Sermon for Ash Wednesday by Susan N. Eaves, February17, 2010
One of the great joys and wonders of being a priest is the privilege of walking alongside human beings living life as it comes: Life with all its complexities, confusion, and wonder: Life with all its joys and tribulations. Lives full of mistakes and sin, but life reaching out to mean something, to have significance, to have mattered. As human beings we want our lives to mean something, to be cared about, to have value and very often we will look to a life of faith to support our search and our hope.
But today we are faced with a non-negotiable reality - we will die. And today, for this short time we will try not to run away from the fact that we are mortal. We are going to try to live into what it means to be finite and human as opposed to our normal stance - the delusion we are infinite and divine. And we are doing this because at some fundamental level we sense it is the only place to begin.
Today is the day we own our smallness before God. We will raise our faces and hear we are dust and to dust we shall return. We will be marked, as we were at our baptism, with the sign of the cross. And the sign is made with ash. For the ash and the cross are the sign of our death and our life, mortality and victory, sin and forgiveness, human loneliness and divine love. It is God's free gift if we will only take it. It is a hard gift to receive but it is the gift of life. It is the gift of life because it sets us free; a paradox, a mystery.
Paul, writing to the Corinthians a mere twenty years after Jesus' death on a cross, captures something of this mystery, " See, now is the acceptable time; see now is the day of salvation! ... as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger, by purity knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God. ... in honor, and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute."
Somewhere in between the disasters of suffering and the clinging to what is right and good Paul has found life eternal. He tells us, " (For) We are treated as imposters, and yet are true, as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see - we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything."
Paul proclaims that God's gift, God's promise of life is more than our human death. Life from God it is life over and above the power of the grave.
Some of you may remember a man called Terry Waite from the late eighties. A Christian lay man he was working on behalf of the church for the release of those kidnapped and held prisoner in Tehran and Libya. He was famed for the power of his peacemaking. It seemed he would win. Then he disappeared. He had been kidnapped himself - and he spent the next 1,763 days held hostage in Beirut. Four years of those days he spent in solitary confinement. It turned out that Terry Waite was an ordinary Christian after all. He experienced no great revelations of God. He merely endured what had befallen him as best he could. He resolved to strengthen his will by fasting, refusing all food for a week. Second he made three rules for himself no matter what was to come: no regrets, no false sentimentality, no self-pity.
By the third Christmas of his captivity he has managed to obtain a Bible and a Prayer Book (extraordinarily enough they were actually his own Bible and Prayer Book that turned up in a box of second hand books given to him by his guards). On discovering it is Christmas Eve, and clutching a blanket around his shoulders against the cold, he reflects it is three years since he has had a normal conversation with anyone, three years since he saw the sun, three years in chains. He begins to plan his celebration of Christmas.
"Tonight when I think it is near to midnight I will celebrate the Holy Communion ... I take one of the paper tissues I have been given and fold it into the shape of a cross. I put this safely in my Bible. The day passes slowly. I don't allow myself to think of those I love. .... At supper time the guard gives me a sandwich. I save a small piece of bread and put it in my Bible. ... I dare not leave the service too late or the guard will come in and tell me to extinguish my candle. After and hour or so I begin. I place the cross on the floor, put a little water into my plastic cup, and lay the bread on a clean tissue. It is very quiet. A few miles from where I now sit, Jesus was born on this holy night. ‘A man full of sorrow and acquainted with grief.' The candle flickers in the cold night air. I have no strong feelings of joy or sorrow tonight. I start to read the service quietly .... The gospel of John rings out: ‘And the light shines ... and we beheld his glory ... full of grace and truth.' I say the prayer of consecration, then sip the water and eat the bread. The candle has burnt out. I close the book, wrap myself in my bedding, lie down and sleep."
Our life in God is not about some by and by in the sky. It is about how we are in the here and now that matters. It's hard to stay in touch with that from day to day. It's hard to own we cannot know what is to come in then times ahead. We need grace to sign up for whatever God has to offer and live in the trust that all will be well.
After his release Terry Waite liked to remember the words written on the wall of a victim of Hitler's persecution. "I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love where feeling is not. I believe in God even if he is silent."
Come. It is time to let go of pretence. It is time for us to own up to who we are that we may become who God knows us to be. It is time for us to be human. It is time to know God as truly God. It is time for Jesus to be born again not far from here where we sit; time to open the door of our heart that he may come in.
Amen.