Loading...Today is Ash Wednesday. The beginning of the season of Lent. Our time of preparation for the death of Jesus on the cross and a time of anticipation for his resurrection on Easter.
When I’m done giving this sermon, we will all be invited to observe a Holy Lent, as found in our Book of Common Prayer. We are reminded that in these weeks, people who have never known the redeeming love of God, those who have been separated from the community of faith because of “notorious sins,” are offered the opportunity to turn their lives toward God, ask forgiveness, and hear a message from the community that they are pardoned and, through the clergy, they are absolved of their sins, according to the promises made by Jesus.
While we may not consider ourselves to be in this category of individuals because we are actively involved in our faith community, or in showing the love of Jesus to those we meet, or in giving of our time, talents, and treasures to fulfill the mission and ministry of God, or doing all these things, this invitation to a Holy Lent goes on. It invites us to spend some time becoming more self-aware of our own failings and mistakes, and to come to confession, knowing that even with the best of intentions, we will always have moments of missteps and of causing unintentional harm to others.
If you are like me, it is in examining my failings that I find myself reliving them, longing for a different outcome, hoping beyond hope that in this reliving, I can see what I need to change, or what I have changed to hopefully not repeat the behavior or attitude. It requires me to ask for forgiveness, most often from myself, sometimes from others, always from God. It is in repentance—in the act of changing, or of turning around, where true healing can begin.
This season of Lent provides us time to reflect in ways that lead to transformation that is only possible with God’s help.
Our invitation this evening suggests that self-examination and repentance can happen when we pray, fast, and deny ourselves. Those things can, perhaps more easily occur when we, as the invitation suggests, include reading and meditating on scripture.
We hear from Jesus what is expected when seeking to be transformed by God. What I’m hoping we hear in Jesus’s sermon in tonight’s Gospel is that all these things we are invited to do in these weeks of Lent, are to be done in private. We don’t need to announce what we are “giving up” for Lent. We don’t need to announce how we’ve given something to someone in need. We don’t need to publicly pray or profess our faith. We certainly don’t need to look like we are suffering when we choose to fast from food.
What Jesus does say is that when we do all these things in the sight of God, with the help of God, we will find our reward.
It seems to me that what Jesus is saying and what the list of behaviors and practices in our invitation to a holy Lent are all designed to do is help us commit to devoting time and energy and to intentionally and deliberately make room in our lives, for God.
We are being invited to put a practice in place that strengthens our relationship with our Holy One, our Creator, our God. And studies show that it takes about 30 days to create a long-term habit. Lent, my friends, gives us 40 days.
What would happen if you gave up a behavior or habit that takes up valuable time, and instead used it for reading and meditating on scripture? Or in prayer, helping someone in need, or getting rid of clutter that fills your rooms or your mind?
The season of Lent is not designed to punish or withhold. It is, rather, a time to better understand what is important to create a more fulfilling, faithful life. It is a time to explore or recognize how the Holy Spirit moves in and around you, guiding you to be a devoted Jesus Follower.
What I find interesting is that we take this beginning of Lent and have a day where we literally mark our foreheads announcing our piety before others, which seems to go against everything we just heard from Jesus. So, let’s unpack that a bit.
Through this worship service, we are all being invited into the season, to personally evaluate the ways we live out our relationship with the Holy Trinity. And we know that our heartbeats and breaths are limited. We only have so much time to understand who we are to God and who God is to us.
Remembering that we will not live forever, we take this time to acknowledge our humanity. To acknowledge that no matter how we strive to follow the teachings of Jesus, we cannot do or be everything to everyone. So, between the dashes of our birthdate and our death date, we must live with the knowledge that we will die. In this time of Lent, we are invited to examine just how we live in that dash.
This worship service, perhaps, gives us an annual wake-up call to our mortality. It is our annual acknowledgement that we were formed from creation and that our bodies will return to creation. We belong to creation…to our Creator, from beginning to end.
The ashes we are about to have placed on our foreheads are our reminder of this. We do this in community maybe to be held accountable to the promises we make each time we renew our baptismal covenant. To remember that we are not faithful alone. To know that we need one another to be the body of Christ in the world.
This is a day when we can make a commitment to God that we are willing to be changed every day we live.
In our lesson from Joel, I find what many may think Lent is about: warnings of alarms and trembling, of darkness and gloom. But that’s not all that I find there. I also find hope. Hope that ultimately, we can live through the hard times as long as we go to God, who will not abandon us in our suffering. Lent gives us a chance to think about how we go to (or perhaps return to) God.
Let me read from Joel again:
Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
rend your hearts
[tear open your hearts, open your hearts to make room for God again and again… rend your hearts]
and not your clothing.
Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, [YES!]
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,
and relents from punishing. [Thanks be to God!]
Tonight we accept ashes on our foreheads. We welcome the invitation to a holy Lent as an opportunity to deepen our relationship with God. We make room for transformation with the hope of redemption, reconciliation, and restoration. And we hear promises about what it means to be in relationship with God in the words from Psalm 103, verses 11 to 14:
11 For as the heavens are high above the earth, *
so is his mercy great upon those who fear him.
12 As far as the east is from the west, *
so far has he removed our sins from us. [Imagine that!]
13 As a father cares for his children, *
so does the Lord care for those who fear him.
14 For he himself knows whereof we are made; *
he remembers that we are but dust.
In other words, God loves you. God knows your heart, sees your efforts, and recognizes your humanity. And God desires that each of us commit to loving God in return through intentionally making changes in our lives that make more room for what is Holy.
That, I believe, is what Lent is all about.
Amen.
