Sermon: Ash Wednesday 2014

Preacher:

Date:

Wednesday 5th March 2014

Service:

Eucharist

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In nomine Patris…

Shortly we will be invited to receive on our heads the sign of the cross marked out in ash. Those ashes will connect us to our creation, our mortality, and will express the limitations of our neuroses, anxieties and efforts when they are evacuated of God’s grace.

The target of this evening’s gospel reading is the sense that outward acts of piety and flamboyant or melodramatic displays can substitute the movement of the heart towards God our maker and our redeemer. It targets each one of us when we are the religious person who wants to be seen and recognised for his or her beneficence or lavish shows. The only reward that comes from that sort of thing is the buzz of doing it, not the growth in grace and love that is revealed quietly and gently, in unseen and undetectable ways of fasting, prayer and acts of service.

The first marking of the cross upon each of us was at baptism. There a mark was placed upon you, invisible yet indelible. Your name was uttered - just as God names the creatures and elements of his creation, bringing them and us into being - ‘N, Christ claims you for his own, receive the sign of the cross’. You receive personally, but not privately, that sign of the cross that forever associates you with the self-giving love - in passion, death and resurrection - of Jesus the Christ.

The signing of the cross is public but personal. It can only be borne by you, for you. It holds you to account, but personally assures you of God’s love for you. After the first murder of Abel, his killer Cain was marked out by God. This mark wasn’t so people could target him, but was to protect him. It said even to the murderer Cain, ‘I love you; I do not want your life to be snuffed out’.

The mark of the cross tonight gives us the dignity of being called sinners. That title ‘sinner’ means not that God hates us, but that God loves us, that we are in relationship with him and when we forget him he never forgets us. The sign of the cross in ash tells us that the first mark that God made upon us remains, albeit marred and sullied by our wilfulness and wandering. Not only does he not want our lives snuffed out, he wills us, in St Paul’s words, to ‘take hold of the life that really is life’ (1 Timothy 6.19)

That is where the sign of the cross in ash brings us face to face with our creation from the dust of the earth. We only receive life in all its fullness by the breathing of God’s Holy Spirit into our nostrils.

That is where the sign of the cross in ash brings us face to face with our mortality as, when we die, our bodies return to the dust of the earth. We are finite beings.

That is where the sign of the cross in ash brings us face to face with the limitations of our own egos and that all that sustains us fundamentally is God’s grace. We are empty vessels without his grace.

The marking of the cross in ash is a profoundly sensual action: the slight grating feeling of ash being marked on your forehead; the tingling sensation of the ash as it dries out, the dirty mark it leaves on you. The ash is a pointer and connector to the way in which Jesus is in touch with us both in our glory and our indignities.

Isn’t strange that on Ash Wednesday I can see the cross in ash that is on your head, but I can’t see it on my own, but you can. Perhaps our Ash Wednesday summons is to see first the ash of our creation, mortality and limitations before those of others, and then recognise it in others. That is where we begin our journey of repentance, as we go, in Lent, on a pilgrimage of prayer and self-discipline so that we grow in God’s grace and learn to be his people once again: ‘I will be your God and you will be my people’ (Jeremiah 30.22).

We make our mark in Lent not to our glory, but to God’s. We do it through fasting, prayer and acts of service, by being brought back to God’s generous heart, through study of God’s holy word, as he opens our eyes to his presence in the world and frees our hands to welcome others into the radiant splendour of his love.

The sign of the cross in ash awaits its glorious transformation in the triumph of the cross at Easter, where we see the Crucified One as the Lord of Glory.

Lord Jesus Christ come make your mark upon us,

that by your Holy Spirit we might return

to the loving heart of the Father,

our maker and our redeemer,

and be brought to a glorious Eastertide

when in the mark of your glorious wounds

we find our hope, our healing and our salvation.

Amen.