I’m sorry, once again it’s a post that’s really a day late. I’ve had a couple of projects on for ministry which have had to take priority over blogging. Luckily, the collect for Ash Wednesday, like the one for Advent I, is one you repeat throughout the season, so it’s as applicable today as it was yesterday.

As I’m sure you all know, Lent is the time of preparation for Easter. For centuries, it has been the primary season associated with repentance in the calendar. Because of the obvious connection to new life, and fresh starts, Easter has traditionally been a time for baptisms to take place, and in the past it has often been a time when people assigned penance for some notorious sin would be formally reconciled to the Church. That was deemed to require serious preparation, self-examination, and catechesis. The fresh start these baptisands and penitents were undertaking became the occasion for the whole community to renew their walk with the Lord. After all, Easter’s message of resurrection calls all of us to live in newness of life, because we too were buried into Jesus’ death by baptism (Rom 6:4).

By comparison with Advent, Lent is long and in my experience can feel long. Six weeks of abstinence, fasting, prayer, self-examination, and study – to whatever extent you choose to engage with it, is a lot and towards the end, the anticipation of and yearning for Easter can be almost uncontainable. Why make it so long?

Well, certainly not to earn extra Brownie points before God. If you haven’t read the three posts from the ‘Gesima’ season – Septua, Sexa and Quinc – do give them a look. At least until recently, the Church has preceded Lent with a sort of mini season specifically devoted to helping us avoid that misunderstanding in its many forms.

Why so long, then? Well, partly to reflect the forty days’ temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. Lent has varied a little in length over the years, but at present it lasts forty days excluding Sundays.* But the Feast of the Baptism of Christ was weeks ago. The temptation in the wilderness isn’t so much as mentioned in the liturgy and readings for Ash Wednesday, nor is it really mentioned after the first Sunday in Lent. Despite providing the number forty, Jesus’ own fasting is surprisingly peripheral to actual observance of Lent.

Lent is really long in part because our sin is really deep rooted. Repentance is always in season. The whole Christian life ought to be one of repentance. As we hear God speak to us in his word day by day, as we hear the Word preached week by week, and when we prepare to receive communion, we should constantly be noticing areas of sin in our life, confessing them to God and turning away from them. Repentance is a mainstay of the normal Christian life, lack of repentance a hallmark of the nominal Christian life. Lent is not, then, the only time for repentance.

The value of a whole season where repentance is the special focus is that it gives time and space to see how deep rooted our sin is. To use a gardening analogy,** everyday repentance is like weeding the garden. Sins spring up to the surface, seemingly overnight, and it is a routine task to pluck them up and throw them on the compost heap.*** But sin is not just a light, surface problem with our hearts. It is more like Japanese knotweed than dandelions. Its roots go deeper than we know, and we can be very good at fooling ourselves about that. Behind every biting remark, or self-important act, every lustful thought, or neglected quiet time, every glass too many or irresponsible purchase, or every pang of envy, there lies a network of assumptions and ambitions and desires which make those sinful actions plausible to us, even though we believe in, hope for and love God. Most of us lack the time or the inclination to explore those assumptions, ambitions and desires in day to day life. Lent is a time when sustained attention can bring those deeper, darker parts of our heart to light. There are risks to introspection and we are, in my experience, good at talking about them. But done well, the prolonged self examination that Lent makes space for also affords the opportunity to develop a self awareness, a humility, and a depth to our repentance that eludes us in the hustle and bustle of daily life.

At the Reformation, Thomas Cranmer replaced the collect for Ash Wednesday with one he wrote himself. It is our constant companion throughout Lent. It’s one of the few collects I’ve actually memorised – not by deliberate effort, but because its constant use impresses the words on my mind.

Almighty and everlasting God,

who hates nothing that you have made,

and forgives the sins of all those who are penitent:

Create and make in us new and contrite hearts,

that we worthily lamenting our sins,

and acknowledging our wretchedness,

may obtain from you,

the God of all mercy,

perfect remission and forgiveness;

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Collect for Ash Wednesday (I’ve modernised the English)

The address for this collect emphasises essential truths about God our Father that we must continually remember as undergo the discipline of Lent. He is Almighty and Everlasting. These are not only qualities which should encourage our worship and repentance, they are a great comfort as we go about it. Whatever you find in your heart these next six weeks, God is powerful enough to deal with it. He is almighty. The repentant sinner will find nothing in their hearts that is beyond God’s power to free them from, whether in this life or in the resurrection. He is everlasting. Every sinner who has ever been redeemed in history has brought their case to him. You may be shocked by what you find in your heart this Lent. But God has seen and saved a hundred thousand cases like yours before.

