Ash Wednesday: "the Church makes this time of our return a time of fast"

Turn ye even to me, saith the Lord, with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning - from Joel 2:12-17, appointed for the Epistle on the First Day of Lent, commonly called Ash Wednesday, BCP 1662.

When ye fast ... - the opening words of the Gospel, S. Matthew 6:16-21, on the First Day of Lent, commonly called Ash Wednesday, BCP 1662.

There is a false imputation cast on us, that we should teach there goeth nothing to repentance but amendment of life; that these of fasting and the rest we let run by, as the waste of repentance, no, that for fasting we proclaim a fast from it, and teach a penitence with no penal thing in it. That therefore this text by name, and such other, we shun and shift, and dare not come near them. Not come near them? As near as we can by the grace of God, that the world may know, and all here bear witness, we teach and we press both ...

To take them as they stand. Fasting; which, were there nothing else but this, that the Church makes this time of our return a time of fast, it shews plainly in her opinion how near these two are allied, how well they sort together ...

And thus preach we fasting ... So no physical, philosophical, political, but a prophetical, yea an evangelical fast. For if in very sorrow we are to fast when the Bridegroom is taken away, much more when we ourselves by our sins committed have been the cause of His taking, no, of His very driving away from us.

And must we then fast? Indeed we must, or get us a new Epistle for the day, and a new Gospel too. For as God here in the Epistle commends it, so Christ in the Gospel presupposeth it - Lancelot Andrewe's Ash Wednesday sermon, 1619, preached before the King at Whitehall.

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