Ash Wednesday 2010

Ash Wednesday 2010 sermon

“Now quit your care and anxious fear and worry; for schemes are vain and fretting brings no gain. Lent calls to prayer, to trust, and dedication; God brings new beauty nigh; reply, reply, reply with love to love most high.” (Percy Dearmer, 1867-1936).

These words by a man named Percy Dearmer, an English priest and liturgist, were written on a friend’s Facebook page this morning, and they are an interesting testament to what we are about this day.

Our primary work this day is to remember: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. We are called to remember that God is God and we are not. That our mortal lives have a definite beginning and they will have a definite end. We are called to remember all the ways that we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, the times that we have forsaken God and God’s call to love God and love each other and we will confess that sin before God and each other.

Today we are called to remember Jesus’s call: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there you heart will be also.”

We are called to look ourselves in the mirror this day and acknowledge that we have spent our lives in pursuit of the treasures of this world, which will fade, and that the deepest treasures of our hearts are the gifts offered to us by God through Jesus Christ which can be received and renewed through prayer, trust, and dedication. Today we are called to recognize that so much of our lives and our energies are spent in care, anxious fear, and worry; in making schedules and lists, in trying to hold the chaos at bay, in trying to prevent the unpreventable: old age and illness, loss, and death.

And the good news is that today we are joyfully stripped of all that. Today we are reminded that it is not up to us, what will happen in our lives, how they will turn out. “All of us go down to the dust”. None of us will escape that, but in that is a freedom. We can be free of the need to try to control, and focus on how we will live, what and who and how we love. We can once again discern, through the influence of the Holy Spirit, what are the truest, deepest treasures of our hearts and how we will go about pursuing those in the ways that we live our lives.

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Remember, as you are marked by your ashes this day, that you have also been marked in the waters of your baptism… “marked as Christ’s own forever.” Remember what has been given to you as you feast at God’s table. Remember the work that you are called to do as you go out those doors and into the world. And remember you gratitude and its source, and give thanks.

“Now quit your care and anxious fear and worry; for schemes are vain and fretting brings no gain. Lent calls to prayer, to trust, and dedication; God brings new beauty nigh; reply, reply, reply with love to love most high.” (Percy Dearmer, 1867-1936).