Sermon for Ash Wednesday
Today, of all the days in the year, we reflect on what it means to be human.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes….the liturgy for this day calls us to this depth of reflection.
Why can’t we be the kind of people we want to be? Why do we keep falling short of the ideal we have set for ourselves? Why can’t we just change what we want to change about ourselves because we decide to do it, once and for all?
Why aren’t we, can’t we be, perfect in the first place??
The Apostle Paul’s anguished cry was this:
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do! I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
T. S. Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday, is split by this refrain from the liturgy of the church:
Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.
And it ends:
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks….
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
What does it mean to be human?
It means to struggle, to suffer, and to protest the struggle and the suffering. We all want to have a nice life—-why should anything hold us back from the nice life we would choose for ourselves?
We cry out to God. But if we cry out before we take a long and close look at who we are and how we live there will be no answer. Jesus says, first confront the truth about yourself, because where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will also be. Where have I placed my treasure? Where have you placed yours? The truth about ourselves is that we choose what we treasure and we become like what we worship.
If we worship wealth, we become slaves to what money can buy and how it measures the worth of things; if we worship power, we become ensnared in the ranking of persons as useful to us, or not; if we worship the beauty of the physical body, we become trapped in the mocking illusion that any of us will not age and die.
If we glorify anything less than God, the source of all life, the One to whom we return at the end of our mortal life, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end—-if we set our hearts on anything less than God our brokenness cannot begin to mend; our wounds cannot begin to heal.
We can never store away any lesser love. Nothing keeps; all fades as the flower of the field. Our life passes as a breath.
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 clothing. Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.
Why do we modern people resist the idea of penitence, the great theme of Lent? Do we think we always measure up? Surely we see our shortcomings, we know when we fail….but this is not a theme you will find in the popular culture, anywhere.
For me, the Christian faith is full of joy, and hope, and promise. It is a declaration of freedom from the bondage of self-love and self-worship. It is the response of a loving God who answers our cries with a yes! Who knows our needs before we name them and who covers them with his overwhelming grace. The Christian faith is dynamic, revolutionary, blindingly beautiful. It changed everything in the course of the history of the world, and still does.
Paul, who knew himself, knew how far short he fell of the kind of person he desperately wanted to be. His own intensely human suffering and struggle were subjected to a powerful conversion that struck him blind, transforming him from despair to hope in an episode that is still one of the most powerful of all human dramas ever recorded. He finished that famous chapter seven of Romans by this exclamation:
Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
What does it mean to be human?
It means to fail, and fail again, and again, and again, to suffer and to struggle.
What does it mean to be Christian?
It means to trust that Jesus the Christ has redeemed all our suffering, and that we are drawn closer to the heart of God by every experience of it.
Because the object of every life is not to avoid suffering, but to know where our treasure is, and that our treasure is safe, in the loving heart of God.
We cannot become fully human, we cannot fully live, we cannot understand the love of Christ unless we share the suffering of others. We cannot.
In penitence for all the times that we fail, and in adoration of the God who loves us beyond all imagining, let us give thanks even for this day when we are marked with a cross.
May your hearts be set on fire with love for the Lord,
the Lord of all life the Lord of life and death
the Lord who brings life out of death.
To whom we entrust our bodies and our souls,
this day and all days, forever,
Amen.
The Rev’d Dana English
The Church of St. John the Baptist Holland Road, London
February 26, 2020