Loading...Priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor says that Ash Wednesday is the day when Christians get to attend their own funerals.
What she may mean is that some of what takes place at funerals offered for loved ones – recounting lives of service, devotion, and love – family and friends ask God to look on the departed with mercy as they stand before the great judgment seat of Christ.
To a point Brown Taylor is correct. This is indeed a day of reckoning; a day of judgment. On Ash Wednesday we place ourselves before the great judgment seat of Christ. We lay our lives open before God, and beseech the Lord’s boundless mercy.
Matthew writes, "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.”
There’s a degree to which we perform our piety so that it can be celebrated by others, because we fear that same piety is insufficient to be celebrated by God. That’s because we know our inadequacies. (jonmrichardson.com) We mask much of the evidence of our sinfulness by applying to our lives ample portions of civility, piety, good works, and even righteous indignation. Again, we hope to fool ourselves and others. Two out of three ain’t bad. And for a while all the sugar pills work. But then comes this annual observance, which we still try to mask the night before with pancakes or jambalaya!
Yet this particular Wednesday always dawns, and God be praised and thanked, we do not shirk from coming here for solace and strength, for pardon and renewal. Abundant Grace and Unconditional Love is lavishly showered upon us, giving us the courage and strength to engage in true repentance, truly turning our hearts, by emptying ourselves so that forgiveness can fill us and motivate us.
But the greatest truth of this day is not the depth of our wretchedness – but the amazing grace of God, who forgives and loves us completely even before we ask. Lent is all about Grace.
Perhaps no prayer of Archbishop Cranmer is more essentially Anglican than the Collect for Purity: Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid….
By grace, we come here tonight not to confess to God something God does not already know. We come to confess our sins to ourselves, to one another, and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth. But, especially, to ourselves.
Let us lay bare our hearts confident that our gracious God already knows what we have done and left undone.
- Let us place before the Lord all that weighs us down from loving God more completely, all that clouds our vision of the City of God , and all that dims our passion for justice and peace.
- Let us name plainly and be forgiven for all we have not done to love our neighbors with all our being, and resolve to right these wrongs as a sign of thanksgiving for absolution.
- May we know the deep, deep gratitude for chains of sin broken, and darkness dispelled forever through the Cross of Christ.
- As we are re-freshed, may our dry and dusty bones, and the bones of the Church, be brought to life by the very Spirit of God for the purpose of restoring all people to unity with God and one another.
Then, having tasted heaven’s sweetness in the Eucharistic Feast, let us wash our faces and anoint our heads, not dourly displaying sin’s old power, but shining forth with the greater divine promise of new hope and eternal life.
Ash Wednesday is a lot like our own funeral. To a point. However there is a pretty big difference: life can be different the day after Ash Wednesday.
Let this Lenten journey be a gift to us, to this cathedral congregation and, indeed to this diocese. Before us is forty days of preparation for the Paschal Feast. Yet, this journey must begin with honesty, turning and re-turning to God with a rendered heart. Let us take this mighty first step, that the joy of Easter may be rich and
sweet.
Lent is all about Grace. Beloved, I wish us all an amazing, life-changing, and community- changing, journey.
