Lent: A Season to Focus on Living as Cruciform People of God

Sermon delivered on Ash Wednesday, March 1, 2017, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of tonight’s sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Joel 2.1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51.1-17; 2 Corinthians 5.20b-6.10; Matthew 6.1-6, 16-21.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of a 40 day season we call Lent. It is a time for self-examination, penitence, self-denial, study, and preparation for Easter. In accordance with my invitation for us to keep a holy Lent, I want us to focus this evening on becoming cruciform or cross-shaped people. How can we use the Lenten disciplines to help us live our lives as people of God? To answer this question fully would require a LONG sermon because this is a complex subject, and while you are used to long-winded bloviators who occupy this pulpit (I speak of Frs. Gatwood, Sang, and Bowser, of course), I will be as brief as possible (as I am wont to do). Hopefully I can lay a solid groundwork for us to develop our thinking and theology during this Lenten season and beyond so that we can be open to God’s healing love and mercy as we grow into the likeness of Christ and have God’s image restored in us.

We start with our OT lesson tonight with its call to repentance by God’s people. The problem, of course, is Israel’s failure to be the people God called them to be, to bring God’s healing love and justice to bear on God’s sin-sick and evil-infested world as God called them to do through Abraham. God warns Israel through his prophet that they too will have to endure the great and terrible Day of the Lord, where God will finally put to right all the wrongs of God’s world. These kinds of warnings usually conjure up in us visions of an angry and vindictive God who is bent on (and indeed even delights in) punishing human beings for our moral failures. But this is to misread the text badly on several levels.

First, it is to misread the character of God. To be sure, the Day of the Lord promises to be awful for those who are unreconciled to God (hence, Paul’s exhortation to us to be reconciled to God in our epistle lesson). But the Day of the Lord is as much about redemption as it is punishment. Why? Because on that day, God promises to put to rights all that is wrong with the world. And we ought to understand this at a fundamental level. We look around at all that is wrong in this world—the suffering, hatred, selfishness, polarization, unfairness of things, to name just a few—and we yearn for a day when something will be done about it. That’s why we have human justice systems—to address wrongs and attempt to restore balance and harmony. But human justice systems, even if they were perfect, can only go so far. A murderer, e.g., might receive a just sentence, but the victim is still dead and his loved ones still suffer and grieve. Only God can execute justice fully and perfectly. Only God can put right the wrongs that we can’t, by, e.g., raising the murdered victim back to life. We should see God’s righteousness more as a verb than a noun. God’s righteousness  means that God’s justice is at work, putting to rights that which is wrong. Israel’s sin, as well as ours, is that they didn’t take God’s call to them to live out his righteousness (justice) seriously. When God finally does put all the wrongs to right, the whole creation will rejoice and sing (Psalm 96.10-13; Romans 8.18-25)! This is hardly an indication of a vindictive and blood-thirsty God!

A second way to misread our OT lesson (or any lesson like it in the Bible), is our failure to take seriously the nature of Sin. Many of us, myself included, were taught (incorrectly) that sin is nothing more than doing bad stuff or the wrong things. We want to catalog a list of sins for us to avoid and then go about about trying to avoid doing those things on our list. In this framework, sin is really nothing more than us making good choices and then following our list of dos and don’ts. And if sin is nothing more than this, we will inevitably conclude that God can easily issue a blanket pardon for all the times we’ve misbehaved. If this were true, why do we need the cross? Why can’t God just forgive our sins and everyone live happily ever after?

