Ash Wednesday, 2015, Sermon

Ash Wednesday sermon for St. Peter Lutheran Church, Dubuque, Iowa, preached February 18, 2015. The texts we read today are Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; and Matthew 6:1-8, 16-21.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

Last spring, before I started internship here, I preached a funeral sermon for my preaching class over at Wartburg Seminary. When I finished, my professor’s feedback was that it was a decent sermon, but that I must not have been to many funerals, which was true.

Part of what I talked about in that sermon was the idea that funerals remind us of our own mortality. I talked about funerals stirring up the fear of death in those attending. Now that I’ve been to a few more funerals, I think I understand better what my professor was trying to say. Funerals are reminders of death, but they’re not always as sad and scary as I made them out to be. They often include an element of celebrating life, especially when the deceased has lived a full, long life.

But I stand by part of that sermon. Being reminded of our own mortality, being reminded that we will die some day is rarely pleasant. It can be downright scary. But as we gather here today on Ash Wednesday, that’s a big part of what we’re doing. We’re here to engage in a ritual of having ashes put on our foreheads and being told, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

This might be the most countercultural ritual we engage in as a church. It’s certainly one of the strangest things we do. We live in a culture that says the purpose of life is to live forever. It’s all about you.

We have fun phrases like YOLO, (You only live once), but we use that to say live life to the fullest, because it’s all about you. Carpe Diem, Seize the day! This is our time! Turn on the tv, and you’ll see ad after ad for products promising to make your life better, to make you feel younger, because you deserve it. It’s all about you! Be all you can be!

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

It seems like this is the most depressing day of the church year to gather in worship. It seems like this ritual, this reminder that we’re going to die, goes against the whole idea of what the church is about. The church is about the Gospel, the good news, right? We come to church to hear “You are loved” not “You’re going to die.” Where is the hope in that?

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The key for understanding Ash Wednesday as a celebration, the key to finding good news in this, is in that first reading we heard from the prophet Joel.

Joel describes a disastrous time in Israel. The specific issue appears to be a plague of locusts, but Joel goes through this litany of everything that’s going wrong. It’s a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness. Israel has abandoned God, turning away from the Lord, and they’re sure God has, justifiably, abandoned them too. They’ve lost hope.

I’m sure we could come up with a similar lament. We might not be plagued right now by armies of locusts, but we have more tragedies than we need to list. Wars in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, Coptic Christians beheaded for their faith earlier this week, and many tragedies closer to home. Car accidents, budget crises, just open the paper or watch the news in between the commercials. It’s not hard to wonder where God is, to wonder if God has abandoned us.

Then I wonder if we’ve abandoned God. I know I should care about all these tragedies in the world, raising awareness, keeping them in prayer, but I get overwhelmed. I get distracted. I get so easily sucked in to that message that it’s all about me.

And as we’ll confess together in a few minutes, I abandon the call to serve as Christ served us. I forget to look for God at work. I question how God can let things go so wrong for so many people. And I quit paying attention and focus instead on what makes me happy. Again, where’s the good news in this? You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

And then we get to God’s response in verse 12. Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart….Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

Those three words are critical to our faith. Yet even now. No matter what we do, no matter how much we abandon God, the Lord says to us, yet even now, return to me, for I am gracious and merciful.

Writing hundreds of years later, Paul tells the church in Corinth, in Christ, we are reconciled to God. Now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation.

Yet even now, no matter how often we abandon God, no matter how much we miss the boat, no matter how much we lose hope, or get distracted, Christ comes to us.

This season of Lent is a time of self-reflection, of recognizing that life is not all about us, of acknowledging our sinfulness, but it’s also a time of preparation, yes, for Good Friday and the cross, but also for Easter and the resurrection, knowing that Christ has defeated death and because he lives, we too shall live.

We’re called today and throughout Lent to return to God. But the reason we can return to God is because God has not abandoned us. The Gospel reading from Matthew describes some practices for coming closer to God, like praying, fasting, and giving, and Jesus gives guidelines for how to engage in these practices without hypocritically turning them around to be about us, but the whole reason we can draw closer to God at all is that God has come close to us.

In his instructions for how to pray, Jesus says we don’t need to heap up empty phrases for God to hear us, because your Father knows what you need before you ask him. When you pray – and notice that it’s when, not if. God wants us to engage in these practices, and this Lenten season can be a great time to focus on faith practices like prayer – When you pray, Jesus says, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.

We talk to God not as if God is far away, as if we need to publicly shout to get God’s attention, but in confident faith that God is here with us, that our Father in heaven is in an intimately close relationship with us.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. But God calls us in our dustiness. When we are marked with ashes, it is a reminder that we are finite, that we are mortal, that we will die. But the ashes are marked in the shape of a cross, the sign placed upon us at baptism, the symbol of God’s claim on us. The cross is the symbol that God has come to be with us in our dustiness, that God has died for us, with us, in our place. We are marked with the sign of the cross when we are drowned in the waters of baptism, dying to ourselves, when we are born to new life in Christ.

We gather here on Ash Wednesday to worship God, who makes beautiful things out of the dust, out of our ashes. Take a look at this video. [I played a slightly shortened version of this video as a conclusion to the sermon.]