ash Wednesday

‘May you all have a miserable Lent ‘said the priest to the choir and servers in the vestry after the Ash Wednesday Eucharist? But even as he said it he had a twinkle in his eye.

For Lent isn’t really a time to become as miserable alas possible even if there is a popular expectation that it is. And you can see why people do associate Lent with misery. In the popular imagination Lent is the time for giving up all the things that you like. For abstaining from all the things that add a touch of sparkle to life – especially as by now we are all pretty fed up with the winter and the dull cold days of February. And so in people’s minds Lent is about giving up chocolate, or sugar in your tea. Or in the church mind it’s about long and introspective and perhaps even rather tedious Lenten devotional addresses with a great deal of introspection and soul- searching. Giving things up can however be very positive.

I heard about a Bishop who had the courage to impose a ban on all Diocesan Meetings during Lent and he tried to encourage the parishes to do the same. This was a positive thing to encourage the church in that diocese to be less busy and to concentrate more upon prayer and the spiritual life. Some years later that Bishop reigned from the Diocese and became a monk at Elmore Abbey – are we to infer that the experiment wasn’t too successful!

Despite the popular expectation around Lent, and despite the Purple Vestments and the hymns sung in a minor key yet in fact Lent should really be a joyful season at heart and not a bit miserable. How can I say that? Even the word Lent has a touch of joy about it for the word comes from an old Anglo Saxon word meaning to lengthen and so it refers to the lengthening of the days as the spring approaches. Far from being miserable Lent is about renewal and new life in our souls and in our lives. Just as the oncoming spring brings renewal and new life to nature. As the days lengthen and the sun rises in the sky with the approaching spring so Lent is meant to fill our souls and our lives with light from the Lord. Lent is a time of spiritual renewal. What do I mean by that? Well simply this. During Lent we try to spend a little more time at our prayers. We try to spend a little more time with our Bible. We try to make sure that we attend the Eucharist at least every Sunday and perhaps during the week as well. Yes we may spend some time taking a closer look at our lives so that we can amend our lives in penitence for those parts of our lives which hinder our following in the way of the Lord.

But what is the purpose of all that? The real purpose of prayer and the bible and the Eucharist and penitence is to bring us close to the Lord. To bring us closer to Jesus – and so to bring us closer to his love for us and his loving purpose for our lives. The purpose of Lent is to bring us closer to the Lord and his love for us so that he may renew our lives by his love. For when we pray we come intentionally closer to the God who is love we put ourselves in our prayer within the friendship of God and his love for us. When we read scripture we hear and absorb the gracious word of God’s love. At the Eucharist we feed on the banquet of God’s love and the Lord generously pours his love and his life into our very lives. When we are penitent we know Gods’ great love as he forgives us and restores our lives after the pattern of Jesus his beloved Son. And so truly Lent is far from a miserable time it is truly a time of great joy for it brings us closer to God who is our greatest joy. And especially so as the end of the Lenten journey is the glorious Easter of the Lord’s new and eternal life.

Ah yes! You may be saying, but what about those ashes? What about today Ash Wednesday? What about all those passages in the Bible which talk about sitting in sackcloth and ashes and wearing hair shirts and tearing one’s clothes as a sign of penitence and mortality? Well of course Ash Wednesday does take its name from all of that and from the ancient custom in the Church of marking all present in ash on the forehead with the sign of the cross. Ash is certainly a sign both of penitence and of human mortality.  It reminds us of our frailty, of our weakness and fragility in the face of sin and temptation. God knows of what we are made says Ps 103.  ‘He remembers that we are but dust’. To which Fr Stanton famously remarked: ‘And you can’t expect dust to be always up to the mark’. We are not up the mark. We fall short of the mark.  We sin and we need to acknowledge that. To receive the ash on our foreheads is a sign of all of that. It is a sign of our human mortality our human frailty and our human sinfulness and therefore of our need for penitence and renewal.

But remember the ash is marked on our forehead in the shape of the cross and in the sign of the cross. It is the cross of God’s love and forgiveness in the atoning death of his Son Our Lord Jesus Christ. In this sign of the cross in ash on the forehead of each one of us our frailty and our need and God’s love and God’s forgiveness meet. It is indeed a sign of penitence and sorrow for our sin but much more is it a sign of God’s loving power to save us to free us and to forgive us through the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ. May you therefore have a joyful Lent in the renewing power of the love of God and a glorious Easter.