Sermon delivered on Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2018, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.
If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast (and you definitely should with this sermon), click here.
Lectionary texts: Joel 2.1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51; 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 the 40 day season we call Lent. It is a time for self-examination, penitence, self-denial, study, and preparation for Easter. Unfortunately, many of us today do not understand the true nature of Sin, and without an adequate understanding of Sin we cannot possibly hope to understand how repentance relates to it. And if we do not understand the nature of Sin and our response to it, we cannot possibly hope to have an adequate understanding of the Good News of Jesus Christ. To understand what Sin really is and how repentance relates to it will enable us to observe a holy Lent and beyond as we rejoice in God’s love for us made known in and through the cross of Jesus Christ.
In our OT lesson, God through his prophet Joel calls for God’s people to repent in light of the fact that the great and terrible day of the Lord is fast approaching. This is the appointed time when God would finally come to pronounce judgment on all that is wrong in his world, us included. Many of God’s people Israel mistakenly believed that God’s judgment would not fall on them because they were God’s chosen people. They thought God would only pour out his anger on the nations of the world while sparing Judah. Not so, warns Joel. Even the nation of Judah and its capital Jerusalem would be subject to the great and terrible day of the Lord. Repent, therefore, says Joel. Who knows? Maybe God will relent in his punishment.
Do you see the underlying dynamic behind this declaration? The implication is that sin is a matter of correcting bad behavior (like worshiping idols or exploiting society’s most vulnerable and helpless people) or making bad choices that lead to bad behavior. Stop engaging in bad behavior (or repenting) might cause God to relent in punishing. In other words, sin is really a matter of making good choices and behaving ourselves and repentance therefore leads to forgiveness. We have it in our power to stop sinning and if we do, God will (hopefully) relent in punishing us. This line of thinking is what helps some of us to become insufferably self-righteous. We see ourselves as having basically overcome sin because we make good choices and choose to behave ourselves—well, most of the time. We go to church regularly, we read our Bible on occasion, and say some quick prayers. Never mind the fact we sometimes gossip about those who irritate us (and even our friends) or sneak an occasional peak at pornography or cut in line ahead of others because we have urgent business to conduct and can’t be bothered by waiting our turn. Those things are all justifiable. And besides, we’re not murderers or rapists or white supremacists or child molesters. That’s why we can look down our noses in disgust on those who are. They should try to become more like us. And because we have overcome our sins by (mostly) behaving well, God will forgive us when we repent. After all, God is loving and merciful and God has to forgive us when we say we’re sorry for our occasional slip-ups, right?
Sadly, this line of thinking is one of the reasons why many Christians are loathe to talk about sin and repentance because some of us don’t seem to be quite as good at making good decisions and behaving properly as others, and the clear implication is that there are some superior Christians who are worthy of God’s love and admiration and some clearly worthless Christians who can’t live up to God’s expectations. What we are talking about here is the gospel of self-worth and self-help. For those of us who have a bit more will power than others, it’s a great game to play and a great gospel to try and foist on others because it allows us to see ourselves as the truly superior people we are. But this kind of thinking about sin and repentance is emphatically unbiblical and is itself a product of the real problem of Sin.
Sin, as the Bible describes it, is an outside and malevolent power that entered God’s good creation when our ancestors rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden. It is variously described as “the darkness” or “the powers” or the “devil and his minions.” Name it what you want but understand that it is an active and malevolent force that has the power to enslave us. This means that none of us has the power to break its grip on our lives. If you want to know what’s wrong with the world with all of its darkness, look no further than the power of Sin. Sin is much deeper and darker than the bad deeds we do or the bad choices we make. In fact our bad deeds that cause all the misery and hurt and suffering in this world are the result of the problem of Sin, not the problem itself. To sin, biblically speaking, means something terribly more consequential than wrongdoing. It means to be catastrophically separated from the eternal love of God. It means to be permanently excluded from God’s heavenly banquet. It means to be helplessly trapped inside one’s own worst self, miserably aware of the vast difference between the way we are and the way God intends for us to be. And given the nature of God’s love and goodness, it is utter foolishness for us to think that God will let this state of affairs go on indefinitely. God must act to break Sin’s power over us to free us from its slavery. So when you hear me talking about Sin with a capital S, this is what I am talking about. It is a breathtakingly hopeless picture of the human condition that Scripture paints for us, not to make us feel bad, although that is a consequence of our sin, but to help us understand the enormity of the forces that are arrayed against us so that we are convinced we need help from beyond.
