Ash Wednesday - March 2, 2022

Nadia Stefko - Ash Wednesday: 2 March 2022 - Sermon for St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church

No matter how much we prepare for it, Lent always seems to arrive abruptly.

There’s nothing subtle about it. It comes mid-week. It comes with a big, dark smear of ash on the face.

Perhaps you know that the ashes are meant to have a two-fold meaning. Two distinct, though related, meanings. Mortality, and penitence. There’s a line in the Anglican Church of Canada’s Ash Wednesday liturgy that captures this particularly well. It says,

We begin our journey to Easter with the sign of ashes, an ancient sign, speaking of the frailty and uncertainty of human life, and marking the penitence of the community as a whole (Book of Alternative Services, 282).

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Two weeks ago, I started to think about what I would say today.

And I grappled with how to handle the mortality theme at a time when 900,000 Americans—6 million people worldwide—have died from COVID, since it first came on the scene, two Ash Wednesdays ago. I realized you don’t really need to be reminded today about “the frailty and uncertainty of human life.”

I did not anticipate, 2 weeks ago, that it would be that other big theme of Ash Wednesday—penitence—that would loom even larger. I did not anticipate that we’d arrive at this day A People At War.

That instead of 900,000 American dead, the figure we’d be watching grow exponentially is the 700,000 refugees spilling over the border of Ukraine, in the snow.

War has broken out. War that is Premeditated. Unprovoked. Unjustified. (Do any of those adjectives matter, when it comes to war?)

It broke out in the middle of the week last week. And here, in the middle of this week, we hold a special service to call God’s people to repent.

It’s what the prophet Joel was doing in today’s first reading. The historical setting for the book of Joel is a bit vague. It lacks some of the context clues that most of the other prophetic books have. But the presenting cataclysm is clear enough. The previous chapter reveals an unprecedented plague of locusts. The locusts have destroyed the crops. The crop loss has decimated the livestock. And now the people are starving.

And desperate. And Joel stands up and calls them to return to God, with all their hearts.

I wonder…if they wondered…what he could possibly mean by that?

Because I’ve thought about it, and I don’t know exactly what it means to repent in the face of natural disaster. (At least, not in the times before we knew about the complexities of human-caused climate change.)

Perhaps there was some grounds for self-examination and atonement in Joel’s day about the ways the famine hit some within society harder than others? Like how the COVID pandemic has brought us face-to-face anew with the inequities of our healthcare system. And the disparities of our economy. I don’t know.

At any rate, the grounds for penitence seems so much clearer with the human-caused disaster of war we now face. Of this war of Russian aggression exploding in Ukraine.

It is a stark reminder that we humans are prone to act in self-interest. Prone to greed, and violence. Murder and war. Prone to that utterly false and dangerous claim that says, “if I am truly made in the image of God, then you must be less so, and therefore, are more expendable.”

The mirror that war holds up is a bitter pill to swallow this Ash Wednesday. And it invites our even deeper reflection on the question of why this conflict seems to merit more of our attention than all the others roiling around the globe?

Is it because the people look more like us?

Is it because the weapons are even bigger than in other places?

(Is it because most of us were better taught the history of this region than others?)

Is it because the aggressor is what we call a super-power?

Is it because we’ve barely begun to recover from the grief and the trauma of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan?

I want to be clear that I ask these questions not because I think I know the answers.

In fact, I’m not at all certain that they even have answers. I ask them because I think they are Ash Wednesday questions.

They are questions to contend with on this day when we place the bitter-pill-truth of our sinful, mortal nature alongside the equally stark, and profoundly hopeful reminder of this day:

That God loved us into being out of ashes.

That God lifted us from the dirt and breathed life into us, and breathes new life into us even still. Even now.

In just a few minutes, we will pray together the Litany of Penitence appointed for this day. We will confess some heavy things:

Our indifference. Our ambition. Our self-indulgent ways.

Our negligence. Our waste. Our contempt toward those who differ from us.

We confess them, and we know that God knows them.

And we trust that God loves us lavishly in spite of them.

We marvel at the mystery that nothing will separate us from the love of God. And we commit to return to God. To give our broken hearts to the One who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

And we ask God to shape us. To breathe new life into us. To teach us how to live in light of that love, in a world at war.

Lord, have mercy upon us. And grant us grace.

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