Heart Smart Spiritual Exercises and a Holy Lent: an Homily for Ash Wednesday with reference to Joel 2, 2 Corinthians 6 and Matthew 6

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Mt 6:21) 

Tonight, is our annual invitation to engage in a little spiritual cardiac health assessment. Interesting that this should be the day before the day of hearts, Valentine’s Day.  

Tonight, if we so choose, we begin a forty day spiritual cardiac stress test using some spiritual exercises or disciplines, to see how well our spiritual hearts are working and how efficient they are. We’ll be watching for signs of spiritual arrhythmia and disease. We’ll be checking where our hearts are, and making sure they're where we think they are, where we, and The Lord, would like them to be. This is an important process, because, as we’ve just heard, where our hearts are, our true treasure is to be found. 

I said spiritual cardiac stress test. If you think stress is too strong a word and I’m being over dramatic, consider the language in Holy Scripture this evening. 

Joel’s words are urgent (2:1-2): 

Sound the alarm! …the day of the LORD is coming, it is near—a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.

And Paul writes of (2 Cor 6:4-5): 

afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger, dishonour and ill repute (v8), dying and punished (v9), sorrowful, poor and having nothing (v10). 

Even Jesus is on about dismal hypocrites with disfigured faces (Mt 6:16), moths and rust that consume, thieves that break in and steal (Mt 6:20). 

Serious, and when we have live through such things, stressful, stuff. How do we get through life when it’s like that? 

By leading with our hearts. "Return to me with all your heart," writes Joel, "with fasting, with weeping and with mourning. Rend you hearts." (Joel 2:12-13) 

Here is the prescription for spiritual cardiac health and a Holy Lent. 

We are about to be invited, in the Name of The Lord, to observe a holy Lent by self-examination, penitence, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and by reading and meditating on the word of God. (BAS 282)

These are absolutely trustworthy and effective heart-smart spiritual exercises, guaranteed to fight off spiritual arrhythmia, hardening of the arteries, or any other spiritual heart disease.  

Why is this so important? Because of Jesus who’s heart on earth now beats in his body, the Church. Do these faithfully and your heart will come to beat in time with his. When that happens, we find real, everlasting, abundant life giving, grace filled treasure and our heart’s true home. 

Being Real on Ash Wednesday

A couple of thought provoking pieces on observing Ash Wednesday…

As an Antidote to "Over-Realized Eschatology"

Richard Beck, over at his always provocative Experimental Theology:

I'm a Winter Christian which means that lament is a pretty big part of my spiritual experience. But by and large the general tone of worship in evangelical culture tends to privilege the Summer Christian experience of unmitigated praise. The theology that informs this preference is often triumphalistic and symptomatic of what is called an over-realized eschatology. What is an over-realized eschatology? It's rushing ahead to heaven, victory, happiness and Easter. A refusal to sit with the Fall, brokenness, lament and Good Friday.

All here. 

Ashless Anglicanism? 

In the you-learn-something-new-every-day department: 

In the sixteenth century the English Reformers abolished the imposition of ashes on the heads of parishioners on Ash Wednesday due to the superstitious beliefs that had become associated with the practice. The practice was too closely tied the Medieval doctrines of attrition, auricular confession, contrition, priestly absolution, and penance.

The imposition of ashes was not reintroduced into the Church of England and her daughter churches until the nineteenth century and then by the Ritualists. It was one of the errors in doctrine, practice, and ritual that the Romeward Movement revived to make the Anglican Church more like the Roman Catholic Church in the hopes that they would help to affect a reunion between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. 

And here I thought it had been an ancient Anglican thing. Read the rest in An Ashless Ash Wednesday for Anglicans here. 

* * * 

All of which reminds me of something Peter Kreeft wrote, I believe it was in Fundamentals of the Faith, "Hell is where you make an eternal ash of yourself." 

* * *

Here's a good prayer to pray after all that: the Church of England version of the Collect for Ash Wednesday. 

Almighty and everlasting God,
you hate nothing that you have made
and forgive the sins of all those who are penitent:
create and make in us new and contrite hearts
that we, worthily lamenting our sins
and acknowledging our wretchedness,
may receive from you, the God of all mercy,
perfect remission and forgiveness;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. 

Amen. With or without ashes. 

Ecumenical Ash Wednesday at StB

BAS straight up, as usual. Pointed and evocative, as was Padre Mike's sermon: 

For all its strangeness, there is a truthfulness about Ash Wednesday. That honesty is the reason, I think, that the culture avoids Lent like the plague. Christmas and Easter can be co-copted, encrusted in layers of sentimental goo and conscripted to serve profit and self-gratification, but not this day and season. 

The culture doesn't know what to do with Ash Wednesday and Lent. It has no purchase on these ideas, can find no way in to turn and exploit them, and so leaves them to the faithful.

Read it all here.

Ash Wednesday

We begin our journey to Easter with the sign of ashes, an ancient sign, speaking of the frailty and uncertainty of human life, and marking the penitence of the community as a whole.  

I invite you, in the name of the Lord, to observe a holy Lent by 

• self-examination

• penitence

• prayer

• fasting

• almsgiving

• reading and meditating on the Word of God (The Book of Alternative Services, p281

The Collect for Ash Wednesday

Almighty and everlasting God,
you hate nothing that you have made
and forgive the sins of all those who are penitent:
create and make in us new and contrite hearts
that we, worthily lamenting our sins
and acknowledging our wretchedness,
may receive from you, the God of all mercy,
perfect remission and forgiveness;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Book of Common Prayer calls the faithful to pray this every day in Lent after the Collect appointed for the day until Holy Week.

Why Observe Ash Wednesday and Lent?


Good thoughts from Glen Packiam over at CHURCHLEADERS.COM here (H/T Andy Read on Facebook):

The bottom line is: no, you don't need to care about the Church Calendar. You don't have to celebrate Lent or participate in Ash Wednesday.

These are not requirements or laws. But then again, you don't need to have a date night with your wife; you don't need to have family vacations. But rhythms and routines are ways of reinforcing a desire. It's because I want to nurture my relationship with my wife that we have date nights; it's because I want our family to be connected that we take vacations together, and have family traditions. In the same way, it's because I want to nurture my relationship with Christ and because I want to be connected to the Body of Christ that I am embrace the "family traditions" of the liturgical year. 

So, the liturgical year is not a requirement, but neither are they "empty rituals." They are sacred rhythms, routines that reinforce our desire to follow Christ and become like Him.

Reinforcing Our Desire: Ash Wednesday as Part of Our Sacred Rhythm

We worship this evening at 7pm with our sisters and brothers from Unity Lutheran, All Saints and St Ambrose. We will receive the ancient Sign of Ashes and enjoy Holy Communion. The preachers will be Canadian Forces Padre Mike Peterson.

 

Ash Wednesday

Those of us who go to Ash Wednesday worship and imposition of ashes will be invited to

observe a holy Lent by self-examination, penitence, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and by reading and meditating on the word of God.

It is a time to re-evaluate our spiritual health; to follow Jesus more closely.

St Augustine adds what could be a Lenten charge to go along with the invitation above:

Remember, Christian Soul, that thou hast this day and every day of they life: God to glorify. Jesus to imitate. A soul to save. A body to mortify. Sins to repent of. Virtues to acquire. Hell to avoid. Heaven to gain. Eternity to prepare for. Time to profit by. Neighbours to edify. The world to despise. Devils to combat. Passions to subdue. Death, perhaps, to suffer. Judgement to undergo.

May your Lent be holy and rich.