Ash Wednesday Sermon
Ash Wednesday March 6, 2019
South Fellowship Church, Littleton, CO
I grew up attending a Presbyterian church that had an Ash Wednesday service. I didn’t know that Ash Wednesday was out of the norm for Protestants. I’ve come to find out that it’s not out of the norm for all protestants, but it is for some. So, if you’re here tonight and this service is a little bit strange for you, thanks for coming anyway. I hope you’re open to what God might want to do in your heart, mind, and soul – and I hope you hear his voice.
There will be a time in a few moments when we’ll do what’s referred to as the imposition of ashes. If that makes you uncomfortable, feel free to not participate. No pressure at all.
One of the questions you might be asking is: why do an Ash Wednesday service and why celebrate the season of Lent? My journey in learning about the liturgy and the liturgical year is not about nostalgia, even though it was part of my upbringing; it's about spiritual formation. The historic church acknowledged that there is a rhythm of the year. From the different seasons of the natural world, to the Jewish feasts and festivals that aligned with those seasons, to the church calendar – most things in life have a pattern. Most things in life are a journey.
The church calendar reminds us that life is built around rhythm and contrast. There are seasons in life when things are light and bright; and then there are season in life with things are dark and difficult. Having a rhythm for the year that acknowledges both extremes forces us to be honest and deep people. In a day and age that’s filled with cynicism and sentimentality, that is a powerful gift the church can give to humanity.
The liturgical year helps the church follow and emulate the life of Christ. It’s essentially a journey with Jesus through the life of Jesus - but it’s pilgrimage, not tourism. What I mean by that is we aren’t just instagramming and tweeting our way through Lent, we are living into it. We aren’t just recounting the stories; we’re entering into the stories. We ask hard questions about life, faith, sin, death, repentance, and renewal.
The liturgical year and days like Ash Wednesday are not requirements, but neither are they "empty rituals." They are sacred rhythms, routines that reinforce our desire to follow Christ and become like Him. They are helpful ways to center our lives on Jesus. They create the space for His Spirit to shape us. And they can be a powerful reminder that we are not the first to follow Christ, nor are we the only ones attempting to do so. We are joining a great cloud of witnesses - the people of God - travelling up this mountain together.
Lent was the earliest season to develop and be adopted by the church world-wide. It became a common Christian practice in AD 330, shortly after Christianity had been legalized in AD 313 at the Edict of Milan. The other seasons of the Church year (like Pentecost, Advent and Christmas) took shape later. By the High Middle Ages, the Church Year was fully developed.
Lent is a 46 day journey. The church decided not to count Sundays as fast days, so you might hear Lent described as a 40 day journey. That should bring to mind the 40 years Israel spend in the desert, the 40 days Elijah spent in the desert, and the 40 days Jesus spent in the desert culminating with temptation by the Devil.
I think it’s wise in each of those cases to ask: why? Why did God do it this way? He knew he was going to lead Israel out of the wilderness. He knew he was going to lead Elijah forward. He knew Jesus was going to start his earthly ministry. WHY NOT JUST SKIP THE PAGEANTRY AND GET TO THE RESURRECTION MORE QUICKLY? Ahhh, yes. This is our tendency, isn’t it? We want the destination, but we don’t relish the journey. We want the formation, but we don’t want to be formed. We want the benefits, but we don’t want to expend the effort. We want the resurrection without the journey to the cross.
What’s the point of getting together and putting ashes on our foreheads? Ash Wednesday is the beginning of this journey and every journey begins somewhere. I can remember when I ran a 1⁄2 marathon. All of the runners were gathered together at the starting line. People were hydrating like they were going on a hike in the desert. They were taking shots of energy drinks. We were readying ourselves for a race. That’s Ash Wednesday, it’s the start line in our journey of Lent; our destination is the cross and resurrection.
But this journey begins in a precarious way. We being the Lenten journey by remembering sin and death. Today, we look our two greatest enemies right in the eye; without flinching and without backing down. Let’s be honest, sin and death are two realities that we’d rather forget about or rationalize away with our humanistic project – but today, we look at them and look at ourselves – and we don’t look away.
The first enemy Ash Wednesday confront is sin. Sin is complex and multi-faceted. In the same way that there are certain overlooks that provide a better view than others, there are certain passage that give us a view of sin that are more robust and complex than others. You know what I mean? If you climb to lookout mountain, you get a view of the city. I think Genesis 3 is our greatest overlook to get a full view of sin. Listen to Genesis 3:1-9:
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” 4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. 8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
Let me point out a few things that we see from this vista in regards to sin: “Don’t touch the tree...” Sin is distortion of what God has said. “Your eyes will be opened...” Sin is doubt that God is good. “They took it and ate...” Sin is disobedience to God’s commands. “They covered themselves and hid...” Sin is disconnection from God’s life, God’s design, and God’s shalom... Distortion, doubt, disobedience, and disconnection. Maybe the best definition I’ve heard of sin was given by Cornelius Plantinga. He wrote, “Sin is the culpable disturbance of shalom.” He went on to say that God is for shalom and therefore against sin.
Today we pause and reflect on the reality of our lives. It’s not a time for us to pretend that we are someone we’re not – it’s a time for us to wipe the condensation off the mirror and to look deeply at our own sin, brokenness, and need. It’s a time to pray: God, search me and know me, see if there is any way offensive within me, and lead me in the way everlasting (Psalm 139:23-24).
