Herb Porridge or Dear Feast?

Ash Wednesday

2 Mar 2022

‘I hate Lent, with its different diets and furmity and butter and herb porridge; and sour devout faces of people who only put on religion for seven weeks!’ Jonathan Swift.

Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee, He loves not Temperance, or Authority, But is composed of passion. The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now: Give to your Mother, what you would allow To every Corporation.

Well, there you have it: two views of Lent. One, from the satirical pen of Jonathan Swift in 1712; the other from the more ethereal minded Anglican poet and priest, George Herbert, a century earlier.

So which is it? Or is it either or neither? Frankly I am not sure Lent can be bottled and branded; no one can tell you what Lent is or what it should be for you.

Tonight we re-enact a ritual that the church as done for close to two millennia. Ashes are not so much a reminder of our sinfulness, but of our mortality. Yet that reminder should make us aware not only of our own frailty, but of propensity to sin, to pull ourselves away from God, and to harm others.

In Ukraine, as we speak, Christians are fighting Christians, in this case most come from the Orthodox tradition, both Ukrainian and Russian. I would ask that you pray for the people of Ukraine and for those Russians who are daring to oppose Putin and protest the war. And as Luke would tell us, pray as well for those whom we see as aggressors.

One of the members of a study group that I help lead, was in Texas visiting her sister when the war in Ukraine started. She said many of the people were happy about the fighting because they truly believed it would start the Armageddon that would end the world and bring the second coming of Christ and, as Christians of a certain persuasion, they would be saved. It was all fore-ordained. It is a view of Christianity that I do not share.

Yes, we face much in our world. How, then, can we observe Lent in a way that is holy? I truly believe we must embrace our mortality; we are dust and to dust we shall return. That is first.

We are sinful; and by that I mean we are human. We do that which we should not, whether by intension or innocently.

We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness which we from time to time have committed, by thought, word, and deed against thy divine majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.

How have we hurt others? There was a TV show called My Name is Earl. Earl was a petty thief who lost a winning lottery ticket when he was struck by a car. As he recovered, he learned about karma and decided to turn his life around by trying to fix all the bad deeds he had done. After his first deed works, he finds the missing lottery ticket and uses the money to help him in his work. People respond in variety of ways to Earl, not all welcome him. But his life is changed and so are many of the people he had harmed.

You can, then, observe Lent with herb porridge and a sour face, or you can give to your mother, to the other, and fast from those things that keep you from experiencing God.

I would suggest that we should also be people willing to stand in the breach, people willing not only to acknowledge our own wrong doings and ask forgiveness, but to repair the divide, repair the damage.

Lent, then, can be a time of individual reflection and a time of corporate reflection.

When we reach the end of the 40 days, I pray we have talked the talk and walked the walk and we can meet at the cross.