This
year, Ash Wednesday coincides with Valentine’s Day. The reminder of our
mortality gate-crashes the celebration of romantic love. A-week-and-a-half ago,
I helped two friends of mine renew their marriage vows, in the presence of all
their family and friends. I’ve been involved in services of thanksgiving for
marriage before, most often to mark the milestone of a Golden wedding
anniversary, and once when an older couple wanted to reaffirm their commitment
to one another at the point where, simply through age, he was moving into a
room in a nursing home while she remained in the family home. But this was
unlike any vow renewal I have ever been involved in. On their tenth wedding
anniversary, my friends renewed their vows in the context of living with cancer.
The
marriage vows are a remarkably honest summary of life, as experienced by all of
us—whether married, or never-married, divorced or widowed—with two people
committing to face this life together: ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for
poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do
part.’ Life and death are a package deal. As my friends sat side-by-side in
front of me, there was no hiding from what Jesus describes as life in all its
fullness—not simply the parts we like the look of. And I think that is what
made it the most holy of moments, and the greatest privilege of my ordained
ministry so far.
Our first reading
this evening comes from the book of Joel.
It is a book originally written for an agricultural community that frequently
experienced locust swarms, sometimes devastating swarms that turned the sky
black and devoured that year’s entire harvest in hours. They might go several
years between such total devastation, but it was a common enough experience for
them to need to find a way to address it. And by address it, I don’t mean find
a way to prevent it from happening. That was beyond their control; as, if we
are honest, and for all our scientific advances, much of our experience of life
is also out of our control. Indeed, being in control of our lives is an
illusion. By addressing the issue, I mean facing up to it, and finding a way of
living life to the full in the face of not being in control, in loss as much as
in bounty.
Joel points the
people back to God. God is the one who holds our lives, our circumstances, in
his hands. This God does not protect us from every circumstance; but in some
mysterious way, God is present to us and at work for us in all circumstances.
Even in the utter disorientation of a locust swarm, Joel points the people to
what is solid, what is beneath their feet: that God is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love; a God who relents from
punishing. That is, Joel brings us back to God’s character: one whose fundamental
disposition towards us is faithful, steadfast love. A love expressed through
compassion (mercy) and generosity (grace). A love that will confront whatever
is ultimately harmful to self and neighbour, not in the heat of the moment but
after due consideration and setting clear limits to its punitive sanction.
Those are the
terms in which God revealed the nature of his goodness to Moses (Exodus 34:6-7), and they are the
consistent testimony of the many and varied witnesses whose words are recorded
in the Old Testament. But Joel goes even further: if we, as a community, help
one another to press into the presence of this God in our midst in the
experience of disaster, we might even find that God leaves a blessing for us—a
grain offering and a drink offering. Note, we might find this: it is not a matter of finding the magic words with
which we might control God. Nonetheless, it is in keeping with this God that he
may turn even disaster into the opportunity to bless. Now, the grain-offering
and the drink-offering were part of the daily practice of morning and evening
prayer for the Israelites since the time of the exodus (Exodus 29:38-46). They were part of the daily reminder that the God
who had rescued them from disaster in the past still dwelt among them, still
meet with them, as a community. The people were to bring these things. But Joel
suggests that in the context of devastation by locust—that is, when the people
cannot uphold their part—God himself might provide what they are unable to
bring.
It should not
pass us by that tonight we gather around a grain-offering and a drink-offering,
the bread and the wine set on this table in our midst, against the backdrop of
various personal and communal disasters. Of secondary cancer moving through our
body, or dementia stripping away our memories, or having to seek asylum in a foreign and often unwelcoming land, or the prospect of the loss of hundreds
of thousands of jobs in the wake of Brexit.
Writing to a
different community in a different time, Paul says the same thing: be
reconciled to God. Now is the time! He goes on to list some of the ways in
which he and his companions have been able to testify to God’s grace, mercy,
and steadfast love in the most awful of circumstances. For insisting on this
truth, they have been treated as imposters. For owning life in all its fulness,
for being honest about its trials and yet hopeful even in them, they are
shunned by those who do not want to face reality. But in loss, they have found
bounty; in grief, they have found joy—neither one cancelling the other out, but
union with God being experienced in every season.
And finally, in
our Gospel reading, we are invited to find ourselves standing alone before
Jesus, our accusers having fallen back. Our accusers, of course, often include
our own inner voices of condemnation, our own projection of the voices of those
we are connected to. But the face of this gracious and merciful God of
steadfast love, whose justified anger at our sin against our neighbour and our
neighbours’ sin against us moves at a slow pace, is revealed in a man crouching
down to write in the dust, words the dust will not record, will not hold
against us—before straightening up to ask, who is left to condemn you? ‘Neither
do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’ And that is
just what we, animated dust, the walking dead, need. When the world crashes
down around us, we may yet know provision, liberation, empowering.
So tonight, we
come to receive the imposition of ashes, the visible reminder that we are dust
and to dust we shall return. And to receive bread and wine, the visible
expression—a reminder, yes, but more than just a reminder; these elements are
efficacious—of the gift of God’s presence in our midst.
And today we
enter once again into the season of Lent, perhaps for the first time, perhaps
for the last. Forty days to assemble-together: the old and the young; those who
have been in this place many times, and those for whom it is unprecedented and
frightening. That together we might go deeper into mystery, more fully into
life. To that end, I do not commend a programme of activity to you this Lent,
but invite you to come together in this place, as often as practicable, to sit
in prayerful silence, and so to enter-into the goodness of God...
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