A sermon preached by the Dean of Melbourne, the Very Revd Dr Andreas Loewe,
on Ash Wednesday 2025 the first in a series of Lenten Sermons on ‘Heart Work’:
Thank you for taking time out in the midst of your busy lives, stepping away from your workplaces and daily business to mark this day, and to receive the ancient sign of ashes on your foreheads. That stark symbol—dust to dust, ashes to ashes—is offered us as a visible reminder: not only of our mortality, but of our need for the life that only God can give. As the gritty ash touches our skin, we acknowledge our frailty, our finitude, and our fallenness.
You and I find ourselves at a threshold today. Before us stretches the season of Lent—forty days of reflection, repentance, and renewal. Like the people of Israel who once wandered forty years in the wilderness, you and I enter on our own wilderness journeys. Our promised land is the kingdom of God, resurrection life with Christ forever. And because our journey is to a kingdom that transcends time and place, we orient ourselves not by maps but God’s word, and we travel not across the Sinai Peninsula but in the landscape of our hearts.
Our first lesson from the prophet Joel speaks to us with urgency: ‘Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning’ (Joel 2.12). Even now—in the middle of our busy day, in the midst of our complicated lives, amid our successes and failures—God calls us to take stock, to take time, so that we may re-orient our lives towards him.
Notice how Joel describes this return. This is not a casual stop on the way, nor a brief nod by way of acknowledgment, but turning full circle. ‘Return with all your heart’, the prophet tells us—leaving no room for half-measures or divided loyalties. Such a wholehearted return involves both outward disciplines—’fasting, weeping, and mourning’—and inward transformation. Joel calls us not to ritualistic observance alone, but to a genuine change that begins deep within.
And that is precisely what Lent means. Lent is not primarily about giving up chocolate or coffee, though these disciplines may help shape our journey. Rather, Lent is fundamentally about inner conversion, inner change. Something that happens in secret; deep inside us. The outward practices are valuable precisely because they can support and nurture our inward renewal, because they can create space in our cluttered lives for God’s transforming presence.
Our first lesson continues with a striking image: ‘Rend your hearts and not your clothing’, the prophet tells (Joel 2.13). In ancient times, tearing one’s garments was a gesture of profound grief or distress—a visible, public display of emotion. But Joel suggests that such external demonstrations miss the point if they aren’t accompanied by a deeper rending. The tearing open of our hearts.
What does it mean to ‘rend our hearts’? It means allowing the protective layers that we have built around ourselves—layers of self-justification, pride, and denial—to be torn away, exposing our true selves to God’s gaze in the expectation that God will grant us his grace. It means becoming vulnerable before the One who sees all and knows all, and yet loves us so completely that he gifts us grace to return to him.
This opening to God’s gaze and grace is what we prayed for in our psalm: ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me’ (Psalm 51.10). The psalmist recognises that true transformation is God’s work within us, and not our work for God. You and I are not able, in our own strength, to cleanse our own hearts, or renew our own spirits. We can only open ourselves to God, who promises renewal at the most profound level.
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We live in a world that values hard work. Melbourne prides itself on being a city of industry and accomplishment. Many of you have come here today from workplaces where productivity and output are constantly measured. Our society celebrates the visible fruits of labour—promotions earned, deals negotiated, targets met. Hard work is about what we can achieve through our own strength, our own determination. It’s about the outcomes that others can see and applaud.
But Lent calls us to a different kind of effort. Not hard work, but heart work. I’ll be reflecting on this heart work in my preaching during Lent, but here are some pointers to get us going.
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Heart surgery remains one of the most complex and delicate medical procedures we perform. When surgeons work on a heart, they have to temporarily stop it, diverting its life-sustaining function to machines. The chest has to be opened, exposing our most vital organ to intervention. Following such profound invasion, recovery is not immediate—it requires weeks of careful management, months of rehabilitation, and a lifetime of attention to cardiac health.
As someone who has spent the past eight weeks nursing a broken arm, the journey of recovery from heart surgery seems particularly intimidating. Yet this medical reality may offer us a good analogy for the heart work of spiritual renewal. The work God does in our hearts is no less intricate, no less profound, no less intimidating. It requires an opening of ourselves to divine intervention—allowing God to access the very core of our being.
While hard work focuses on external achievements that are often temporary, heart work addresses the eternal. Hard work may bring us worldly success; heart work brings us closer to God. Hard work exhausts our resources; heart work renews them. Hard work is what we do for ourselves and others; heart work is what we allow God to do within us.
God’s work of transformation may go entirely unseen, but it does change us at the deepest level of our being. This is heart work—the difficult, unseen, and sometimes painful process of allowing God to rework us from the inside out. And like medical rehab after an injury or surgery, spiritual renewal is not instantaneous but demands our continued participation in the healing process.
In our second reading, Paul encourages us in this venture of opening ourselves to God’s grace: we are not to accept God’s grace in vain but need to recognise that ‘now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation’ (2 Cor 6.1-2). Paul not only tells us to take a leap of faith, but points to his own life story in making sense of the profound inner transformation that occurs when we surrender our hearts to God.
For the world, our transformation in Christ may look like a failure: as Christ died a lonely death on a forlorn cross outside the walls of his faith community, so our own allegiance to him, our opening our hearts to him, may be seen as a failure. By the standards of hard work—of visible achievement and worldly success—the Christian life often appears foolish. Paul knows that we may be treated as impostors, yet are true; as unknown, yet well-known; as dying, yet alive; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing (2 Cor 6.8-10).
But in God’s eye, this surrender, this opening of the heart, is the greatest victory. It is the beginning of authentic life. Just as Christ’s apparent defeat on the cross became the moment of ultimate triumph, so our own vulnerability before God transforms our weakness into strength, our brokenness into wholeness, our sorrow into joy.
That’s why Paul takes such care to remind us that the outward circumstances of our lives—whether marked by affliction, hardship, or calamity—cannot prevent the inner renewal God offers. Hard work may be thwarted by circumstance; heart work transcends it. Indeed, it is often in moments of greatest difficulty—when our hard work seems most futile—that our hearts are most open to divine healing. It’s often in those moments when our carefully constructed facades crack, when our own strength fails us, that God’s grace can enter most deeply to begin the work of healing.
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As we begin this Lenten journey together, remember that the God who seeks to rework us, the God to whom we return is, as Joel reminds us, ‘gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love’ (Joel 2.13). When we turn to God, we turn to the Heavenly Father who already faces us, who has been looking out for us and is waiting for our return. When we walk towards him, Jesus tells us in one of his best known stories, he will run to meet us on our way and bring us home.
This Lent, I invite you to move beyond hard work to heart work. To set aside time each day for that inner work of renewal. To come before God with honesty and vulnerability, asking him for the gift of a heart made clean and a spirit renewed. The ash cross we receive today is an outward token of our inward commitment. It shows that we are committed to this journey of inward transformation—the heart work of letting God remake us.
May this Lenten season be for each of us a time of genuine heart work. May we experience God’s healing and renewal at the very core of our being, that we might live more fully as disciples of the One who gave his life so that we may have life in abundance. And may we arrive at Easter with hearts more open, more loving, more centred on the heart of Christ himself.
Let us pray:
Gracious God, as we begin this Lenten journey,
open our hearts to your transforming grace.
Help us to turn to you, not just with outward observances,
but with genuine repentance.
Create in us clean hearts, O God, and renew your right Spirit within us.
Walk with us through these forty days,
that we might arrive at Easter renewed and restored,
better able to live as disciples of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.