Ash Wednesday
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Matt 6:1-6; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Lent is a time to recognise our humanity. It’s a time to acknowledge our mortality. And it’s a time to detach ourselves from some of the things of the world and, in the freedom that this brings us, to recognise our deep sense of belonging to God.
The readings for Ash Wednesday all invite a return to God and a return to our true selves. The prophet Joel, in the context of crisis confronting Israel, bids the people to ‘Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful.’ Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, recounts the overcoming of great challenges through the contemplative qualities of knowledge, patience and holiness of spirit. Matthew’s gospel rebukes religious practices motivated by a desire for honour alone.
Creating the space for contemplation, to return to God, may mean that we can understand some of the desires and motivations that inspire our actions, which at the best of times will be complex, muddled and murky. To do this will mean we need to let go of some of the things that block our connection with the perfect life that God promises us in and through Jesus. It means we may need to let go of life itself.
Of dust we are created and to dust we will return. Facing the powerlessness of our mortality is a great leveller, one of the elements of our common humanity. With the recognition of our common humanity comes the invitation to respond to the systems and structures that make people less rather than more fully human. And in doing so, our humanity is enhanced, and we and other people may be empowered.
Christian Aid works through justice and not charity, to challenge all the things that deny people their humanity. The first week of Count Your Blessings is a week of justice, and features partner’s Ekta Parishad’s epic march for justice across India. A team of 15 is travelling across 25 states for a year, mobilising and preparing some 100,000 or more landless people to march for a month, some barefoot, in October /November 2012. As they march, they will be calling for their rights to the land they rely on for food and income and which is being rapidly taken for industrial development and mining.
Christian Aid is organising a series of sponsored walks in the autumn of 2012 as the march for justice reaches its climax march in India, a 350km trek from Gwalior (near the Taj Mahal) to Delhi. Hundreds of people up and down the UK will stand in solidarity with Ekta Parishad and the landless people in India. Some will put aside £2 a week for a year – just as Indians are putting aside 2 rupees a week to prepare for the march – which will go towards Ekta Parishad’s continued struggle.
Walking in solidarity – being in solidarity – builds our common humanity and makes us more rather than less whole. If we can make space to enter into the bigger life of God we may find that we are able to look objectively at some of the desires that drive our actions, and to acknowledge and respond to God’s gracious and merciful presence.
Gracious God
Abounding in steadfast love
Knowing that we are but dust
May we accept your gracious invitation
To inhabit your greater story.
Through the discipline of prayer and contemplation
May we recognise our own desires,
May we find the freedom to let go,
May we embrace our powerlessness,
May we stand with the powerless of the world,
And may we glimpse the power of your life
That transcends death.
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