A few words on Ash Wednesday

Joel 2.1 & 2, & 12-17

Blow the trumpet in Zion, sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the LORD is coming, a day of darkness and gloom is at hand, a day of cloud and dense fog. Like blackness spread over the mountains a vast and countless host appears; their like has never been known, nor will be in all the ages to come.

Yet even now, says the LORD, turn back to me wholeheartedly with fasting, weeping, and mourning. Rend your hearts and not your garments, and turn back to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, long-suffering and ever constant, ready always to relent when he threatens disaster.  It may be he will turn back and relent and leave a blessing behind him, blessing enough for grain-offerings and drink-offerings to be presented to the LORD your God. Blow the trumpet in Zion, appoint a solemn fast, proclaim a day of abstinence. Gather the people together, appoint a solemn assembly; summon the elders, gather the children, even babes at the breast; bid the bridegroom leave his wedding-chamber and the bride her bower. Let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, stand weeping between the porch and the altar and say, ‘Spare your people, LORD; do not expose your own people to insult, to be made a byword by other nations. Why should the peoples say, “Where is their God?” ’

John 8.2-11

At daybreak Jesus appeared again in the temple, and all the people gathered round him. He had taken his seat and was engaged in teaching them, when the scribes and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught committing adultery.

Making her stand in the middle they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of adultery.  In the law Moses has laid down that such women are to be stoned. What do you say about it?’  They put the question as a test, hoping to frame a charge against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.  When they continued to press their question he sat up straight and said, ‘Let whichever of you is free from sin throw the first stone at her.’  Then once again he bent down and wrote on the ground.  When they heard what he said, one by one they went away, the eldest first; and Jesus was left alone, with the woman still standing there. Jesus again sat up and said to the woman, ‘Where are they? Has no one condemned you?’  She answered, ‘No one, sir.’ ‘Neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus said. ‘Go; do not sin again.’

 

Today, Ash Wednesday, we enter a season of penitence and preparation, so it seems right to ask - What happens when we repent, what happens when we turn to God to save us? The Old Testament prophets were constantly calling the people and their leaders back to God. In our reading today the prophet Joel tells the people to turn back to God. Do what God wants you to do, and longs for you to do, he tells them. Turn back.

And if I turn back to God, can I by doing that change his mind? No, I don’t believe I can. What changes is not the mind of God, but the relationship between God and me - or, for the people Joel is writing to, between God and his people, between the people and God. For, however far from him they’ve wandered, they remain his people, loved by him, desired by him.

But even the smallest scrap of sin changes that dynamic. There are no big fatal sins as opposed to little and not all that important sins; there is just sin - sin that takes away from us the power and the right to act as though we had God’s approval. We see this in the Gospel reading from John 8, the story of the woman taken in adultery. The crowd are ready, stones in hand. “Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone,” Jesus tells them. And not one of those gathered there can claim the right to do it.

Lent is God’s gift to us, as a time to take sin seriously, a time to admit our failings and to work to put things right. Penitence is about saying sorry but also being sorry, the words themselves aren’t enough. It requires a commitment to grow in discipline, and perhaps also take on some new work of service or care. It requires that we place ourselves afresh under God’s authority and judgement, but also under God’s mercy, as mediated to us by our Lord Jesus Christ.

Sin is deadly. Our sin cuts us off from life, and destines us only for destruction. Except that God continues to love us, to love each one of us, to love me despite all the unloveable things in my life. While sin remains a real and deadly thing, if I’m striving to do what is right and good, then even though I will fail, even though I will fall short of my target, God meets me, meets us in our striving and trying with a boundless generosity, with a grace that’s always there for us.

Dust and ashes - the Ash Wednesday words, as a cross is marked on our foreheads: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return; repent and believe the Gospel.” Repent and believe the Gospel, and do that with faith and hope and expectation. For you are just dust, we are just dust - but God can do the most amazing things with dust.