Sermon for Ash Wednesday

admin | 26 February 2020

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.

I used to serve at a weekly Mass in the King’s College Chapel which was celebrated by a Swedish Lutheran priest and scholar using a modern Swedish Lutheran rite. It began with the words, “I, poor miserable sinner that I am”. The confession of sins is part and parcel of our confession of God in his abundant goodness and grace. It belongs to our awakening to God as the truth and goodness of our souls. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Jesus tells us. Where are we spiritually and ethically? “Return to the Lord, your God,” Joel exhorts us, “for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Abundant grace.

Lent is really all about our loves, about what defines us and directs us. What do we want? As the Quinquagesima Gospel reminds us, we want to know what God wants us to know. But that means confronting the darkness of our sin and folly through the increased awareness of God’s grace and goodness. Such is the light of his truth which illumines us even as it purges and cleanses us in order to bring us more closely, more nearly, more completely into the life and light of God. It happens through our contrition and confession which in turn throws us into the mercy of God.

Ash Wednesday confronts us with the abundant grace of God through which we know, in Paul’s wonderful words, the very contradiction of our being and knowing and so are turned back to Him from whom we have turned away. “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7.19).

To know such self-contradiction is already to know something more and something greater, namely, the abundant grace of God which enables the journey of our souls back to God. Such is the pilgrimage of love. It is with Christ and in Christ and by his grace moving in us abundantly. Lent is about our working with grace.