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Monday 11 February 2013

Still you make what purchases you please

Lent begins a series of progressions or stages starting with the temptation of Jesus and tracing Jesus’ road to the cross and beyond, step by step, through Lent, Holy Week and Easter.

As Lent begins we are invited to join Jesus for forty days in the wilderness. Our victory in the temptation comes through confession and the Word. We are also invited to look across the wilderness to the promised land of Easter. We progress with movement to the cross. Jesus laments over Jerusalem displaying the heart of God. We are invited to put our trust in him and take our victory in Jesus but we also sense something of the hope, apprehension and desolation which Jesus’ friends felt in Lent and Holy Week, before being ambushed by the wholly unexpected, deep joy of Easter. In short, Lent prepares us to experience Easter.

The beginning of Lent is itself marked by Ash Wednesday which is always six-and-a-half weeks before Easter. Palms kept from last year’s Palm Sunday are burnt and the ashes mixed with holy water to make the greyish paste used to make the sign of the cross on the foreheads of those attending services on Ash Wednesday.

Ashes are a symbol of being sorry for things we have done wrong and want to get rid of forever. The ashing is also a reminder to that we all come from ashes, and to ashes we all will return. The marking on our forehead with ash marks our renewed commitment to Christ. We want to show we are sorry for the wrong things done in the past year.

None of this is intended to be simply personal or simply about the past. For instance, Operation Noah have made an Ash Wednesday Declaration supported by the leaders of many churches calling for repentance over the prevailing ‘shrug-culture’ towards climate change.

‘Traditionally, Christians commit themselves to repentance and renewed faith in Jesus Christ on Ash Wednesday,’ said David Atkinson, Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of Southwark. ‘We must live out that faith in relation to our damaging consumer economy, over-dependence on fossil fuels and the devastation we, as a species, are inflicting on God’s world. We believe that responsible care for God’s creation is foundational to the Gospel and central to the church’s mission.’

Some of those themes are visited in this sonnet which was inspired as Malcolm Guite set about the traditional task of burning the remnants of last Palm Sunday’s palm crosses: ‘I was suddenly struck by the way both the fire and the ash were signs not only of our personal mortality and our need for repentance and renewal but also signs of the wider destruction our sinfulness inflicts upon God’s world and on our fellow creatures, on the whole web of life into which God has woven us and for which He also cares.’

Receive this cross of ash upon your brow,
Brought from the burning of Palm Sunday’s cross.
The forests of the world are burning now
And you make late repentance for the loss.
But all the trees of God would clap their hands
The very stones themselves would shout and sing
If you could covenant to love these lands
And recognise in Christ their Lord and king.

He sees the slow destruction of those trees,
He weeps to see the ancient places burn,
And still you make what purchases you please,
And still to dust and ashes you return.
But Hope could rise from ashes even now
Beginning with this sign upon your brow.

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Bruce Cockburn - If A Tree Falls In The Forest.

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