We are getting the following error whenever someone tries to access either the front end or the administrative end of our website:

"Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@saint-albans.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

As suggested, I checked the error log and all the error messages contained there read similar to the following:

Sun May 19 13:16:30 2013] [alert] [client 67.141.169.162] /home/sainta9/public_html/.htaccess: Invalid command 'BEGIN', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration.

I'd welcome any advice on resolving this problem. Thanks!