ASH WEDNESDAY 2009

The Revd Daniel Weir preached this sermon on Ash Wednesday, February 25, 2009.

"We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God." (2 Corinthians 5:20b)

Lent, at least in my mind and heart, is not really about how sinful we are. It is about how much God loves us. It is about letting God’s grace deal with the roadblocks between God’s love and us. We can call those roadblocks sin or failings or going the wrong way or missing the mark. It doesn’t matter much what we call them. They are what keep us and others from experiencing that transforming love.

Of course, the roadblocks that I allow to stand between me and God don’t only affect me. Some of them can do very serious harm to others. When I fail to honor the dignity of another person, not only does that harm my relationship with God – it injures the other person as well, sometimes seriously, and stands as a roadblock to any kind of grace-filled relationship that we might have.

We are reminded by the words of the Ash Wednesday Liturgy – “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” – reminded not so much of our own insignificance – because I think no one created in the image of God and bearing the likeness of Jesus is insignificant – not of our insignificance, but of our finitude, our mortality.

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a priest is asked when something happened and he replies, “Since when, my watch hath told me, toward my grave I have travell'd but two hours.” We are all travelling towards our graves. We don’t have unlimited time. There is, thus, an urgency about Lent. Of course, we are not to be frenzied in our Lenten disciplines, trying to cram every conceivable spiritual practice into these Forty Days. But we need to hear the invitation to a holy Lent in all its urgency and to get on with the business of having the roadblocks cleared away.

I say “having the roadblocks cleared away” and not “clearing away the roadblocks” because I know only too well that on my own I can’t do it. Only God can clear the path. It is, after all, what John Newton came to see, that it is Grace that teaches our hearts to fear, and Grace that relieves those fears, and Grace that will in the end bring us home, reconciled to God.

I want to end where I began, with God’s love, with two quotes, one from a 21^st century theologian, the other from an Englishwoman who died around 1417.

Douglas John Hall, in a book about the theology of the cross, wrote: “The theology of the cross…is…first of all a statement about God, and what it says about God is not that God thinks humankind so wretched that it deserves death and hell, but that God thinks humankind and the whole creation so good, so beautiful, so precious in its intention and its potentiality, that its actualization, its fulfillment, its redemption is worth dying for.”

Near the end of her life Dame Julian of Norwich wanted to know the meaning of the spiritual experiences that she had had. This is the answer that she was given: "Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end. Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord’s meaning.”

May each of us during this Lent discover, either for the first time or discover again, that Love is for each of us God's meaning.