Sermon for Ash Wednesday
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”
Where are our hearts? Ash Wednesday is the stark reminder that our hearts are in disarray, in darkness and confusion, in sin and folly. We don’t like to hear this perhaps and yet the message of Ash Wednesday is the strength and comfort of the Christian Gospel. It convicts us, to be sure, but only so as to set us on the path of redemption.
Year in and year out, it seems. The path is at once easy and hard, the ways at once difficult and yet altogether possible. It is about the grace of Christ in us and through us in the course of our daily lives.
Welcome deare feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie,
But is compos’d of passion.
Wise words from the poet of the Anglican spiritual way, George Herbert. He has put his finger on the challenge of Lent. It is to be welcomed, even loved. Why? Because of the importance of temperance – one of the four cardinal virtues and the one which speaks directly to the matter of self-control – and because of the necessity of authority. As he rightly intuits, it is hard to imagine which we reject the most, the idea of temperance in the culture of self-indulgence, or the idea of authority in the culture of the tyranny of our own subjectivity; in short, “you are not the boss of me!” It is, I fear, the underlying mantra of the culture of arrested adolescence. Lent provides a counter to these disorders and disasters, a welcome counter, as Herbert suggests.
