Isaiah 58:1-12 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 Psalm 103 or 103:8-14

Ash Wednesday – the beginning of the season of Lent – presents us with a conundrum of questions requiring our brutal unabashed honesty.  On this day, we commit ourselves with heightened intention to reflection in which we seek to see ourselves as God sees us, peeling away the layers of self-righteousness, self-justification, and self-sufficiency, exposing our souls – not to God, to whom no secrets are hid, but exposing our true souls to our own selves in God’s light.  We sit face to face with Jesus Christ for sort of a performance review. Where have we been faithful?  Where have we fallen short?  Where do we go now?

Is Lent intended to be a penitential martyrdom in which we fast ourselves to the point of fainting from hunger, we wear hair shirts for perpetual discomfort, and heap ashes on our heads as we reflect for forty long days on our sinfulness and lack of worthiness to stand before the Cross?  The Rev. Thomas Ken was a 17^thcentury bishop of Bath and Wells and attendant to Charles II.  In his piece entitled “What it Lent?”, he questions if this is a time in which:

a devout soul… fastens himself to the cross…, and hangs crucified by contrition all the Lent long;  …that having felt in his closet,… the anguish, the nails and the thorns, and tasted the gall of his own sins, he may by his own crucifixion be better disposed to be crucified with Christ on Good Friday, and most tenderly sympathize with all… the anguish, and torments, and desertion, infinite, unknown, and unspeakable, which God incarnate endured, when he bled upon the cross for the sins of the world; 

We come this day with intention of being marked by the Cross on which our Lord was crucified – a cross of ashes on our foreheads.  “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” We go forth with our marked foreheads and the glow of having received the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of our Savior Jesus Christ.  And – the words of Jesus ringing in our ears, “Do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others… whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.”

And, yet, we go forth with our marked foreheads, not as hypocrites who seek the vainglory of the world, but as humble Christians marked as Christ’s own forever – faithful, sincere, humble Christians carrying the Cross of Christ, walking in the revealing light of God’s holiness, witnessing to the world.

Turning again to the words of The Rev. Thomas Ken, we confront the deepest of a meaningful Lent’s rewards:

that being purified by repentance, and made conformable to Christ crucified; [we] may offer up a pure oblation at Easter, and feel the power and the joys, and the triumph of his Savior’s resurrection. 

In the words of Eric Milner-White, chaplain at King’s College, I offer his prayer that each of us might take with us for these 40 days:

LORD, bless to me this Lent.

Lord, let me fast most truly and profitably,

By feeding in prayer on thy Spirit;

Reveal me to myself

In the light of thy holiness.

May my whole effort be to return to thee;

O make it serious and sincere

persevering and fruitful in result,

By the help of thy Holy Spirit

And to thy glory,

My Lord and my God.   Amen