But to think this way ignores the biblical witness about the nature of Sin. The NT writers, especially Paul, see Sin as something much more sinister than breaking God’s rules. They see Sin as a malevolent force and power that enslaves us so that we cannot act as God’s true image-bearing creatures. Sin holds us in its power so that we really are unable to act rightly and justly as the fully human beings God created us to be to rule over God’s world. The power and dynamic of Sin is analogous to the unconscious impulses that drive our personalities in unhealthy ways, making us, e.g., perfectionists, abusers, addicts, schemers, bullies, fanatics, adulterers, and all the rest. This is not to excuse Sin but to understand its power to enslave us, and it is the biblical witness that the entire human race is so enslaved. That’s what is wrong with God’s world in a nutshell. The real problem is not the sins we commit, but the power that compels us to commit them and our inability on our own to break free from this power. Don’t believe me? How many New Year’s resolutions have you kept over the years? How’s that diet going or your efforts to break your porn addiction? The human race is enslaved by the power of Sin and when that happens, our relationship with God is fundamentally ruptured and we are lost because God cannot and will not countenance any form of evil. When we by God’s grace finally understand the awful truth about the power of Sin and its utterly corrupting and death-dealing influence in our lives, we will read warnings about the great and terrible Day of the Lord with new understanding (not to mention fear and trembling). And this is where the OT teaching about repentance falls short because as we have just seen, we are so thoroughly corrupted and enslaved that it is impossible for us to repent enough to remove God’s justice from being executed on us. We simply don’t have it in our power and we are part of the problem God promises to address when God promises to put to rights all that is wrong with God’s world.

Fortunately this grim and depressing reality is not the final word in God’s story of redemption and our lives, thanks be to God! The cross of Jesus Christ is the final word on the matter and must always be the focus of our thinking and living because we are called to be cruciform or cross-shaped people of God. The cross is the final word on Sin because it is the power of God to destroy the power of Sin in our lives. On the cross, we see God’s perfect love for us as well as his justice executed on our behalf. As Paul tells us, on the cross, God condemned our sin in the flesh, both our sins and the power of Sin in our lives that caused us to commit those individual sins, so that God would not have to condemn us. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, Jesus, God become human, died for our sins, offering us God’s forgiveness instead of God’s condemnation. When by faith we receive the gift of God’s justice and love and accept God’s accompanying forgiveness, we are set free from the power of Sin. By God’s grace and in the power of the Spirit, God reorients our hearts toward doing God’s will and leads us to an obedience of righteousness, i.e., God leads us to act justly and in the manner God created us to act in the first place. The truth of the matter is this. We will either live for Sin if its power remains unbroken in us or we will live for God, when we accept by faith God’s gift of healing love and justice offered to us in the death of Jesus.

On the cross, God put all the world’s wrongs to right and bore the terrible brunt of God’s own justice himself by becoming human for our sake. In doing so, the power of Sin was broken, we receive God’s mercy and forgiveness, and are literally offered new life and real hope. Only God has the power to do this and it is the testimony of the NT that God has indeed done this on our behalf. Only when we begin to realize what God has done for us on the cross can we truly bear the fruit of repentance out of a profound love for God accompanied by a sense of release that must flow from a real and lively faith. God has already broken the power of Sin by offering us forgiveness on the cross. Our only appropriate response is repentance, the resolve to live our lives justly and rightly in the power of the Spirit.

But we want to protest. This can’t be true. God hasn’t broken the power of Sin. The world and our lives are still a mess! Well yes they are, at least from our limited and finite perspective. But we have the resurrection that testifies that one day when Christ returns in power and glory (the NT version of the great and terrible Day of the Lord), his victory over the power of Sin and the powers behind it won on the cross for us will be revealed fully. But that is a theme that must wait till Easter. Before we get to the resurrection, however, we must grapple with the cross and all for which it stands. Is this the Good News you believe in and live out or are you settling for something inferior? If you are, you are still having your very life and humanity sucked out of you.

The power of the cross, the power of the suffering love of God to destroy the power of Sin and offer us both his restorative justice and healing love, is the reason we must become cruciform people of God. And here is where the rubber hits the road and we can apply what we have just talked about. God calls us to be his suffering lovers to bring God’s healing and justice to bear on the world. It’s what Jesus meant when he told us we must deny ourselves and take up our cross if we are to follow him. But if we don’t understand the gravity of Sin, if we still look at sin as simply a list of dos and don’ts that can be addressed by our own self-help, we will resist our Lord’s call to suffer on his behalf for the world. This very mindset of minimizing the gravity of Sin and its power to enslave us is itself the very product of the enslaving power of Sin!

