Sermon for Ash Wednesday
Wednesday 1st March 2017
Joel 2. 1-2, 12-17
John 8.2-11
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
We mark the beginning of Lent with ashes and with a certain sense of foreboding.
Attention is shifting towards Easter – or at least to the events of Holy Week, with their inevitable journey towards death on a cross… And we begin the season of Lent with another cross, this time made of ash.
And the ash comes from the destruction of Palm leaves and crosses from previous years. As I said this morning both here and in school, Shrove Tuesday is marked in Vicarages the length and breadth of the land not by the smell of pancakes cooking but the much less appetising smell of old palm crosses burning – which is a lot less easy than you might imagine! And Social Media is full of vicars asking each other for the best method for reducing the things to the ash that we know we need today! One of the many things they never teach you at Theological College!
And as we all know, Lent is the time to give up the things you like and be totally miserable for 40 days – because obviously God only likes human beings when they are feeling totally miserable and down in the dumps…
Except I actually think that is total rubbish.
I think God much prefers us to be happy and cheerful and joyful when we come to worship him – when we come to spend time with him. – after all, who wants a load of visitors who are depressed!??
So why the ash? Why the long faces?
Well ash has a fine and very very old biblical provenance.
Throughout the Old Testament you will find instances of human beings donning sackcloth and ashes to show God and each other just how very sorry they are for the wrong things they have been doing. And Lent is certainly a time for us to take a long hard look at ourselves and our lifestyles and ask if there is anything we could do to make them less selfish and more life enhancing for those with whom we come into contact. So the ash fulfils various functions…
It helps to remind us all of our mortality. We are born, we have a few short years of active life on this earth and then we die. God symbolically creates human beings from the soil- the adamma, and when we are buried or cremated we return to the earth in the form of dust. Extract all the water and we are not much more than a pile of elements, – dust on the wind.
But the ash also marks us as ‘miserable offenders’ to quote the old prayer book. Which does not mean we are sad and grumpy, but actually means that we are in need of pity and compassion – especially in need of God’s pity and compassion and mercy. That is a rather different way of looking at it – and knowing as we do the extraordinary lengths that God in Christ is prepared to go to in order to bring us salvation – death on a cross, followed by resurrection – there is every reason for us to be not miserable, but joyful as we contemplate the Lenten season stretching out before us. I do not imagine that the woman in our Gospel reading for tonight left Jesus feeling sad and miserable. Having endured the fear of death and the shame of being paraded before all those elders and the others gathered to hear Jesus teach, she must have felt huge relief and even exhilaration that she had survived, – she was saved! But that doesn’t mean that she was unscathed or got away with everything wrong she had done. She is told to go and sin no more. And God lays the same command on us too. We are to leave here feeling that our inner compass has been re-calibrated – we have turned to the light and the love of Christ.
So we wear our crosses of ash today to remind us that life is all too short – we should make the most of them, and that we are deeply and unconditionally loved by God. And that should be something to smile about – not to feel all sad and miserable!
I am hoping to use Lent this year to do a bit of de-cluttering of my
wardrobe and other cupboards. Each day to put at least one item in a bag to go eventually either to a charity shop or the dump. And as I do so, I shall be de-cluttering metaphorically too – praying for a mind calm and clear sighted and more able to focus on God’s message to me. How many of us need some de-cluttering to happen in our lives? To clear away the things that get in the way – that , if we are not careful, get in the way between us and God.
Forty days is a useful time-span. Long enough to do something meaningful, but not so long that you lose sight of the end. And at the End we have the prospect of a glorious Easter!