Ash Wednesday, 25^th February 2009.

Mt 6: 1-6, 16-21

Can we start again?

In Joel, prophesying that the day of the Lord is coming, is close at hand, we have the words, ‘return to me with all your heart, with fasting, and weeping and mourning’ rend your hearts and not your garments.

To the Jew there were three great mainstays of religious life, charity, prayer, and fasting. Jesus did not have a problem with these things, but he did have a problem with people doing them with the wrong motive.

And in today’s society it is a great problem. Why do people give – do they give truly to help the cause, to show true sympathy with the suffering or do they give to receive praise for their generosity? And if we look at the three symbols, charity, prayer and fasting it can apply to each of them – we may start with the best of intentions but perhaps we get carried away with our own determination to succeed at them and in doing so risk losing the true reason.

It may seem rather strange to talk about ‘go to your room to pray and close the door’ . I don’t believe Jesus is against corporate worship, but I think his message is – we can pray in such a way that our prayer is not really addressed to God, not to impress the people around us, but not truly talking to God. And again with fasting it is easy to fast, not really for the good of our own souls, but to simply show how self-disciplined we are, or indeed to try and lose some weight!

Jesus is happy for us to pray and fast, but he wants us to do it for the right reasons and that is not to glorify ourselves but to glorify God.

To me one of the great joys of our present Archbishops is that they are happy to appear human, they don’t walk around looking pious all the time, they smile, they respond. I remember as a child thinking how pompous some clergy and indeed some church members looked. That somehow it would be irreligious if they smiled - I felt some of them thought themselves far better than the rest of us. They probably didn’t, but they did seem to think they had to look pious all the time. And I personally feel there is no bigger turn off to those on the outside than church goers implying they have got it right, so they are superior.

Christ came to earth without a great fanfare, just those who saw the star met him. His ministry was done with deep love and great humility. He never exhibited signs of pride or indeed ever sought the political type of power.

And we are called to be humble, to serve, to walk alongside our saviour and to be open to his voice.

Nowhere are we called to be pious to think we are superior.

We heard the words ‘ be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men or you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. Indeed the message is that if we seek earthly reward for all we do, we will get no reward from God. And that’s a hard message – for we may have fallen into the trap without realising it.

 It’s as if God says ‘why should I look at what you have done, why should I notice, you didn’t do it for me, you did it for yourself, you did it to get praise.’

Jesus himself, or course, is our perfect example. He preached in public, he performed his miracles of healing, compassion, and power over nature in public. But he always focused the attention on His heavenly Father.

So how do we equate all this with the teachings that the lengthy period of Lent is one of penitence and fasting, a time provided for those, who separated from the church by their sins, could be reconciled by acts of penitence and forgiveness.

Nowhere do we read that prayer, fasting and charity and anything but the right way, it is just doing it for the right reason that matters. And surely today is the right day to start looking at ourselves – we are shortly to receive the imposition of ashes. Lent can be a time of quite painful self-examination, for we are called to scrutinize our religious and spiritual life, indeed our

whole lives – as we try to make ourselves worthy of the love of God.

And each of us will enter Lent with different projects in the hope of achieving this. We may spend more time in prayer, fasting, sitting in church in silence before the Eucharist, in order to remove those un-necessary distractions from our lives, those things which separate us from God, which make it harder to hear his voice

Whatever way we chose our aim is the same, to be closer to God, to be better able to appreciate the Resurrection joys come Easter Day by enduring a Lenten discipline. By the linking of our Lenten journey to Christ’s suffering for us, by seeing, in what happened to Christ, our own weaknesses.

We are called to accept God’s forgiveness, his grace, bought for us on the Cross. Christ didn’t die for us so that we have to spend our lives unable to leave our guilt behind, unable to accept forgiveness, he died to release us.

For not only did God create us, and everything there is; not only is all of creation wonderfully good; and not only are we offered the grace of God; but we are also offered that again, and again, and again. We are offered God’s love in times of sickness; and in times of peace and war, prosperity and hardship. We are offered God’s love at all times, including in times of

righteousness and in times of sin.

Because when we sin, we need God even more. We need courage to turn away from darkness and to face the light. We need to turn away from the world’s false comforts and to accept the enduring grace of God. And we

need faith to turn away from all that holds us back, and face the new life that is freely given to all of us.

And so, as servants of God, as we journey through Lent, as well as looking at where we are going wrong, as well as giving up something let us also accept from God, and thank him for, his grace, commend ourselves to him and give ourselves the time and space to truly hear his voice and let the Holy Spirit take over our lives so that we may serve our Lord with genuine love and humility.