Moving from God’s attributes to his actions, the acknowledgement in this collect says that God hates nothing that he has made and forgives the sins of all who repent. There’s a clear contrast between the ‘nothing’ and the ‘all’.

God hates nothing that he has made. We may find hateful things inside us. We may even be tempted to hate ourselves. But God hates nothing that he has made. He takes no pleasure in the death of a sinner (Ezek 33:11). Whatever you find in yourself this Lent, whatever you fail to find but fear may be there, God in his love offers to heal, to renew, to cleanse, to restore. He does not turn away in disgust. He loves the unlovely, that he might make us lovely.

God forgives the sins of all who repent. Nothing that presses against your conscience this Lent is beyond forgiveness. If you have repented of it, you are forgiven. That’s a guarantee. All who repent are received into God’s grace. One of the appointed readings for Ash Wednesday is Jonah 3, in which the brutal Assyrians repent and call a fast at Jonah’s preaching and find forgiveness. As the story of Jonah shows us, God is gracious and compassionate even to the worst of the worst, and forgives everyone everything when they repent.

The request at the heart of this prayer underlines that grace in all its almighty power. We do not ask God to look on our repentance. We do not ask him to take note of our fasting. We ask him to give us new hearts. Cranmer includes here a double reference to Psalm 51, one of the Psalms appointed for the day.**** Verse 10 of that Psalm asks for God to create a clean heart. Verse 17 says a broken and contrite heart is an acceptable sacrifice to offer God. During Lent, we are asking God to give us new hearts, clean ones, broken ones. It’s an uncomfortable request. We are asking God for sorrow for our sins.

The aspiration expressed for ourselves is both modest and magnificent. All we envisage doing here is lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness before God. Once more, the assigned reading may be in the background. In Joel 2 (assigned for Holy Communion) all the people do is call a fast and collectively lament their sins. We long to grow in holiness this Lent, and if we reach Easter having made real progress in our fight with sin, that will be wonderful. But none of that will happen without true contrition, an attitude that hates our sin and mourns over it. We know, as the Psalm reminds us, that this is a sacrifice God accepts and he will respond with perfect forgiveness.

But not because our tears are, objectively, able to win us forgiveness. The plea at the end is not just a liturgical punctuation mark, designed to let us know the collect is over. It confesses that all grace, including the grace shown to the repentant, is only, ever, always a result of the finished work of Jesus Christ.

Lent is a time for reflection, self examination, self denial. But it must not become a season for self absorption. Cranmer’s collect, our constant companion, continually refocuses us on grace.

*As a shout out to a friend who asked (you know who you are), this does raise the question of whether the Sundays ‘count’ as Lent or whether Lent is temporarily suspended for the Sundays. My answer is, firstly, while I think Lent is a helpful thing to observe and I take it seriously, it’s not good to bind your conscience over it, especially as the Church (at least the bit of it we belong to) leaves it up to you to decide how to observe Lent. Secondly, that the Sundays seem to be an exception because they don’t count towards the forty days, but thirdly, the existence of Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent when things lighten up a bit (a bit like the third Sunday of Advent) implies that somehow the other Sundays do have something of a penitential character. At home, we tend to relax things a bit on Sunday, but not as much as usual. If you’re looking for other days which are a bit of an exception, tomorrow is Prayer Book St Matthias’ Day (though CW has moved it to May) and March 25th is the Feast of the Annunciation.

**This analogy is similar to and inspired by a similar one Tim Chester uses in his excellent book ‘You Can Change’. If you’re looking for a book to read over Lent, you could do much worse than You Can Change.

***I have no idea what your spiritual compost heap is. Analogies have limits.

****Psalm 51 isn’t one of the ‘proper’ Psalms for Ash Wednesday, but it’s central to the Commination, which Cranmer intended to be used on Ash Wednesday.