Trinity in the City of Boston
Ash Wednesday, Year C, 2025
March 5, 2025
Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Create in us clean hearts Oh God and renew a right spirit within us.
Turn our eyes towards you, our hearts and minds, that we know you with all that we are. AMEN
Good morning/mid day/Evening on this Holy Day.
As we begin this day and season, I want to invite you to think for a minute:
When was the last time you looked deeply into someone’s heart and held time with them?
When you held the gift of their brokenness and put your own needs aside to just be present.
To see the other’s pain and belovedness?
Not to fix, not to advise, not to judge…
Rather, to be present with, to listen to deeply,
To remind the other that they are not alone, (without or without words) that there is God’s light and love within them despite everything else that is being said to them, despite the world falling on their shoulders, in spite of their own thoughts of inadequacy, that they are enough.
Our world is filled with too much judgement, brokenness, and heart wrenching circumstances to ignore those around us….
It is easy to fill our schedules with things that we think will make our hearts happy, make our hearts sing, or perhaps unintentionally bring more heartache. We can find ourselves doing things for the sake of doing things, over and over and over again.
Dissatisfied and frustrated, numbed and isolated.
St Augustine is attributed to saying that our hearts are restless until they rest in God.(1)
Restlessness, that insatiable craving of something more, something else……
Each year we gather on this holy Wednesday to begin our season of Lent, to listen, to reflect, to pray and to pause…….
Together we begin an intentional period of time for pausing, praying, and making space to see God in our midst and wonder how does God’s sacrificial love call to each of us?
We slow down. (or attempt to)
We change our habits…
Our liturgy shifts……
Our music changes
We take on things and we let things go
And like our Scriptures today, we ask the question“why”
Our reading from Isaiah today speaks volumes of the joy of our faith that we are called to..we are to shout with joy! (It is OKAY TO HAVE JOY IN LENT!) To sound the trumpets- those raucously joyful instruments that announce royalty, that punctuate our Christmas and Easter services, be loud with this sort of joy about the God you not only love but LOVES YOU more than you can imagine
Isaiah continues, as any good prophet would, to share the how.
Inviting his listeners, the writer speaks to the practices of the people.
Let all that you do be done with love, otherwise stop what you are doing.
God wants your heart’s devotion, not your mindless recitations. If your actions are not from the depths of your heart, perhaps it is time to change what you are doing.
Give it up!
Jesus speaks likewise, in his depiction of the tax collector and the Pharisee, Jesus illustrates to his disciples that your actions are not for others to see your piety and be full of awe of your works,
Rather, your actions should be such that your neighbors, and you, might see God more clearly,
that your heart be restored in right relationship with God.
Do those things.
Be seen not for the amount of church you go to, rather be known because of the faith and hope that you live out in the world.
God looks to our hearts, to love us into transformation.
God sits with our hearts, holding us deeply as we need to be still, to be known, to be loved.
In this letting go and being still, we too are transformed.
In the mini deaths, the endings, the things we let go of, we too can be reborn in the ashes and be a new creation, a new chapter, a new understanding of the God right in our midst.
God, accepting us right as we are, in our brokenness, our feeble attempts to do right, also gently calls us to let go, to stop creating our own madness and live fully into our belovedness.
My prayer for you is that in this holy season of Lent, the season may give you opportunities to make space to listen to the indwelling of the spirit in your own heart.
May your restless soul find rest in God and may the practices you set upon this season nourish your relationship with God and those around you as you too embrace the trumpets joy of God’s Love.
Amen.
(1) https://www.vatican.va/spirit/documents/spirit_20020821_agostino_en.html