Ash Wednesday Sermon

I'm going to start a new thing for my blog.  Each week I will be putting my sermon on there, for those who either are unable to join us for worship, or who want to reflect on something from it a little more. 

Without any further ado, here is the sermon from Ash Wednesday.  The text from the Bible is Joel 2:12-19, with the title: Ash Wednesday: A Journey of Forty Days.

As a pastor, you end up looking in a lot of different places for inspiration or stories when it comes to the task of preaching.  As always, there are some places that I have looked that are better than others.  But in one book that I read a number of years ago, there was this story.  I’m not sure if it’s a true story or not, but for the sake of our time together tonight, we’ll just assume that it has some basis in reality.  It’s the story of this church, and the people of that church had this strange tradition.  As they would enter the building, there was this one spot on the wall that they would go up and touch.  They taught new people to the church that they were supposed to do this as they entered for worship.  It was a tradition that had been in place for centuries. 

Finally, one day a visitor to the church stopped and asked someone why everyone touched the spot on the wall.  After getting over the shock of actually having someone question the tradition, the person admitted some confusion.  He didn’t know why they did it.  It was just tradition.  And so, they started asking around.  Finally, they came to someone who knew where the records were, since the people they were asking didn’t seem to know.

So they searched through the records.  Guess what they found.  At one point in the past, a renovation had been done on the church.  It has previously been an orthodox church, and the spot that people were now touching was where an icon had formerly been stationed.  When the church had new occupants, some of the same people had stayed.  And the people who had remained would go up to the spot and touch it in remembrance of the icon that had formerly sat there.  In the years and decades and centuries since then, the practice had continued, but no one remembered why they actually had that practice and tradition.

As I said, I’m not sure if that’s a true story or not.  But there is a lesson there, and it’s one that I take seriously.  If we don’t teach the things that we do, we tend to forget them.  And when we forget why we do the things we do, then they start to lose their meaning.  And if they lose their meaning, eventually someone will ask why we are doing it, and wondering if it’s all that necessary to continue on.

Tonight we observe Ash Wednesday.  It’s the doorway into the Christian holy season of Lent.  And right there from the beginning, it seems good for us to pause and ask the question.  Why do we observe Lent?  What is Lent?  What’s the thing with Ash Wednesday?  Why do we have these crosses of ash on our foreheads now?  I have learned over the years that there are likely more than a few of us sitting here tonight who are thinking such questions in our minds.

So please bear with me as I take this teaching moment.  Some of you already know this, but it doesn’t hurt to have the refresher either.  Lent is a season of forty days that leads us up to Good Friday, where we observe the death of Jesus on the cross with our sin upon Him.  If we count back forty days, not including the Sundays, you arrive at a Wednesday.  Traditionally, that day has been observed as Ash Wednesday.  It’s a solemn day in which we reflect upon our need for God to send us a Savior, and a time to reflect upon the sin which separates us from God.

So the next question typically is, why forty?  Forty is a pretty significant biblical number.  When Noah loaded up the ark, we’re told that it rained for forty days and forty nights.  When Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt, their failure to believe that God could deliver the promised land to them caused them to wander for forty years in the wilderness, until the unbelieving generation had gone the way of their fathers.  And in a kind of re-enactment of that wilderness wandering, Jesus was baptized and then driven by God’s Spirit into the wilderness to fast and be tempted by Satan for forty days.

That’s why we began tonight with forty chimes from the handbells.  That’s also why the season is forty days long.  So now you might say, okay, we’ve got the reason that it’s forty days long.  So now what do we do or think about during those forty days? 

You’ve probably heard some people talk about giving up things for the season of Lent.  It’s a tradition that traces back for a very long time.  As we go through Lent, we think about what caused us to be in need of a Savior from God.  The answer, of course, is sin.  We recognize that there are things that we do in life that are contrary to God’s will and design, His commandments.  And so, one of the observances that God’s people have engaged in through the Lent season is that of giving up a sinful behavior, battling against it, and working to overcome it in their lives.