If you understand what I’ve just said, you will also understand that no amount of repentance on our part is going to fix the problem of Sin. Does that mean repentance is not important to Christians and we should abandon it? No, of course not. Jesus himself called for us to repent and believe the Good News (and there’s the hint where I’m going with this). What I am suggesting is that we have to put repentance in its proper place. More about that in a moment. No, the critical thing for us to understand is that we worship a God who has the power and the desire to free us from our slavery to Sin and Death. And the Good News is precisely that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures (1 Corinthians 15.3-4) or as St. Paul says in our epistle lesson this evening, God the Father, in full cooperation and agreement with God the Son, made Jesus, the sinless one, to take on and absorb God’s wrath on the power of Sin so as to destroy its grip on us. Destroy the power of Sin and God can set us free from our slavery to it. This was God’s plan from all eternity to deal with the corrupting and dehumanizing power of Sin over us. This, says St. Paul, is exactly what happened to us at our baptism. Listen to him in full:
Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? Or have you forgotten that when we were joined with Christ Jesus in baptism, we joined him in his death? For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.
Since we have been united with him in his death, we will also be raised to life as he was. We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin. And since we died with Christ, we know we will also live with him (Romans 6.1-8, NLT).
Did you catch the Good News? God has condemned our sin in the flesh by condemning it in Jesus’ body. In other words, God has moved to impose God’s justice on the evil behind all our wrongdoing and wrong thinking, sparing us in the process. In other words, God has chosen to absorb his own justice so that we might be spared and freed to live as the fully human image-bearing creatures God created us to be. So we no longer are separated and alienated from God. We are given power to overcome sin because God has defeated Sin and the powers behind it on the cross. We know the powers are defeated because God raised Jesus from the dead and we are united to Jesus by virtue of our baptism. Our slavery to Sin’s power has therefore been ended on the cross and we are no longer slaves to Sin. Notice Paul did not say we will no longer sin. There’s still the struggle because we are still weighed down by our mortal bodies and corrupted desires. But new creation has begun with Jesus’ resurrection. We live in a new world, albeit imperfectly until our Lord returns to finish his work. Nevertheless, it’s a done deal, whether we perceive it or not. So on the cross, we see God’s justice and God’s mercy at work simultaneously to rescue us from our hopeless alienation from God with its attendant death while condemning the power of Sin in our lives so as to spare us, thanks be to God. God did this for us out of God’s great love for us, not because of what we do or don’t do or because we are worthy of that love. This is truly Good News because God’s love and justice are simultaneously enacted on the cross and we are freed from our slavery to the power of Sin.
Nobody can prove any of this empirically, of course, but we see glimpses of its truth every time we choose to do the right instead of the wrong, every time we see real justice enacted, every time we see mercy extended to the unmerciful. No, we believe the Good News by faith and we live accordingly, however imperfectly. When by God’s grace, we are given the eye of faith to catch a glimpse of this, we are convicted of our sin and moved to repentance because we understand the great and wondrous life-giving gift God has given us in Jesus Christ. So our repentance is in response to what God has already done for us in Christ, not what God will do if we repent. If by God’s grace you truly understand this dynamic, you will truly understand what the Good News is all about and rejoice.
We see this dynamic working in our psalm for this evening. David committed adultery and then committed murder to cover his tracks. He now comes to God with a broken and contrite heart, asking for God’s mercy. Notice David does this precisely because he knows the steadfast love and mercy of God, just as Joel did in our OT lesson, which is the true basis for his call to repentance. David and Joel knew this, not because of wishful human thinking but because God revealed this about himself in Israel’s history. So while David’s spirit was crushed over his evildoing, he was also convinced that God had the ability and the means to cleanse David from his sin. The full means would not be revealed until the death and resurrection of the Son of God. But the point is that David’s repentance and plea for mercy were based on something God had already done for him before David was ever born. Likewise for us. This is the Good News, my beloved, now and for all eternity! During this Lenten season (and beyond), we are all invited to examine our lives in the light of God’s love, justice, and mercy on our behalf to free us from our sins and to act accordingly, all in the power of the Spirit. May we all observe a holy Lent, thereby giving honor, power and glory to the One who loved us and gave himself to us from all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.