Ash Wednesday Sermon |
God created through love and for love. [Simone Weil]
O blessed day! At a time when the folly of trying to act out perpetual Carnival with no ensuing Lent has been exposed; here is the beginning of the sad but beautiful springtime of the Church’s year; inspiring us to rediscover the rhythms which are integral to a spiritually attuned life and which open the door to life in all its fullness.
The submerging of the rhythms of the day, the week and the year which connect us to the other parts of the creation, to the sun and the moon and the seasons, by a hectic tide of getting and spending leaves us dangerously exposed to spiritual exhaustion. Paradoxically as each moment is hyped in a life which lacks light and shade, feast and fast as part of a coherent pattern embracing the whole year, then everything is reduced to a dull average. In this state we are vulnerable to the dejection which swept over Hamlet when he exclaimed, “how stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the usages of this world”.
Ash Wednesday invites us to resist the pressure of the passing moment, to acknowledge those parts of our life which have become stale and to open ourselves to the gift which Christ longs to impart, newness of life, the gift of the Easter or Resurrection life.
If we live as solitary individuals, bent on acquiring happiness by a hectic whirl of activity; consuming more and more things and possessing more and more people, then there may come a point when we recognise with ‘May’, a character in T S Eliot’s play “Family Reunion” that:
"It takes so many years To learn that one is dead."
The vision of death in life, the realisation that if we do not live in the self-giving love of God then we are counted as dead before Him, is the spur for a renewed passion for life in all its fullness.
The gospel which shows us both adultery and loveless religion helps us to see how we should go about our work.
Jesus comes into the Temple very early in the morning. It might be here in St Paul’s. The people come to him and then the religious professionals, the party of the pious enter, we can imagine with a great surge of indignation. A woman had been caught in the very act of adultery. She should be stoned. Moses says so in the law. What do you say?
It is a trap, of course, to show Jesus up as someone with no respect for the Law of Moses. You can feel the indignation. Standards slipping everywhere and this so-called teacher undermining the traditions of the faith.
What does Jesus do? He stoops, and with his finger writes upon the ground.
It is easy to get on a treadmill of over consumption, overwork, gusts of anger and diminishing awareness. There are warning signs in our irritation within, evidence that there are unacknowledged shadows we are covering up. We relieve the pressure by projecting these shadows onto other people. We do not know what we are doing, but if you have ever felt a surge of dislike for someone you have only just met, hang onto that feeling, for you have been given a precious indication of what you are covering up inside yourself. We all dislike most in others what we are prone to ourselves.
Jesus detaches himself from the confrontation. He stoops rather than bristles and does not enter into argument. He doodles with his finger upon the earth. Perhaps he was acting out the saying of the Prophet Jeremiah, “Those who turn away from you shall be written upon the earth for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.” – Life in all its fullness. [XVII, 13]
The message here is not that we should opt out of confrontations which may be sometimes necessary, but that if we want to see clearly and engage profoundly there are times when we must stoop and refrain. You disengage to clarify and connect at depth.
What does this mean for us? Awareness is diminished by over-stimulation. Our Lenten fasting should not be some token abstinence from sweeties but a conscious effort to reduce stimulation and over consumption to stoop to clarify and connect. We should cut both the carbohydrate and cut the carbon.
But if we wish to emancipate ourselves from the hectic hype and pressure of the passing moment then it may be more important to refrain from switching on the Today programme first thing in the morning than renouncing chocolate. But do not neglect the reality that what we eat and drink does have a bearing on our awareness and that we often over-indulge because we are unhappy and need to confront that unhappiness.
Death in life is living as an individual who tries to acquire happiness by possessing more and more things and people. You can even possess a loveless religion. We stoop and fast to open ourselves up to the feast of life to which God invites those who know their need of Him.
Our deepest, truest nature as human beings is as persons who are unique and precious but who have been created for unpossessive love and for whom fullness of life comes when we go beyond ourselves to accept the searing and transforming love of God as we see Him in Jesus Christ and as He gives Himself to us in this holy communion.
God creates and transforms through love and for love.
