I wonder if any of you have heard the poem, “To Keep a True Lent?” The poem is curious – modern, up to the minute – and yet it is over three hundred years old. It’s secret? The author, Robert Herrick, an Anglican priest and poet was thrown out of his vicarage in the wake or the English Civil War for refusing to follow the Protestants. But he loved life and Christ with a passion. He loved love, too, spiritual and physical. He is the kind of person most of us would enjoy knowing, because he was real, very honest, and he enjoyed people and beauty. You really need to read the poem aloud and listen as you read:
Is this a Fast, to keep
The larder leane?
And clean
From the fat of Veals and Sheep?
Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with Fish?
Is it to fast an houre,
Or ragg’d to go,
Or show
A downcast look, and sowre.
No; ‘tis a Fast, to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat
And meat
Unto the hungry soule.
It is to fast from strife,
From old debate,
And hate;
To circumcise thy life.
Robert Herrick knew what he was talking about; he wrote as a lover of life. Furthermore, and let us not be unduly or falsely modest about his love of the Anglican way. Perhaps we do not assert this sufficiently but at a time when the Church is in danger of losing her nerve and her temper over tough issues and reverses and embarrassing disobediences, she could well remind herself that there is much in her history and in contemporary event to commend the Anglican way of life and being and doing. For at its best, that way, the Anglican way is wise and wholesome. It is mature, adult, serious and able to be stern without being miserable, requiring the faithful to use their heads as well as hearts, steering between the Puritan’s distrust of life’s joys. The little known English poet, Kenneth Hare, wrote this in
“The Puritan through life’s sweet garden goes
To pluck the thorn and cast away the rose,
And hopes to please by this peculiar whim
The God who fashioned it and gave it him.”
Steering the Ark of Safety, the Church of God, between Geneva and Roman, Anglicans reject patronizing and brittle formulas that diminish mind and heart, spirit and body.
And Lent concerns both spirit and body, as year after year the Church provides us with the opportunity for nourishment and discipline of both soul and body. Our discipline then is not a focus on just the body or just the spirit, but both together and not merely for endurance. We welcome the discipline not because we welcome misery, but because it is another great opportunity for God to work in our hearts made more receptive and open to his work. As St. Paul put it, we may hope to “grow into the measure and the stature of the fullness of Christ.”
Because Christ wants us to grow into his fullness, into a divine life of abundance and he wants us to realize our full and proper potential as human beings. That is our preparation for eternal companionship with him – to grow into our full potential as human beings. We are obviously not there, not yet. He does not want us to cover ourselves with a fatty degeneration of soul which is bondage to our pride, our self pity, our preferences, our bitterness, our jealousies, our resentments all of which prevents growth, prevents loving anything more than we love ourselves.
Is this a Fast, to keep
The Larder leane?
And clean
From the fat of veals and Sheep?
It it to quit the dish
Of Flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with Fish?
Is it to fast an houre,
Or ragg’d to go
Or show
A downcast look, and sour.
Humorously and realistically, he puts his finger on silly phariscism that Christ showed to be fundamentally hypocritical and dishonest in its triviality – straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that others may praise them. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you… “And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” Matthew 6:1-6,16-18
Why go without meat in order to plan a lobster dinner? Why go without your cocktail in order to plan a party to end all parties on Easter evening? Why refrain from smoking if abstinence give you a bad temper, liable to kick the cat and impossible to live with for six week, moaning and whining and full of self-pit the whole time? Why spoil penitence with depression instead of hope? Why assume that penitence is alien to joy? Why economize if you keep the rewards of economy for yourself instead of giving them to the poor? And that brings us to Herrick’s fourth verse:
And that brings us to Herrick’s fourth verse:
“No; ‘tis a Fast, to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat
And meat
Unto a hungry soule.”
Christ recalls us again and again to the need to be sensitive to the sufferings of other, not just to fast from food to support famine relief (I hope we all do) but to make our Lent discipline an offering to the Lord – offered up the poor, the hungry, the broken, the sick, and they dying. Not just our imposing a bit of hunger upon ourselves in order feed others, but imposing a bit of hunger upon ourselves for the sake of love. Is there someone who wants your love? Is there someone you have shut the door of your heart to? Is there someone starving for human affection that we many love in deed and truth? Who do you love? Who do you resent? What relationship may be restored this Lent?
“It is to fast from strife,
From old debate,
And hate;
To circumcise thy life.”
It that not true? Can you hear the voice of God?
Ash Wednesday is the day of public penitence and sorrow for having offended God, and our ceremony is made poignant and profound as blessed ashes are imposed upon the forehead of everyone. The sight is a sign thousands of years old, a sign of sorrow and humiliation older than the Bible.
But why ashes? Well, consider what fire meant to the people of the Old Testament. It meant the presence of God. Moses was confronted with the burning bush in the desert. Fire, the Jews said, the fire of God’s presence was unapproachable and yet purifying. Everything is reduced to ashes when living fire has passed over it. And what has God to say of the dust of the ground? Go back to the story of the fall of man when God confronts man with poetry that still pierces the heart:
“Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Dust is God’s phrase for the worthlessness of the pride of man standing against him since “God is a consuming fire.” Dust and ashes denote the deep humiliation and shame of mankind that the Scriptures are full of. And so this special sign and symbol has a very real, deep, mysterious meaning for us when we wear it upon our foreheads. On Ash Wednesday when Christians come into the House of God to observe as a family the splendor of God’s forgiveness we first begin with grief for having offended him, and we hear the words that the Almighty spoke to Adam and Eve: “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.” And we have faith that our sorrow is not ignored, but God accepts the sacrifice of a broken heart, he picks us up, he forgives us, he dusts us off, and he send us out to do his will and to pay attention to the way we do his will; not to attempt too little and not to attempt too much, the first being self-indulgent and the second being prideful. God loves the cheerful giver and he wants us to give ourselves to him and to others in the joyous liberty of the children of God.
