A Sermon for Ash Wednesday (Year B)
February 17, 2021
Psalm 103:8-14
I speak to you in the name of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
From Psalm 103: “As a father cares for his children, so does the Lord care for those who fear him. For he himself knows whereof we are made; he remembers that we are but dust.”
I don’t often preach on the psalms, but it’s not because I don’t think they’re important. It’s because most of the time, I feel drawn to preach on the Gospel lesson appointed for the day. The Gospels serve as our best and most reliable source for learning about the life and ministry of Jesus, which is why we consider them especially significant and why most priests in the Episcopal Church tend to focus on the Gospel lesson in their preaching.
But the psalms offer us something different. The psalms offer us a window—a glimpse into the lives of an ancient people who put all their hope and all their trust in God. The psalms are a collection of prayers and hymns, expressing a wide range of emotions—everything from joy and thankfulness to pain and sorrow. I think that’s one of the reasons why the psalms resonate so deeply within us. They’re honest about the human condition and the struggle we all feel in trying to be faithful to God.
It’s likely that many of the psalms we use today in public worship were used in a similar way during the time of Jesus in temple worship. There are psalms of lament, expressing Israel’s grief and their hope that God will reach out and save them from their suffering. There are psalms of praise and thanksgiving, expressing Israel’s joy in knowing that God is a loving and merciful god. There are other categories as well, but mostly, the psalms can be divided into two categories: psalms of lament and psalms of praise.
It’s almost impossible to know exactly when the psalms were written and who wrote them, but we do know that many of the psalms, like the one we read just a few minutes ago, are attributed to King David from the Hebrew Scriptures.
Psalm 103, the one appointed to be read every year on Ash Wednesday, falls under the psalm of praise category. It begins with the words, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.” You would think that the framers of our lectionary would choose a psalm of lament to be read on Ash Wednesday during the Liturgy of the Word—a psalm that expresses our plea for God to be merciful and kind, to rescue us from our wicked and sinful ways. But instead, we’re given a psalm of praise, a psalm that expresses our thankfulness to the God who loves us more than we can possibly imagine, the God who is always ready to forgive us and welcome us back home. I think this is an important detail to consider as we contemplate the significance of this day and the beginning of our journey through Lent.
Unfortunately, we often get Lent wrong, and we do so to our own detriment. I harp on this every year on Ash Wednesday. What I mean by that is that our common perception of Lent is that it’s a time when we’re just supposed to sit in our own misery and think about the ways we’ve been awful to each other and to God—like a parent who punishes their child by telling them to go and sit in a corner and think about what they’ve done to deserve such a punishment. Another common perception of Lent is that it’s a time when we’re supposed to give up things that we enjoy, usually material things like coffee or sweets or Facebook.
But, when we think of Lent in this way, we run the risk of missing out on how incredibly life-changing it can be. One of my goals as a priest each year, around this time, is to offer a better and more helpful way to think about Lent. It isn’t a punishment from God. It isn’t God sending us to “time out” for forty days and forty nights. It’s actually a time for us to draw closer to God, a time for us to be intentional in rebuilding our relationship with the one who created us, the one who loves us with no exception. Overwhelming feelings of shame and guilt are useless in this work. Now, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t acknowledge those moments when we’ve fallen short of God’s call or our need to repent and return to the Lord. But, if we spend all of our time in Lent focused on our sinfulness and what we’ve done wrong, we create a stumbling block for ourselves.
A former professor of mine from seminary recently wrote an article about observing Lent this year based on a question that many of us have probably asked ourselves already. “Must we do Lent this year?” After a year of desperately holding on through a global pandemic, after a year of giving up so much already, after a year of so much death and sadness and isolation, must we do Lent this year? And the answer, of course, is, “no.” No one is forcing us to observe Lent this year, at least not in our day-to-day lives, but why wouldn’t we?
Think about that question. Why wouldn’t we accept the Church’s invitation to observe a holy Lent? Why wouldn’t we accept an opportunity to grow and seek new life with God, to be reminded each day of God’s unending love for us? It’s true. Lent can be an emotional time, especially as we move closer and closer to Holy Week. We know how the story of Jesus unfolds, don’t we? We know that he’ll go through much suffering and pain in Jerusalem before he’s finally sentenced to die on the cross, and perhaps this year, more than most, the emotional weight of Jesus’ suffering will resonate with us even more deeply. But, we also know that the story doesn’t end on the cross. The story ends with joy and resurrection and new life. This is the journey we’re invited to take with Jesus over the next several weeks, a journey to rediscover who we are as God’s beloved children. I hope you’ll join me and accept the invitation. Amen.
A video of this sermon is available below, beginning at the 13:35 mark.
The Rev. Eric Mancil 