6As we work together with him,* we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. 2For he says, ‘At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.’ See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!–2 Corinthians 6:1-2
This reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is part of every Ash Wednesday in our Episcopal tradition. When read as the bridge between either of the Old Testament readings and Matthew’s Jesus call to a quiet piety during Lent, we have a link between action and contemplation. It is this link that I’m coming to believe that helps us live into the call in the Ash Wednesday Liturgy to the ‘keeping of a Holy Lent’
Isaiah 58:1-12 strikes a great counterbalance to Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 in calling us to pay attention to the needs of others and the world in Isaiah and a commitment to personal piety, sanctification and dare I say, divinization. What is before us is the invitation to live a life of action and contemplation in the present.
When I was younger and would say that, “I ought to do x” or “I want to do y”, I’d often hear, “now’s as good a time as any.” Sometimes Lent can become an excuse to postpone ministry and response to the world and its needs in favor of a commitment to personal reflection and piety. These Ash Wednesday texts seem to say that we are not living in a time of either/or, but rather that the keeping of a Holy Lent is a both/and proposition.
We go to our Lord in private and He hears the laments of our souls and the desires of our hearts and then we are equipped by that exercise to act in the name of God by the Power of the Spirit in the ways that are ours to do. And now’s as good a time as any to start!!!
On this Ash Wednesday, may we all learn to accept, embrace and celebrate and actively contemplative discipleship of Jesus, the Holy One of God. And now’s as good a time as any to start!
