conscious of our mortality, our nakedness, our regrets, our sin. Lent is the church’s annual stocktaking season, the time to overhaul our lives in God’s presence. To de-clutter and undergo the strenuous exercise of prayer, study and worship. It is our own voluntary wilderness experience.
Which is why I am increasingly un-impressed by the idea of giving up the things we like… because that makes it all about us, rather than all about God. About getting ready to journey with him towards the Cross and beyond. Paul urges us not to accept the grace of God in vain, to take it for granted, to treat it lightly, but to use it to engage seriously with the new life to which God is calling us.
Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return….
Lent, then, invites us to recognize that we are all defenceless before God but that the One who called us into being and made us in his image and loves us into a relationship with himself, would never abandon us to nothingness and futility. Enjoying God, we begin to experience a renewal of ourselves that gives us hope of a fuller life to come. May your Lent enable you to face the future; to face reality with hope and joy in your heart as you keep your eyes firmly on the day of resurrection to come. Amen