Sermon for the 22nd of February, 2023 - Ash Wednesday

The essential needs of human beings are few: water to drink; food to eat; what will clothe us, and a shelter to protect us from the sometimes overpowering
force of nature.

These seem self-evident. But also, we come into the world with just as elemental a need, or even more: to have, to feel at the deepest level of our being, a sense of loving relationship to our fellow human beings, and to God. But it is this last great need that we, of all of these, cannot ever fully satisfy. We seek
love where it cannot be found, we alienate those who would love us, we fail to respond to those who need our love. When our loving God looks for us we turn an indifferent face.

We cannot create a perfect world of love within and around us, for ourselves. We fall short, again and again, and we cannot make ourselves not fall. We fall short of the persons we would like and long to be—we cannot help being human and not God. And so, built into the deepest part of our being, we are conscious that we are incomplete, broken, trying and failing, again and again, to fulfil our highest gifts, to realise fully our possibilities as the unique human creatures whom God loves. We form the noblest of intentions, but we cannot live them out. In bare eloquence Paul said: For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Romans 7:19). Wretched man that I am! (vs. 24) Such failure and such brokenness we cannot mend by ourselves. Who will lift us up out of ourselves? Who can satisfy this need that we so deeply feel?

The Christian faith makes the astonishing claim that Christ’s life of love for us has already done this. God’s own love shone in his life. Christ’s act of self-sacrifice, out of love for us, restored all that was broken in our own lives. We have already been restored to the loving relationship with God that was meant for us from the beginning. We have already been lifted up, set free, to love, and be loved. What, then, is left for us to do?

Do you remember the story of the centurion’s servant? When Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, appealing to him and saying, ‘Lord, my servant is lying at home paralysed, in terrible distress.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘I will come and cure him.’ The centurion answered, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant shall be healed. For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I
say to one, “Go”, and he goes, and to another, “Come”, and he comes, and to my slave, “Do this”, and the slave does it.’ When Jesus heard him, he was amazed....And to the centurion Jesus said, ‘Go; let it be done for you according to your faith.’ And the servant was healed in that hour.

Are any of us worthy? Worthy of God’s great love for us, drawing us back to Him however far we fall or how badly we behave? What is left for us to do?
We, like the centurion, need to ask. To ask for the forgiveness that will heal us and for the grace that will restore us. As we continue to try, and fail—to try, and fall. This season of Lent that now begins is a season for asking. In silence, in self-confrontation, in acknowledgement of the love we lack. May our habit of prayer grow in these forty days, as we ask for all that need