Sermon for Ash Wednesday
“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”
Psalm 51 is the quintessential penitential psalm. One of the seven penitential psalms, as they came to be known (psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143), it captures wonderfully the longing of the soul for God’s goodness out of the profound awareness of sin. “Against thee only have I sinned.” However exaggerated this may seem, it states the truth about all sin. All sin is against God. When we sin against one another and against ourselves, we sin against God and the goodness of his creation. It is in this sense that “against thee only have I sinned” is to be understood, much in the same way as we pray, “Almighty God of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding”. All sin is against God in the same way that all wisdom is of God. Every sin opposes the good that is God himself.
Such is the great insight of this penitential psalm which is front and centre on Ash Wednesday. Dust and ashes symbolise creation and redemption. Ashes are imposed on our foreheads, the seat of the rational will, as a sign of repentance. Repentance is our turning back to the one from whom we have turned away. The ashes are imposed with the words from Genesis: “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” We are recalled to the humble ground of our creation. We are the dust into whom God has breathed his spirit but whom we have spurned in the arrogance and presumption of all our sins. We are recalled to creation in the awareness of our separation from creation.
But as sinners who know that we are sinners means to embrace the disciplines of repentance, literally “to decline from sin and incline to virtue” (BCP, p. 614). That means the heartfelt turning back to God “by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” (BCP, p. 612). This is not a list from which we may pick and choose. It means all those things. Together they signify the deep desire of our souls for the truth of our being in the rejection of all the things which stand in the way of ourselves in union with God and in the acquisition of what properly belongs to our life with God. Lent concentrates wonderfully the three-fold nature of the pilgrimage of the soul: purgation, illumination, and union or perfection. These are all present to us in the programme of Lent and in its beginning on Ash Wednesday.
We begin in ashes but not so as to end in ashes. Our beginning is with God even as our end is in God. We seek his will and power and truth to make us new. We only live in this divine activity of being renewed. But to be renewed is to know that we are broken, not whole. “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit.” Nothing could be more counter-culture; no greater contrast possible between this and the therapy culture of emotional well-being. We are meant to feel troubled and to know our brokenness; “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou shalt not despise.” Contrition, confession, and satisfaction form the underlying spiritual patterns of our liturgy in relation to the three-fold pilgrimage of our souls to God.
