26 February 2020 - Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday  — 26 February 2020

Trinity – 7:00 am & 12:15 pm

Joel 2:1-2,12-17    |  Psalm 103:8-14  | 
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10  |  Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

In just a few minutes we will begin the distinctive Ash Wednesday part of the Liturgy, with the invitation “to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.”  [BCP page 265]  

Repentance.  Obviously, traditionally, a major theme of the season of Lent.  What runs through your mind when you hear the word “repent”?  Maybe it’s a New Yorker cartoon with a rough bearded man in a dirty tunic striding down the street with a sign that reads “The End Is Nigh!”  (Yeah, well, that’s pretty silly.)  (Which doesn’t mean it might not be true!)  Or perhaps an old fire-and-brimstone preacher shouting, “Repent, you sinners!”  Or maybe, closer to our reality, Jesus at the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel, fresh from his sojourn with the Devil in the wilderness, proclaiming, “Repent, and believe the good news!”  [Mark 1:15]  

Okay, what does Jesus mean by “repent”?  Let’s face it, for a lot of us, at least, and some of the time, at least, “repentance” involves beating our breasts, moaning and groaning about what miserable sinners we are, and wearing a hairshirt or sitting in dust and ashes.  And actually there’s a fair amount of that kind of stuff in Biblical and Christian history.  In fact we just heard some of it!  Jesus himself even seems to encourage it a little bit in his parable about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in the Temple.  [Luke 18:9-14]  But is this what is at the heart of what it means to repent?  Is this what Lent is about?

You already know this, because we clergy learn it in seminary and we spend the next fifty years telling it to you over and over:  The word in the New Testament that we normally translate into English as “repentance” is the Greek word metanoia.  And the basic meaning of metanoia is “to change your mind.”  Well, that’s simple enough.  Most of us change our minds all the time.  I say, “I think I’ll go over to McDonald’s for lunch,” and then on the way I say, “No, I’ve changed my mind, I’ll think I’ll go to Burger King instead.”  

Metanoia is about a lot more than that.  

In Greek the preposition meta- has a whole lot of meanings, depending on context.  In this context we usually say it has the sense of “change,” although I’ll come back to that shortly.  -Noia is derived from the Greek word nous, which means “mind,” more or less.  Thus a metanoia is a “change of mind.”  Yeah, but…  Nous, “mind,” has to do with a lot more than just whatever fluff is floating around in our heads at the moment.  It has to do with perception, with understanding at a deep level, both intellectual and intuitive.  It is at the level of nous that we deal with our most profound understandings and commitments about who we are and what our relationships are to other people and to the world.  And the meta- in metanoia is not just “change,” but, like as we use the word “meta” in other contexts, it means taking our most profound understandings and commitments to a whole new level.  A meta-noia  is a whole new way, a whole new dimension, of thinking and perceiving and understanding and being.  To repent is to become, by God’s grace, as St. Paul puts it, a new creation.  [2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15]  

So we will shortly be invited to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance.  “Self-examination” may of course call to mind making your list of sins to take to confession – “I yelled at the kids three times, I said ‘goddammit’ seven times…” – and of course “repentance” includes being sorry and trying to stop doing things like that!  But just as “repentance” means a lot more than groveling about our flaws but as metanoia involves raising our thinking and perception and understanding of ourselves and our world and ourselves in God’s world to a whole new level, so “self-examination” involves an honest assessment of who we think and perceive and understand we are, how we are in relation to other people, what place we claim in the world, and to what extent we recognize the world as God’s world.  And for this, prayer and the prayerful reading of and meditating on God’s holy Word are essential.

May you, and I, and all of us, have a holy Lent!