Today is a day of solemn supplication for the Christian People, and so it is with a sure instinct that our first reading turns us back to the experience of ancient Israel.  On our day of solemn supplication, the prophet Joel reminds us of the worship of God in the Temple, and we discover an echo of our liturgy in their own.  The trumpet is blown, the ram’s horn or “shofar”; grain offering and drink offering is made; and the priests take their hallowed place between vestibule and altar.

What in fact we are given by the prophet Joel in this reading is the highly ritualized and stylized expression of some powerful emotions.  Joel and the community of faith seem to be in the midst of a life and death issue, a plague of locusts that has darkened the earth and led to a famine which challenges the well being of the community.  In response, Joel looks back to an earlier time, when the community had been threatened by invasion and destruction at the hands of an army from the north.  He reflects on God’s faithfulness in the past, in that instance, and on God’s faithfulness now; and holds out the hope of deliverance and renewal of life in the future.  All of which is premised on the People’s repentance, and their turning to God for forgiveness of sins.   The repentance finds expression in this hieratic and ritualized form, as the People of God are invited to come together to pray God to have mercy.

This is what we do today.  The liturgy invites us to express what is sometimes difficult to give voice to: our sorrow for our sins and our hope in God’s mercy.  This is a powerful theme, one which ought to touch us deeply.  The Ash Wednesday liturgy expresses what are surely life and death issues for each one of us.  Our sins separate us from God, and where sin brings us is a desperate place to be.  To acknowledge  our sins is to acknowledge failure, in a matter that is fraught with consequences of an eternal nature.  To give voice to this is to give voice to the shipwreck of our hopes, as the human race and as individuals.  The temptation is to either be overcome by grief and paralyzed, or to skate lightly over truths that can’t really be dealt with.

Here is where our liturgy, and the instincts of ancient Israel, come together.  In this stylized and ritualized form, the liturgy for Ash Wednesday allows us to acknowledge the unspeakable and seek what cannot be presumed upon except as a function of mercy: God’s forgiveness.  Through movement and ashes, through words and through symbols, we give voice to truths which have the power to lay us waste.  Through the liturgy and through the Sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood, we lay hold of a truth that is much more powerful than our fear and the sin that clings so close: God’s infinite capacity to forgive and transform us, through the death and resurrection of his Son.

The liturgy allows us to acknowledge the truth of our sin without our destruction and without letting us deny sin’s reality, and lets us grasp the hope of heaven.  The liturgy of Ash Wednesday gives stark and objective form to great truths, among which is the power of God to make and remake us, over and over again.  And therein lies its power, and its ability to bring us into the presence of God.

The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.

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