We hear a little bit of that tonight in our reading from the prophet Joel.  “Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with morning.  Rend your hearts and not your garments.  Return to the LORD your God.”  Through His spokesman, God was calling for His people to give up their sinful ways and to return to Him.  There was much going in the lives of God’s people that was drawing them away from Him.  And remember, this is the God who had given the promise to their ancestor Abraham.  He had freed their ancestors from the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.  He had conquered the promised land for them, and had given them all they needed to become a prominent land. 

The problem was, all of those things kept getting in the way of their trust in the LORD their God.  They looked to things like the strength of their military, or the wealth of the nation, rather than to the LORD their God for their good and protection.  And yet, God called them back time and time again.  Return to me.  Come back to me.  Give up the things that are drawing you away and come back to the one who cares for you, and who gives you everything you need.

As we walk through this season of Lent together, one of the practices that some people engage in is giving up something.  In a sense, it’s a bit like Jesus fasting in the wilderness.  We give up something, and then, when we think about that thing, we turn our focus and attention to God instead of that thing.  It becomes a spiritual practice.  When we think about that thing, when we crave that thing, we then turn instead to our God in prayer.  We ask Him for strength in the battle. 

As we do such things, we’re also called to recognize who it is who has authority over our lives.  You and I, as Americans, have been raised from a very young age to believe that it’s my life and I can do with it what I want.  As we look at our lives, and remember that we have our lives from God, and that God has created us to live in certain ways with one another, we realize that God is the one who truly has authority in our lives.  God doesn’t have us reflect on that because He’s an overbearing God, or because He wants to be mean or spiteful toward us, especially since we haven’t done it His way, but instead, He wants to show us the way that He created us to live. 

That’s why we take the time during Lent to reflect on our sin.  And that is not the easiest thing in the world for us humans to do.  We aren’t a people that likes to be told when we are doing things wrong.  We don’t like to feel guilty.  And yet, it’s inevitable that, if we reflect on our sins, we will encounter the guilt that comes from going against God’s will and design for our lives.

God wants us to acknowledge that guilt.  That’s why He speaks through Joel and says for us to return.  We need to know that we have wandered away from Him.  He wants us to recognize our wandering.  But here’s the thing.  God doesn’t want us looking at that guilt and then beating ourselves up over it unnecessarily.  It gets real easy for us to see our guilt, and to recognize what that calls for from God, and then to kind of wallow in our guilt.  We lose sleep over it.  We can’t seem to get it out of our heads.  And that’s not what God wants from us as we reflect on our sin and guilt.

Our reflection serves a purpose.  It’s the purpose that God speaks about through Joel.  We reflect on our sin in order to return our lives and our hearts to God.  We don’t want to do the things that go against what God created us to do.  We want to live in line with God’s will and design.  We want to return to God.

God called the people of Joel’s time to return to Him.  And as they rend their hearts, and as they fasted, and as they wept and mourned, Joel also reminds them, and us, of what we will find as we reflect on our sin and return to the LORD our God.  As Joel says it like we heard tonight, “for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and He relents over disaster.”

We don’t reflect on our sin to make ourselves feel more guilty, or to beat ourselves up.  We do it because we recognize that we have a God who is more than gracious toward us.  We have a God who wants us to recognize the things that separate us from Him, and to feel regret that we are separated from Him.  And that’s when He reminds us of who He is.  He is a God who is gracious.  He’s slow to anger.  He abound in steadfast love toward His people.

Tonight, we start our journey to the cross and the empty tomb.  We start our journey with the call to return to the LORD our God, who is a gracious God.  We start our journey in God’s grace.  The LORD our God has chosen you in Christ Jesus, even from before the world began.  You are His, and God has known you from the very beginning.

Our journey is also a reminder that we live each day in God’s grace.  Every day, Jesus renews us in His life, death, and resurrection, as we live daily in our baptism.  God has washed us and made us His own through those cleansing waters, and we live that cleansing out daily. 

And as we walk that journey, not only through Lent, but throughout our lives, we discover a God of endless grace.  We will falter along the way.  We will have need to return to the LORD our God.  And yet, we continually find one who is slow to anger.  We find one who has given His life for us, and now gives us the gift of new life.  So, as we walk our journey with Jesus to the cross and the empty tomb again this year, we know the reason for the journey.  We know why we reflect on our sin and battle against it.  And we give thanks that ours is a God who is gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.  That is all yours, through our Savior, Jesus Christ.  Amen.