“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.
What does he mean by authority and by temperance? “The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now”. Nothing could be more concise, nothing more direct. It reveals, of course, an entire way of understanding about revelation and about the Church; the authority of God’s Word revealed to us in Jesus Christ and the authority of the Church understood as the body of Christ, subject to and measured by that Divine Word.
We reject this at our peril. The point is very simple. Lent is a discipline of the Church but it is one which is grounded in the witness of the Scriptures. Herbert, in proper Anglican fashion, has connected them. “Give to thy Mother,” meaning the Church, “what thou wouldst allow/ To ev’ry Corporation,” he goes on to say. So true and so precise. Yet we are so easily led by the currents and the fads of the contemporary world and so reluctant to pay heed, let alone follow, the path of redemption proclaimed in the Scriptures and provided in the pattern of discipline and worship mandated by the Church.
What we reject is the authority of God in our lives. Skeptical and cynical, angry and in despair, quick to point the fingers of accusation and blame for all of the miseries of our lives on others, if not God, we do everything to avoid the clarifying truth of Lent. Yet, as the Exhortation in the Penitential Service (BCP, p. 611) suggests, Lent is about “self-examination and repentance, by prayer and fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word”. In the name of the Church, you are invited to the observance of a holy Lent. In the name of the Church, but in obedience to the collected wisdom of the Scriptures, themselves the Word of God towards us, you are invited to enter into Christ’s way of redeeming love.
We embrace it because it is commanded but in embracing Lent we make it our own. We go the way of redeeming love because we go with Christ. Lent is about nothing less and nothing more than the life of Christ in us.
Ash Wednesday reminds us of the inescapable and certain truth of the necessity of repentance and, paradoxically, of the deeper joy that is to be found in our living not for ourselves but for God in Christ. What do we treasure? What do we value? What has real worth in our hearts? The things which are of passing worth or the things of God? When we oppose temperance and authority, we become but the slaves of our passions, captive to the passing parade of endless distractions that take us “farther from God and closer to the dust”, as another poet, T. S. Eliot, puts it, the life “lost in living”, the wisdom “lost in knowledge”, the knowledge “lost in information”. His words are, I think, hauntingly prophetic.
Lent is our call to repentance and renewal. It recalls us to God and to the power of his life in us. Embrace it, and embrace it with joy!
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday, 2012