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An edited version of the sermon Gary gave at St Alban's on Ash Wednesday:
The Old Testament is full of examples of the LORD's love for his people - one of the most famous of which is Isaiah 5:1: 'Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard'.
From his creation of man and woman in his own image, to his Covenants with Noah, and Abraham, and Moses, and to the prophets calling people back to God and expressing his love for them - over and over again God's love for his people is recounted.
Which, of course, is one of the reasons why the sometimes expressed view of the Old Testament 'God of Wrath' contrasted with the New Testament 'God of Love' is so wrong. God is God, and aspects of his love and judgement are found in both the Old and New Testaments.
We hear one of these expressions of the LORD's love in the first reading on Ash Wednesday from the Prophet Joel: 'Even now, says the LORD, return to me with all your heart…rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.'
What lovely words to hear at the beginning of this Lenten Season, a season of penitence and fasting, certainly; but, much more importantly, a season to remind ourselves, over and over again, of God's love for us, his desire for a relationship with us, his patience with us and with our sins and failings.
'Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love.' 'Return to me with all your heart', says the LORD your God.
So, Lent isn't a time for a sort of spiritual self-help - a dragging of ourselves through the dust, a wallowing in our sinfulness and lack of worthiness to be in God's presence - important as it is to acknowledge these things.
It's not a Christian 40-day diet plan. It's not a telling ourselves to buck up, to drag ourselves up to God by our boot-strings. Lent is a time for rest and refreshment in God's presence, an acknowledgement that he loves me and you, and that he wants us to come to him in love and worship.
It is a 'Season of the Spirit', a season to deepen our faith, to reach out in love and service to God and to our neighbours, an opportunity, if we need it, to return again to the source of all of our being, to renew our love and faith, and to come close to the God who loves us through his Son, Jesus Christ.
And this Service gives us the opportunity to begin this Lenten process, and to set it in the context of eternity.
In some ways it is a bit odd to hear in the Gospel Reading set for Ash Wednesday, 'When you fast…do not be like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces to show that they are fasting' [Matt 6:16], and then to smear our faces with ash.
But the words used at the imposition of ashes are very significant ones:
'Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ'. We were created by God's love from the dust of the earth - from 'the dust of dead stars', as Jostein Gaarder puts it.
And to that same dust we shall return - but that is not the end. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, which we celebrate each time we share Communion together, our return to the dust is not the sum total of what God intends for us.
After our bodies have returned to dust, we will have an eternal place in God's love, our origin and final destiny.
So, Lent is a solemn season, but also a joyful season; a season to remember God's love for us, a season to 'Return to God with all your heart… to rend your hearts and not your clothing, to return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love.'