Journey through Lent: The First Step
Today is Ash Wednesday in the English-speaking Anglican world. In Wales, this is Dydd Mercher y Lludw: the Wednesday of the Ashes.
After weeks of intermittant posts, my Lenten discipline this year, as it was last year, is a return to daily posts during these forty days.
This first post is the sermon I preached today.
+ In the Love of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
These are the words we hear every Ash Wednesday, and as I say them over each of you, and as they are said over me, I cannot help but reflect that between now and the next Ash Wednesday I may go down to the dust, or one of you may go down to the dust.
As I thought about what I might say this morning I remembered these words from The Commendation portion of the Church’s service of the Burial of Dead (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 499), words addressed to God:
“You only are immortal, the creator and maker of humankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
And then this Commendation concludes with these stunningly defiant words: “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”
We don’t often think of Lent as a time to be defiant. Usually we think of Lent as a time of self-examination, penitence, and the knowledge of our mortality. And these are important aspects of Lent.
But the goal of Ash Wednesday and Lent is Easter, and tonight we are beginning our journey from dust to resurrection.
Here’s how St. Paul describes the journey from dust to resurrection in his extraordinary chapter on resurrection in his letter to the Church in Corinth (1 Corinthians 15:45-49):
“The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam”― by which Paul means Jesus― “became a life-giving spirit. . . . The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man”― Jesus― “is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.”
So let us make a defiant Lent, defiant against all those things which try to bring us down to the dust, so that even at the grave we will be able to make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
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