Thoughts from St. Andrew's Episcopal Church • Birmingham, AL

Ash Wednesday

Old Testament: Isaiah 58:1-12
Psalm 103 
Epistle: 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10
Gospel: Matthew 6:1-6, 6:16-21

“The tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” Luke 18:13  “But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing…” Matthew 6:3

In a classic understanding of Lent, Lent is a time of starving and suppression of the flesh so that the spirit can prevail. It is a time of rehearsing our sins before God and petitioning for forgiveness. 

In the words of a “penitential Psalm” for today: “Enter not into judgment with your servant, * for in your sight shall no one living be justified… Let me hear of your loving-kindness in the morning.” Psalm 143:2, 8

It is a time of reflection on our sins, the particular chains that bind us like the ghost of Jacob Marley. In A Christmas Carol, Marley appears to his business partner, Ebenezer Scrooge, wrapped in a chain. His warning speaks of the origin of this chain: “‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.’”

But Dickens’s story of the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge is grounded in an understanding of Lent that has long dominated the tradition of the English church. The word “Lent” is a Middle English word for springtime, the time of the len(g)thening of the hours of daylight after the winter solstice. Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, one of the great intellectuals of his day, always preached the festal sermons at Whitehall for James I. His sermon in 1619 develops this understanding of Lent:

“Now at this time is the turning of the year. In Heaven, the sun in his equinoctial line, the zodiac and all the constellations in it, do now turn about to the first point. The earth and all her plants, after a dead winter, return to the first and best season of the year. The creatures, the fowls of the air, the swallow and the turtle, and the crane and the stork, know their seasons, and make their just return at this time every year. Everything now turning that we also would make it our time to turn to God.”

We are dust, and to dust we shall return. We return to that primordial point just before humankind was created out of dust — we are poised on the edge of new creation, unfettered by Marley’s chains.

The Reverent Dr. Roy Wells