Ash Wednesday

                   A year ago when we started Lent together we really didn’t know what we were in store for.  I don’t know if we can say what is in store for us this year either.  I know what we want to plan for: return to in person worship, the calling of a new priest, a fresh start in your life together, the hope for a new normal that has promise for a better future.

 

                  Yet this moment right now is what we have for today as we embark once again on that Lenten journey from the ashes of our mortality and repentance today to the flame of new life kindled again at the Easter Vigil.  Just today wherever we are, however we are, here we are with our present reality.

 

                  The liturgy for Ash Wednesday helps us to stay with and look at our present reality, but not in a comfortable way, yet in a way that leads to healing for our sin sickness and reconciliation with God and with one another.  It’s the Litany of Penitence that is the real heart of this liturgy and gives us what we most need to make a good start for Lent.  I urge you all to turn to page 267 in your Book of Common Prayer, and pray that litany on your own.  Use it weekly or even daily as a helpful spiritual tool for observing a holy Lent.

 

                  The Litany is our confession.  The wording is in the first person plural – we – recognizing that we are all in this together.  We all have a common denominator – this sin sickness.  We all have been infected with the sin virus.  It’s something we have to admit is our own fault.  To move on to the healing of this sin virus we have to own that we have it. The vaccine is the Cross, and the good news is that inoculation came with baptism.  

 

                  Now sin is not just wrong actions, but also – and probably especially – what we have said, and even what we think to ourselves that no else can hear.  And it’s also both our sins of co-mission and sins of omission.

 

                  In the Litany Penitence we have to admit that our ability to sin pretty comprehensive; it covers the field from the first and greatest commandment to love God with all our heart and all our mind and all our strength to the second commandment that is like unto it loving our neighbor in the way we would love ourselves.

 

                  The litany reminds us of that part in the Lord’s prayer where we say forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us, and we must examine our conscience to see if we really have forgiven, lest we hold God to forgiving us according to the standards with which we actually forgive others.  The litany reminds us of how we ignore God, don’t listen, even don’t want to listen at times.  I think God must weep when we shun the Spirit speaking with us calling us to our better angels.

 

                  Do we need a list of sins to check off the boxes? This litany does that beautifully: lack of faith, pride, hypocrisy, impatience, self-indulgence, exploitation of others, self-anger, envy, attachment to material goods and comforts, dishonesty, negligence in our spiritual life and prayer, and the way we avoid giving words to our faith both in witness to others and, perhaps more importantly, in witness to ourselves.

 

                  There’s more on this check list: turning a blind eye to the needs and sufferings of others, indifference to injustice, conveniently ignoring the cruelty we may witness, jumping to conclusions that judge without merit, any kind of thought that demeans and is unloving towards one another, prejudice in all its many colors and its corollary, contempt for those different from us.

 

                  And finally, our sin goes beyond what we do to one another as a species, and includes our profligate consumption and pollution of the creation God had entrusted into our care, because that shows that we have no concern for who comes after us as long as we get what we want.

 

                  Yes, we are in a sorry state, and occasionally we have to take a good long look at that, admit the truth of our condition and ask for help.  And that is very good – to come to the place where we have to ask for help.  We have too much of that enculturation about rugged individualism that says, “I can do it on my own, thank you very much.” How did that get so deeply engrained into our psyches?  It’s like those of us who won’t stop and ask for directions when we can’t find where we want to go.

 

                  Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent is a good time to put on the virtue of humility, that quality of character that has given up on the illusion of self-sufficiency.  Humility can be comfortable with not being perfect, because perfection is a very lonely place to be.

 

                  So here we are again at the beginning of Lent, and all of this last year has seemed like one long Lent.  But I say to you, drop last year’s Lent. Leave everything that caused you so much grief and suffering this last year in the ashes of the cold, dead fire of last year.  Take those ashes and use them to remind yourself that they can be dead to you, and that you can rise, like the phoenix, from the ashes, and heed the Holy Spirit instead of grieving the Holy Spirit. Let Lent be a time to come clean with God and a time to draw closer to one another because we will be able to do that and when we do may we always remember what a privilege it is to be able to be together as friends, as family, as a faith community as followers of Jesus who died and rose for us and shows us how.