Preached on Ash Wednesday at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 5 March, 2025.
Readings: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17, Psalm 103:8-18; 2 Corinthians 5:20B-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
“Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near - a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness!” (Jl 2:1-2).
Several weeks ago, one of Elon Musk’s Space X rockets exploded during a test flight over the Caribbean. However, Musk’s company did not call it an explosion, or a failure, but rather, it was a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”. Or, as WB Yeats would have put it more poetically, “things come apart, the centre cannot hold”. Things coming apart seems an apt description of the strange time that we are currently living through, in a way that makes our readings today especially pointed and relevant.
Ash Wednesday is about things going apart in catastrophic ways that only God can fix them. The prophet Joel warns of a coming disaster that threatens the very nation. Jesus warns us that our wealth and security can disappear. And the ashes, a sign of mortality as well as repentance, warn us that our health and our very bodies will one day fail us. Things come apart.
There are times when Ash Wednesday can seem like a quaint ritual, the flip side of Pancake Tuesday. When things are going swimmingly, the familiar scripture readings don’t really touch us. We laugh at one another’s smudged foreheads, we might even leave the church hoping that someone will see our ashes and ask us about them. At other times, though, when things don’t look so rosy, Ash Wednesday seems to strike a nerve. Today Ash Wednesday feels very real.
I don’t need to spend much time detailing the crazy times we live in. Certainties are being swept away daily. Dictators are now friends. Friends are now dictators. Neighbours and allies are scorned and threatened. Cruelty and corruption, ignorance and racism now seem to be the official values of the most powerful country in the world. Recently, Elon Musk said that “empathy was the fundamental weakness of western civilization”.
In these times when we feel vulnerable, threatened, and just dazed, we need to remind ourselves that we stand on solid ground, and that saints and angels stand with us. Empathy is at the centre of all that we believe as Christians and is at the centre of what we inherited fro Judaism. Earlier we heard the prophet Joel saying “rend your hearts and not your clothing”, meaning that true repentance is not ritual but a change of life. Or, as the late film director David Lynch once said, “Fix your hearts or die”.
The Old Testament readings chosen for Ash Wednesday, Joel or an alternate selection from Isaiah, call on cruel and corrupt societies to find their way back to God by embracing justice, kindness, and equity. Likewise for St Paul in our second lesson, the path to God is “patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech”. And in our gospel reading, Jesus reminds us that when we give alms and do acts of kindness, we are giving from the true wealth of the human heart.
Today the ashes on our heads can be seen as a as something more than a sign of our mortality. They can also be seen as a sign of our commitment to God’s kingdom of justice and empathy. Amid the darkness and gloom, we can wear the ashes as an act of lamentation and sorrow for what we see going on around us. Like the people in Joel, we can wear the ashes as a call for God to reappear, to come and be the God of justice and peace that we long for, to forgive our many collective sins and to drive away the darkness and gloom.
Today, on Ash Wednesday, we call on God to fix our hearts.
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