What do you think God is like?

This is the homily I offered to my work colleagues at our in-house celebration of Ash Wednesday this year. The imagery is inspired by the work of Marcus Borg. We all did a bit of the service, sitting in the round. A great way to start our Lenten Journey

What do you think God is like?

We carry this adage in our minds that we are "created in the image of God", so it is important that we cultivate an idea of what God is like so that we might recognise it when we see it.

There is an image of God that the Hebrew people picked up very early in their formation as a faith community - Lev 19:2 says "You shall be holy because the LORD your God is holy." And this image of God became something of a catch cry for them as it shaped more and more of their religious practice. So they developed all sorts of rituals to demonstrate and maintain their holiness - or purity, as it came to be.

This emphasis on holiness and purity has been carried over into the Christian church as we know it today, both in our emphasis on doctrinal purity and our reluctance to associate with those whose badness might be construed as tainting us. And much of what we associate Ash Wednesday with is borne out of those traditions. The symbolism of ashes was seen by the Hebrew people as a forceful reminder of the pervasiveness of human sin and the inevitability of human death. The Christian church adopted this symbolism readily and as people all round the world today will gather together and are marked with this symbol many will do so out of a sense of grief over their failure to be what they believe God has called them to be - Holy.

And so they will embark on this period of penitance we call Lent by declaring a total abstinence of some thing or another as a constant reminder of this failure and as a signal that they determine to be drawn into a deeper spiritual life with God.

Today I would like to call you towards a different image of God that might transform this period for you.

Shrove Tuesday in 1983 brought one of the most awsome experiences to Melbourne. A storm of Wimmera dust rolled in over the city, 1500ft high, turningthe mid-afternoon into late evening darkness. I doubt that anyone living in Melbourne was not taken somehow aback by this experience - it was a natural phenomonon but somehow rather terrifying. we were not to know then that the very next day devastating bushfires would erupt around the state, surrounding the city of Melbourne on three fronts and threatening Adelaide as well. I recall the day as if in slow motion, gripped by the radio being used to pass on messages, and terrified by the smoke in the air. At one stage I went out the back to see if the fire was in our street - yet we were actually more than 50kms away from the fire fronts.

That Ash Wednesday blackened far more hectares of forest and farmland than the fires Victoria experienced last year and the whole state was just as mortified then as it is now.

Not long after the fires I travelled out of Melbourne into one of my favourite parts of Victoria, the coastal areas between Geelong and Warnambool where the fires had been particularly severe. There I saw something that has forever transformed for me the meaning and symbolism of Ash Wednesday. As we drove through bushland and forest we saw hectares of stark skeletons of trees with thick trunks covered in fresh green foliage, even if the blackened ends of branches poked out crasily towards the heavens. The blackened trunks and the white grey earth had been transformed into vibrantly living symbols of the resilience of God's presence among us.

I mentioned recently to a friend that an alternative to the image of God that Leviticus gave to us is found in the words of Jesus himself. In Luke 6:36 at the end of a little saying about loving your enemies, Jesus says "Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate." Here, I said, was a new way of understanding how God wants our lives to reflect his being. My friend laughed and said how glad he was to hear that. "I don't do HOLY very well" he said, "but I can do COMPASSIONATE."

When you look at the things Jesus said and did and the people with whom he associated it is not hard to see that he spent a lot more time living out the COMPASSION of God than the HOLINESS of God. In many ways the things he said and did actually challenged and repudiated the purity and holiness codes of his day.

Today I am inviting you all into a transformational experience. Rather than entering into this Lenten time with a purpose in your mind to make your life a little bit more HOLY, I would like to encourage you to take up Jesus' example and examine how you might better express the COMPASSION of God in the thinsg you say and do and the people with whom you associate.

Instead of abstaining from something or another, perhaps you might take up something new. Last year I decided to give a little extra donation every week of Lent to a charity, and I went through the STUFF of my belongings parting with a number of things I no longer used - including a Pentax SLR camera and goodies (all to a loving home).

Can you learn during the Lent to take a more inclusive view of God's Kingdom, sharing with Jesus his care for the marginalised and outcast of our day? Can you be especially mindful of compassionately mending broken relationships out of a conviction that we are all recipients of God's grace and mercy and should therefore practice the passing of it on to those near to us?

Let us spend a few moments in silence considering ways in which we might express the compassion of God. As my friend reminded me, we don't do HOLY very well, but we can all do COMPASSION.