Sermon for Ash Wednesday
God bestoweth abundant grace
We begin with ashes for that is where we are or rather the way in which we awaken to ourselves as apart from God. Our self-consciousness in the biblical view begins with our separation, our self-will opposed and in denial of the will of God. “Did God say?” we ask with the serpent in Eden, knowing full well what God said to the Adam, to our humanity.
Ashes symbolize the profound awareness of ourselves as sinners. They are a symbol of repentance, a sign of our acknowledgment of ourselves as sinners, the realization that things are not as they should be or as we would like them to be about ourselves. This is then a kind of metanoia, a way of bringing ourselves to mind, and so to self-awareness. But this belongs to what the Epistle of James rightly calls God’s “abundant grace.” In bringing ourselves to mind, we are being returned to God.
The point is fairly straightforward. We can really only know ourselves as sinners through the prior awareness of the goodness of God. Sin and evil are privatory; they are privations of the prior goodness and grace of God. Thus it is by grace and only by grace that we can know ourselves as sinners. Paradoxically, this is the good news, the gospel itself, if you will. We can only know ourselves as sinners through having contradicted what we know (in some sense or other) as the good. Sin, in other words, presupposes God’s grace and goodness. To confess our sins is to confess the goodness of God which we have negated, denied, and ignored.
Ash Wednesday recalls us to the dust of creation and to the ashes of repentance. It is all about our turning back to God from whom in myriad ways we have turned away in our folly and sinfulness. To know this is the abundant grace of God bestowed upon each of us in our acknowledgement of our sinfulness. It is not just a one off, a penitential moment to get over and done with. It is a regular and recurring feature of our liturgy in the constant pattern of contrition, confession, and satisfaction that belong to the pilgrim ways of the soul through illumination, purgation, and union.
