Ash Wednesday (2019)

To get us ready celebrate wholeheartedly Jesus’ saving work,

we have three disciplines,

three ways of ‘training’,

three methods for adjusting our daily regime:

prayer, fasting and almsgiving.

Prayer: for most

the right approach will be to spend a bit more time in prayer each day.

For those with smart-phone addiction,

there are a variety of apps:

you will find four on the links page

under Miscellaneous on the parish web page.

I very much believe in the powerful prayer of meditating on scripture,

allowing it to speak directly into our lives.

Lent day-by-day booklets, available in the porch,

are one way to engage with this.

Another is to reflect on one of the gospels

(Luke’s is the natural choice this year),

at the rate of about half a chapter a day.

Fasting: the primary meaning is to eat less,

but we can think of ‘fasting’ from all sorts of things:

breakfast, alcohol, the Today programme, television after 9pm….

it should be something we quite like,

something we will miss,

something that is part of your current daily routine,

but something you know isn’t ‘important’.

If you ‘fast’ from something you do, freeing up a bit of time,

you may be able to substitute prayer for that activity,

helpfully linking these two disciplines.

Almsgiving: we think of this as giving money to the needy,

and we should do that,

but there is more to it than that.

More broadly,

‘almsgiving’ is working on the virtue of serving those around us.

So one part of the third Lenten discipline is

to be actively more helpful to, or more considerate of,

those we see every day.

Look for definite things to do

that someone near you will appreciate.

How to Jesus’ words in today’s gospel apply to us?

Is he really saying we have to be determinedly secretive

about our Lenten practice?

In our world,

there is little admiration for religious seriousness:

we are unlikely to be lauded for our Lenten exercises.

Secrecy could be a barrier to what we should do

and I am not sure it is the nub of Jesus’ teaching here.

Rather, in it we can hear the dangers of being self-satisfied,

of being rather proud, of our Lenten endeavours.

This seems to me to be the essence of Jesus’ warning.

For that reason,

taking on a significant Lenten exercise

trying hard, and still failing to stick to it fully,

may be better for us

than taking on something more modest

and feeling successful before God.

Lent is to prepare us for Holy Week and Easter:

to prepare our hearts

to be filled with gratitude

that we are saved, redeemed, and brought new life.

We take ashes as a sign of our intention to prepare seriously:

a sign that we are truly dust before God –

dust that looks forward to being raised up:

to become, in Christ, the goodness of God.