Sermon for Ash Wednesday
“Make me a clean heart, O God, / and renew a right spirit within me”
And so it begins, the great ‘make-over’ which is the purpose of the pageant of Lent. Once again we are being challenged that life does not have to be just the ‘same old, same old’. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, the divine love which seeks the redemption of our human loves which are in such sad and sorry disarray.
And so it begins with dust and ashes recalling us to creation and repentance and challenging us about our hearts and minds. “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double-minded,” James exhorts us. “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” and “not upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Jesus tells us. Where are our hearts? What do we treasure? Somehow this is critical to the whole project of transformation captured in the great Penitential Psalm of Lent and this day we call Ash Wednesday.
What does it mean to ask God to “make me a clean heart” and to “renew a right spirit within me”? Only that we know ourselves to be incomplete, fallen, and wounded, unhappy and sad, miserable and, perhaps, even in despair, and yet somehow desiring something more in spite of ourselves.
The poet ,T.S. Eliot, begins his poem called Ash Wednesday with the sense of despair and uncertainty that calls into question the whole idea and purpose of any kind of journey that might make us clean and new, as if this journey, the journey of Lent, were far more folly than even the Epiphany journey of the magi. “’A cold coming we had of it,/ Just the worst time of the year/ For a journey, and such a long journey: / The ways deep and the weather sharp, / The very dead of winter’,” Eliot says, quoting a nativity sermon of Lancelot Andrewes, and imagining the thoughts of the magi-kings about the hardness and the uselessness of the journey, “with the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.” And yet the journey to Bethlehem concludes with the journey from Bethlehem whereby they are changed by virtue of what they had been given to see, “no longer at ease” in the ‘same old, same old’. Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and for us here in the Valley it might seem all folly, too, and, certainly, “just the worst time of the year/ For a journey”, “the ways deep” with mountains of snow, “the weather sharp” and cold, “the very dead of winter”.