We all know how this goes. What’s all this fuss about Sin and sins, we ask our Lord? Why do you want us to suffer? We know a better way to do things! Everybody knows there is not enough to go around in this world so we have to look out for ourselves. Nobody else will. And if we have to act selfishly or unjustly to get what we need, who really cares? I care, comes the reply. I died for you so that you can be freed from being a slave to Sin so that you can act in truly human ways. But you insist otherwise. You want to be the master of your own life and destiny when doing so is impossible. I call on you to act justly, to take care of the oppressed and to have generous hearts. But you refuse because you do not know or trust me. And how can you  know and trust me if you don’t pray to me and ask me to show you my will for you as my people in your daily lives, both collectively and individually? How can you know and trust me if you don’t read my story in Scripture? How can you know and trust me if you don’t worship me in Spirit and truth or feed on me and proclaim my death until my coming again? And without know-ing and trusting me, you’ll act selfishly because without me you are still enslaved by your Sin.

But we protest. We don’t have time to read and study and pray and worship you. We have too many other responsibilities and things to do. We can’t be truly generous to the poor and needy. We have our own needs and wants. We have retirement to consider and $10,000 watches to buy so that people will know how truly rich and important we are. And besides, we’re really good people. We don’t do that many bad things.

Do you see the power of Sin and its corrupting influence at work here that leads to this mindset? In place of God’s generous heart, we are miserly. We look for reasons why we cannot do what we are called to do, from living our lives to finding a building we can make our parish home and base of operations, we are too quick to tell God and each other why we can’t deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him, i.e., why the status quo must be maintained. We know better than the Lord, right? And we sure know better than to seek his will in all things and then trust God to help us do his will for us, both as individuals and as God’s people together.

But when by faith we put our hope and trust in the cross of Christ, in what God has done for us and God’s world on it, we are promised and given a power to overcome the power of Sin and act as truly human beings. We are given the power to be generous and compassionate and forgiving and to act justly according to God’s economy, not our own. This is what it means to be a cruciform people and it will inevitably lead to our suffering, precisely because the world is enslaved to Sin and the powers behind it. Let me give you a quick example of what a cruciform life looks like. My wife was a principal at a local high school for several years. She felt God called her to the position and worked hard on behalf of underprivileged kids to help improve their lot in life by making sure they received a good education. But this was met with resistance for many reasons, most of which were self-serving and myopic. And so eventually she was given the choice of being fired or resigning. She chose the latter and was humiliated in the process. It was not pretty, trust me. Despite the wrong she suffered, good came out of it. Her school’s ratings improved along with the education her kids received. Did it change the world? No. Did she have to suffer because of her determination to act justly? Yes. She had to resign in shame, but that is by the world’s standards, not God’s. Paul would have understood this perfectly. He might have offered this counsel to my wife in her suffering and humiliation.

[You worked] with the weapons of righteousness [justice] for the right hand and for the left… You were treated as an impostor, and yet [were] true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—you are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

This is the power of God in our lives, my beloved, the power that enables us to live cruciform lives. As our Lord observed in our gospel lesson, it is a power that must be cultivated by prayer, fasting, living generous lives (look how we raised twice as much money for Fenny as we set out to do; that money did not fall from the sky, it came because God created generous hearts), and other acts of piety, sincere acts that seek to obey the will of God and not court the favor and approval of humans. This is the stuff of which Lent is made. This is the stuff of living faithful Christian lives. It is the power of God at work in us to transform us over time into the fully human beings God created us to be. It is the power of God to use our faithfulness to help right the wrongs of his good but fallen creation. It is the power to receive and live the Good News, now and for all eternity, thanks be to God! To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A Prayer for Ash Wednesday 2017

Almighty and everlasting God,
you hate nothing you have made
and forgive the sins of all who are penitent:
Create and make in us new and contrite hearts,
that we, worthily lamenting our sins
and acknowledging our wretchedness,
may obtain of you, the God of all mercy,
perfect remission and forgiveness;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and ever. Amen.