Ash Wednesday - Asking God to spare us

I’ve decided to use Lent to do some serious thinking and writing about where God is in my life and how his way might prevail in a world which feels madder every day that passes. 

In an Ash Wednesday service tonight I was challenged by the words of Joel we had read: 

Blow the trumpet in Zion,
    declare a holy fast,
    call a sacred assembly.
16 Gather the people,
    consecrate the assembly;
bring together the elders,
    gather the children,
    those nursing at the breast.
Let the bridegroom leave his room
    and the bride her chamber.
17 Let the priests, who minister before the Lord,
    weep between the portico and the altar.
Let them say, “Spare your people, Lord.
    Do not make your inheritance an object of scorn,
    a byword among the nations.
Why should they say among the peoples,
    ‘Where is their God?’”

This is the second Lent in a row I am not leading a congregation through the passion and resurrection story. I was struck tonight by what we might find not a really attractive part of the priestly call. Are we called to weep? Are we called to remind people of the consequences of not returning to God? Is Joel right when he warns that God’s story becomes so irrelevant because his people aren’t sharing it or worse, living it,  that people in the world (the nations) suggest God is no more? 

As Lent begins I suggest two things might need to happen. First we need to return to God ourselves! My counsellor who has been really helpful in recent days has said I have to love myself before I can really minister again. I’m good at caring for other people, I’m hopeless at caring for me. A nurse practitioner had to tell me off because my blood pressure the other week was sky high and I’d forgotten to get a new prescription for my pills and had stopped taking them which was foolish! In the Church we are great at raising funds, talking strategy, worrying about how to fix the roof, we are like me and my pills, hopeless at looking after ourselves spiritually as a priority and then we wonder why we are so unwell and exhausted. And then we don’t think God can do anything any more so we don’t turn to him and we have lost confidence that anything new or different might be possible. We hanker after the good old days because we are frightened of the future. So like the mockers at the cross, the world says “where is your God?” and we say “I don’t know any more...” 

So first I’m calling for all God’s people to turn back to God! Put Church second for a while. Read the Bible, pray more fervently, find an Evensong and hear the psalter read honestly, take time to listen, expect God to speak again. Care deeply for those around you and find God with you in that caring. I believe madly if the spiritual temperature of a church is right then we enjoy being church so much more. We need our assembly to be consecrated again! Don’t we? 

Then secondly I think Lenten discipline invites us to call on the mercy of God to heal our broken lives. We’ve been staying this week in a lovely cottage on the Fountains Abbey estate. I love the picture above. I took it in the Abbey ruins tonight as dusk fell. There is a chink of light in the distance but the journey to get there is a hard one through the gloom. In the service tonight we prayed a lot “Lord, have mercy.” Jesus in a forty day wilderness hell, could only lean on the mercy of God as he was tested, empty physically and mentally. 

Perhaps we need to weep, to call out, to protest, to say all is not right at the moment and let God come into those emotions. Perhaps Lent as a season is a call to return to vulnerability. I’ve been asked so many times since I became unwell if I’ve lost my faith. I have never lost my faith in God, I have in other things but not God. Why? Because my God is in the dark journey not just in the light. This week my future at least for the next few months has suddenly become uncertain. Some things have changed. There is light ahead but I feel at the moment because stuff has happened outside my control I’m holding on in the gloom. 

We watched the DVD “Judy” the other night. It’s a brilliant film about Judy Garland’s 1969 shows in London, when she was really struggling mentally. At the end of her last show, she sings Somewhere over the rainbow. Before she sings it she says sometimes the journey is all there is and it’s about hope and she says “and we all need some of that.” 

So second, I’m calling for us to be real this Lent. The Church needs to be a safe space where all of us can be who we are at the moment. In worship we’ve lost that calling on God to come because maybe we’ve as I’ve already said forgotten the need to call on him. What do you think? 

May all of us have an honest, real, relevant and faithful Lenten journey. May we weep, stop, and call out. And then may we really believe that the incarnate God might just help us through what today feels too much...