As followers of Jesus, we should be far more afraid of not seeing our sin than of seeing it. Before you knew Jesus, seeing your sin should be terrifying; but after encountering Jesus, the idea of NOT seeing our sin should horrify us. Whatever it is that you’re carrying, it loses its hold and power when it gets brought out into the light of Divine love. In Psalm 32:3-5, David wrote:
3When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. 4 For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. 5 Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.
Let me give you a moment to think about ways that you’re participating in the fracturing of shalom – in your own life, in your life with God, in your relationships, and with creation. Maybe it’s in: not telling the truth; harboring bitterness or hatred; outright rebellion; in the need to defend yourself; maybe you’ve edged God out; or in a myriad of other ways we bought the lie of distortion, doubt, disobedience, and disconnection.
Rich Villodas wrote, “In scripture, repentance and ashes go hand in hand. Ash Wednesday orients our lives in this way. Now, typically, when we hear the word, “repentance” we often understand it through the lens of moralism. We hear repent and think, “do away with those dirty sins.” Change your life! Get in line! Clean yourself up! But these words and that lens lacks the weight of grace that accompanies repentance.” When Jesus preaches repentance, it’s because the kingdom of heaven has come near. God is at hand. Repentance is about joyfully and intentionally adjusting one’s life to this reality.
Repentance is a radical reorientation in response to God’s grace. On this holy day, we acknowledge our frailty and sinfulness. We freely confess our sin and imperfection and find freedom in laying our darkness at the feet of Light. This is a time for introspection and self-awareness.
A key theme remember in our journey through Lent is that sin has consequences. The scriptures are very clear – starting in Genesis 3 and weaving the thread all the way through to the end of the story: “the wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23) Don’t make arbitrary what the scriptures make specific – the punishment for sin is not an ill-explained, torment inflicted by a vindictive God, the wages of sin is the punishment of death.
Sure, you can raise a lot more money to build a basilica if take your queue from Dante and tell people the punishment of sin is being eternally tormented by God, but that’s simply not the story the Scriptures are telling. Adam and Eve are told what their punishment would be if they ate of the tree (Gen 2:17), and it’s reinforced after they eat of it. Genesis 3:19 reads,
“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you shall return.”
When we impose the ashes on your forehead in a few moment, we’ll say “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” Every place in the scriptures that it refers to humanity being dust, it means that we are mortal. We are mortal and we have always been mortal. Even Adam and Eve were mortal – their immortality was only found in their connection to God. They were immortal as long as they ate from the tree of life; but when sin entered the world, death entered the world as well – and they were disconnected from God their source of immortality and life.
Are you ready for some humbling truth? You are going to die. I am going to die. As followers of Jesus, we refuse to deny death. This affirmation runs counter to our culture where we’re mired in the denial of death. Think about it for a moment, we don’t like to think about death. We don’t even like to say the word. We use all sorts of euphemisms instead of saying someone died: “they passed on” or “they’re no longer with us.” No one dies of old age anymore – that’s too threatening. Now we die from diseases so that we live under the guise of believing that, if given enough time and ingenuity, we can defeat and cure even death.
However, there seems to be an invitation in acknowledging our universal mortality. It seems like that’s what Moses was getting at when he penned the words of Psalm 90:12:
“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
In a culture that spends billions trying to stave off death, Ash Wednesday offers a different way of seeing life. There is wisdom and freedom in remembering that we are mortal beings.
In looking intently at death, we are freed to get to embrace the life that death invites us to embrace. We live differently when we realize something is temporary – and as much as we’d like to ignore it, our lives on this earth are certainly that. So today we intentionally create space to remember that life is fragile and that we don’t have time to waste on nonsense. We might be convicted that our clicking and swiping; our cynicism and bitterness; our anger and our anxiety isn’t worth our limited time and energy. Maybe during this season our empty distractions are to be rejected and abundance is to be embraced. That’s why people have given something up during Lent – we intentionally jog ourselves out of monotony to remind ourselves there is a bigger story of abundance that’s being told.
Please hear me, Ash Wednesday is not a day to live in guilt. It’s a day to recognize our brokenness and our humanity and to trust in God’s unfailing love. Rich Villodas framed Ash Wednesday so well when he wrote, “It’s a day to freely come before God and declare, “I AM HUMAN, I AM DUST, AND YOU STILL LOVE ME.” When seen in larger context, Ash Wednesday sets in motion the pattern of the GOSPEL. It’s the start of a season that takes us into the land of resurrection. While it is true that “you are dust and to dust you shall return,” it is also true that God’s final word to the world is resurrection. Ash Wednesday points us not to a despairing of death, but to the death of despair.” We are being led to the glorious reality of life - but the journey to that life goes directly through the valley of death.
So yes, in a moment we’ll say “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust” but in the same way God spoke life into dust in the beginning, so too will he breathe life into dust at the resurrection in the end. So look at your SIN and embrace your DEATH. IT IS A REALITY, BUT IT’S NOT YOUR DESTINY.
On this Ash Wednesday consider a few questions for reflection:
Where am I refusing to embrace weakness?
What might it look like to repent in this season (i.e., aligning your life to the reality of God’s nearness)?