Ash Wednesday 2025

At the imposition of ashes, James preaches on the ancient words — remember you are dust — and their strange power to free us from pretension, to open us to grace, and to set us on the Lenten road.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Let me start with something shockingly insightful. This will be news to most of you. Having two children under the age of two is very, very messy. It's basically bodily fluids everywhere all the time. Sometimes moments just before a service is to start. That's always fun. Ruth at the moment is up multiple times a night feeding, and she's a bit of a colicky baby, so we're dealing with the effects of that. She has a very loud voice. And so Hannah and I are processing the um effects of sleep deprivation on the human brain. It's a fascinating study. We'll give you the results once the ex once the ex um once it's finished. George has just recently turned two and so is asserting his will at every opportunity. Anything less than precisely what he wants is the world is the end of the world. You know, it's the it's the biggest disaster you could possibly imagine. Um I I should say that George has also discovered what it is to have crayons and what walls are. So in the front of the Dean, I just want to make this confession. I'm probably going to need some more white paint uh before the year is out. Uh he he has inherited uh a double dose of stubbornness. Uh both of those doses came from his mother's side, of course. Uh and so uh there's a lot of grumpiness in my house, there's a lot of uh tiredness, which leads to some uh unfortunate arguments at times, sometimes at two in the morning. None of what I've just described, the reality of being a parent, uh, and uh it's a great joy, I love it, but none of that reality has made it onto our Facebook profiles, onto our Instagram accounts. If you were to look at our photos and our regular updates, you would think that our family goes from one picturesque activity to another, from one highly educational activity to a glorious walk in the countryside, always smiling, always photogenic. You should also say thank you to this congregation who knows that's not the truth, and for your warm smiles and knowing looks, they're much appreciated. Maybe I'm the only one, but I feel a lot of pressure to portray myself as together, clean, satisfied, and successful. As a result, I want my picturesque life to be Instagrammable. I want my Facebook feed to be overflowing with good news. And because I don't think I am the only one, let me speak on behalf of all of us. Each of us all the time is carefully curating our public image. We've been trained to do so by media, by social media, by a culture that is constantly producing and consuming the image. But this is not a modern affliction. It's something that Jesus warned us about 2,000 years ago. In our gospel reading, he says this beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them. We love to be seen. More precisely, we love the particular version of ourselves that we find acceptable to be seen. And so we project that version out into the world and we hope that no one discovers the truth. I'm the pious one, I'm the accomplished one, I'm the studious one, I'm the quirky, alternative, undefinable one. So our first question for tonight is this Have you come to believe your own propaganda? Instead, we are invited this evening to be honest with ourselves and with one another about the state of our lives and the state of our hearts. To stop for one moment the propaganda campaign and to be undefended in our acknowledgement that we do not have everything together, that things are not alright, that our lives are a mess, that we are only hanging by a thread. Perhaps in a cathedral, more than in most places, we need nights like tonight. Canon Michael and I went to Burnley this week to visit the Church on the Street, an amazing organization doing church for homeless people, for addicts, for those who've been marginalized by society. And among other things, one of the things I was struck by in our visit is that here is a church where all the difficulties of life are on the outside, clear to be seen. Not so in a cathedral. It's easy in a place like this to hold all our brokenness on the inside, covered by a thin veneer of middle-class do-goodery. We're invited to this profoundly powerful statement this evening, particularly in this image-conscious world, to wipe dirt on our faces, to have someone wipe dirt on your face, and to leave it there for all to see, to remind ourselves and one another of the truth that should be obvious. We are broken. Life is difficult, we are sinners. That is the call of Ash Wednesday, to be honest, to truthfulness about the way things really are, to peel back the thin veneer of social propriety, and for a moment to vulnerability to give ourselves vulnerability and to expose the dirt of our hearts by putting dirt on our heads. Now I can't quite finish there because I need to complicate things one step further. Because if you were listening carefully to our Old and New Testament readings, it's not quite as simple as that. Our Old Testament reading also says this. The problem we have here is that the human heart is deceitful above all else, as Jeremiah 17. You could do this whole putting ash on your head thing, and it could be completely performative. In fact, we find that that is exactly what was happening in Jesus' day. That's what he's trying to critique. This should not be a surprise to us in an image-conscious world that some people make it a point out of displaying their brokenness because there is some cultural and personal power in being the person who flaunts their powerlessness. This is the this is the pernicious nature of the human heart. That we put ashes on our heads to show people how broken we are, and before long we find ourselves doing that and try to snuck in through the back door, and we find ourselves putting ashes on our face to prove how powerlessly you are, just as a position of power and strength. This is the difficulty of Ash Wednesday. There are two errors available to us this evening: the error of beauty and the error of ugliness. The fact that there are so many ways to fail tonight is evidence that the human ego detests humility, that it flees from self-crucifixion, that it will resist and do everything it can to avoid following Jesus to Calvary. But that is the challenge of tonight. To come forward and to receive ashes on your forehead so that people might know that you are a broken human being and in that process to not do it performatively, but because you're trying to present God with your inner being and asking him to transform it. So receive the sign, an outward sign of an inward reality that you are a broken, scattered mess. But then, secondly, receive the bread and wine, symbols of Jesus' body and blood, which were broken for you, so that you in him might return to the Lord. All we can do is throw ourselves on his mercy this evening, because the human heart is deceitful above all else, and all your attempts at self-discipline are likely to fail. Amen.