Ash Wednesday: God's Nature is the Foundation of Forgiveness
Introduction
Good evening friends. Welcome to Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten season. I find this to be a helpful 40 days each year to pause, examine, and recalibrate. It is a chance to make sure we’re on the right track. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the opportunity to put together furniture from that blessed Swedish store, but I have. And I can remember starting the process of putting together a dresser. I spent about 45 minutes putting things together when I realized that I reversed two of the boards and so all the work I’d done had to be completely undone before it could be redone again. Oh how frustrating it was. And sometimes life happens this way as well. We start off following Jesus, making decisions and forming habits each day. Our vocations, prayer lives, our friendships, the daily routines, our parenting patterns, habits of leisure, exercise, and coping patterns become hardened as we grow comfortable with the composite results of the many decisions we’ve made over the course of years. We find ourselves heading the wrong direction and we have to start over.
Tonight we remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. And yet, God is the one who formed us from the dust of the earth and loves us, dusty icons though we are. This season begins with the God who created us in love and whose love invites us to turn towards him and return. The ways we have gotten off track, the things we’ve built incorrectly, the harms we have caused in thought, word, and deed, are not beyond God’s grace to heal. Contrition, almsgiving, fasting, and prayer are not displays of piety to bypass our pain and harm, but invitations to be restored by the God who loves us and gave himself to death on a cross for us, to raise us with him and restore us to perfect communion with him that begins now and lasts eternally. He invites us to reorient ourselves to his kingdom through rhythms that lead to genuine repentance.
God’s love is the basis for our repentance
In Joel 2, which we read earlier, the prophet describes the Day of the Lord, and compares it to a locust plague. The destruction of the Babylonians was described like locusts who would come into Judah’s territory and decimate everything. The text says that before the locusts the land is like the garden of Eden and after they pass through they leave a desolate wilderness and nothing escapes them. There is a concept scholars talk about though with Old Testament prophecy, which is the concept of conditional prophecy. Sometimes when things sound like promises in prophetic literature they’re actually invitations for Israel to repent so God may do the opposite of what was predicted. And Joel 2 is an example of conditional prophecy.
This is why we encounter verses 12 and following, where the LORD tells Judah to return with all their heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning. They are called to rend their hearts and not their garments. They are familiar with what religious rituals to carry on doing, but God isn’t interested in empty ritualism; instead, His is interested in a heart that is beginning to turn towards him for his help. And all of this is possible because the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounds in steadfast love. He relents from punishment. This is who he is. It functions like an old covenant creed and it shows up in the torah, here in Joel, and in our Psalm reading tonight. God’s character is the foundation of the possibility of forgiveness.
I like the way that verse 14 is rendered in the New Living Translation, “Who knows? Perhaps he will give you a reprieve, sending you a blessing instead of this curse. Perhaps you will be able to offer grain and wine to the LORD your God as before.” It is more certain than it sounds. The idea is that they need to begin the process of repentance and see what God will do.
Sometimes we become aware of our brokenness and we get really comfortable with it. I was listening to an interview where they were talking about people who appear successful. Their superpower is that they can do a lot and do it well. And yet doing a lot and doing it well is often a drive and addiction, or coping strategy for keeping someone from dealing with the heartaches and hurts so that they become truly human again in Christ. Our allergy to suffering is mitigated by our drive to perform. And then we learn to believe that if we just keep going we’ll be fine because beginning to repent and heal is to admit that we’re broken and that kind of vulnerability is scary because we might lose our superpower. Lent is a great invitation to become fully human, admit the brokenness, and begin turning toward the Lord and to rest on his faithfulness. His character is the foundation of our hope.
Repentance and spiritual rhythms are to orient us to God’s kingdom
Jesus teaches us something very similar in Matthew 6 which we read tonight. He cautions his follower to watch how they keep their religious observance and spiritual rhythms. There is a way to do a checklist of duties that make us look alright and completely miss the substance of the real work of repentance. The nature of prayer in the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 6 is to form us and reorient us to the kingdom of God and where God is at work in our world. Fasting, giving alms, and prayer are the three spiritually foundational habits of Lent. In the end, they are for our formation more than appeasing God’s desire for moral people.
Their aim and goal is to attune us to God’s work. It reminds me a bit of when Ashley and I had a community garden plot a long time ago. The whole thing was covered in crab grass and we both recognized the problem. Because she and I are wired the way we are, I started scraping off the grass at the surface level with the broad end of a pick axe. I was perfectly happy to throw some seed down and some top soil on it. Now I did do that for part of it, but within a few weeks, plants came up, but so did the grass. Ashley, on the other hand, took to the shovel and went deep. It was slow work, but substantive work. Her work did not cover as much square footage, but where she dug, the grass did not grow back. And in the long run, I had to go back and do it her way. It was harder to see the progress on the slow and substantial work in the short-term, but in the long run, this was the only way to have a healthier garden. I think we often just scrape at the surface spiritually.
When someone comes to me for confession, if they say “I want to confess my pride,” then I will invite them to tell me what pride looked like for them. Vague senses that something is wrong is a good start, but the roots go deep. We need to spend time with where our overreactions and deep sensitivities are. We need to examine our places of insecurity, fear, and cynicism. How many times do we make a joke about something and with a smirk on our faces, we subtly communicate that someone’s opinion is not only unwelcome, but that they are a deeply flawed individual for holding to their conclusions? The religious habits that form us and please God are the ones done with integrity. They work heuristically. As we come to an awareness of how we are going the wrong way, then we begin to honestly come to the Lord with a desire for him to rightly align our desires, thoughts and loves. Even the smallest of desire for repentance is met with the fullness of the grace of God because of who he is. Then as we are formed through these rhythms, we begin to move the right direction, build the right way, become rightly aligned with God’s love and his will. In other words we learn to long for God’s will and love what God loves.
Conclusion
This Lent, let me encourage us to be vulnerably broken before the Lord because God’s very self is compassion and he longs to meet us in his grace. Admitting our brokenness is not to give up our superpowers; it is to become fully human. As you receive a bit of ash on your forehead this evening and you hear the words “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”, be encouraged that God longs to restore you to the dusty, image-bearing, icon he has made you to be.
