Ash Wednesday Sermon
Bishop Michael Pryse
Psychologists tell us that in order to be
healthy people we need to be able to mourn. It is healthy to give voice to our
grief. It is healthy to acknowledge the frailty of our human condition. This is
not news for Christians. In the beatitudes Jesus tells us that those who mourn
are blessed. We know that it is good for us to collectively acknowledge not
just the happy things of life, but also the sad. We know that it is healthy for
us to mourn together; to acknowledge, as one, that things are not as we would
wish them to be and not as God intends them to be.
Each fall I am thankful that we have a
national day of thanksgiving wherein the general public is given the
opportunity to officially acknowledge our need to offer thanks to God. I often
think that we could use more such secular holidays! Perhaps it would be wise to
institute another national holy-day, in this case, an official day for
repentance and mourning.
In the state of Israel, they publicly
observe the Jewish holy day Yom Kippur. Those who have experienced an Israeli
Yom Kippur tell me that a mystical silence settles over the whole nation.
Everything stops. Everything is disrupted as the nation engages in a collective
act of repentance and mourning that acknowledges all the injustice, hurt and
violence that we share as a people, both corporately and individually.
The church's liturgical calendar provides
us with similar points of reference. Our lives, too, are ordered by the cycles
of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, Lent and Holy Week, Easter through
Pentecost, and then by the long weeks of Ordinary Time. It's a wonderful gift
that provides us with a special lens through which we experience the rhythms
and movements of what constitutes the stuff of our everyday lives, even in the
midst of pandemic days where every day seems like yet another “blursday.”
In her book Things Seen and Unseen, Nora
Gallagher speaks of "living by a calendar that runs parallel to my
Day-Timer: a counterweight, one time set against another. The church calendar
calls into consciousness the existence of a world uninhabited by efficiency, a
world filled with the excessiveness of saints, ashes, smoke, and fire; it fills
my heart with both dread and hope. It tells of journeys and mysteries, things
'seen and unseen,' the world of the almost known.
Ash Wednesday is a day of “grieving for a
purpose” – a day of ritualized mourning that has a discernable and clear end in
sight. Today we grieve for the sake of healing. We mourn for the sake of
cleansing. As we heard in the great penitential Psalm 51 that we heard just moments
ago, we plead to be “washed and made clean.”
As a young pastor in rural Ontario, I was
surprised when a parishioner taught me that ashes are used in the making of
soap. Ashes, the church's preferred symbol of lament and mourning, can at the
same time be seen as a symbol of cleansing! The cross of ashes on Ash Wednesday
symbolizes both these actions.
In the sign of the cross, we recall the
gift of baptism and how through its waters we have died to sin and then risen
to new life in Christ. We recall both two actions; dying and rising and by
wearing ashes, we ritually step towards new life!
On Ash Wednesday we come face to face with
the harsh fact of our own mortality. The trumpet calls and we are marked with
the mantle of ashes; an ancient sign of sorrow. The pastor intones the harsh
reminder. "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return." With
sober urgency we are called to return to God. We begin our paschal pilgrimage –
a pilgrimage that in many ways feels that we’ve been on for almost a year - and
are summoned anew to the spiritual disciplines of prayer, almsgiving and
fasting.
It is a heavy day. It is a dark day -
definitely not a party day! But don't think for a moment that days like this
don't hold special gifts. Pray and watch! Who knows what miracles of life might
rise from these ashes!
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