Ash Wednesday 2018 – Resurrection and Life

Ash Wednesday is my favorite church holiday of the year. This year, Ash Wednesday here in Greene kicked off our ecumenical Lenten series focusing on the “I AM” sayings of Jesus in John’s gospel. For this first week, we focused on “I am the resurrection and the life” in John 11:25.

Our reading was the story of Jesus raising Lazarus, in John 11:1-44. Here’s the Ash Wednesday worship service bulletin in Pages format: Ash Wednesday 2_14_18 and as a PDF: Ash Wednesday 2018 Bulletin.

Although I didn’t really talk about the conjunction of Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday in 2018, it is a fun coincidence to think about. As I was reflecting on the meaning of Ash Wednesday, I found this reflection by Beth Felker Jones helpful.

Tonight is the beginning of the season of Lent. Lent is a special forty-day journey of focusing on our need for God and what God has done for us.

We begin tonight by reflecting on the reality of sin in our lives, thinking about those things we do that separate us from God and keep us from living the life God calls us to live.

Lent, though, is not about focusing on our sin just so we can feel bad about ourselves. The point of repenting is so we can recognize our need for God, our need for someone to come and save us from the sin that clings to us. Tonight, we recognize our sinful, mortal nature so we can celebrate God’s forgiveness and grace.

As the bulletin says, our Wednesday Lenten series this year focuses on who Jesus is. In the Old Testament story of Moses and the burning bush, Moses asks what God’s name is, and God responds, “I AM.” God is the one who is eternally present, the one who IS.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says things like “I am the bread of life. I am the good shepherd.”
Jesus provides the object for the verb, defining who God is. With these “I AM” statements, Jesus identifies himself as God, which is such a radical claim that the people around him run him out of town, try to stone him, and eventually crucify him.

In these “I AM” statements and in his whole life, Jesus reveals specifically who God is for us, for you and for me. Tonight, we’re looking at Jesus as the resurrection and the life for us, the one who forgives our sin, who gives us life even beyond death.




Before we get to this story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, I have a question for you.

How many of you enjoy household chores?

I know there are people who really enjoy cleaning, but I’m not one of them. In our house, Christin and I usually divide up the chores. She’s in charge of cleaning the bathrooms, and I take care of the kitchen. She’ll collect the garbage, and I’ll vacuum. It’s a good system, but we have two problems.

First, you’ll notice I didn’t mention dusting on that list, because dusting is a stupid chore. Both of us hate dusting, so sometimes it gets skipped. The other problem is we really only clean if someone is coming over, and we don’t get that many visitors. Sometimes, our house gets pretty dusty.

And I’m not saying we have piles of dirty dishes, but it doesn’t really hurt clean dishes to sit in the dishwasher for a day or two, right?

But if someone is coming over, then we clean. Sometimes we procrastinate as long as we can and we have to tag team where one person’s hiding stuff in a closet in back while the other is greeting visitors at the door, but by the time someone comes into our house, it’s clean. Anyone else like that?

We clean because we don’t want anyone to see our dirt. That doesn’t work on Ash Wednesday, at a worship service about dust.

In a few minutes, we’re going to take part in this ancient practice of having ashes put on our foreheads and being told, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Ash Wednesday is my favorite church holiday because it forces us to confront the reality that we are going to die.

Often, I think we’re ok with the idea of death in the abstract. On some level, we all know we’re going to die; we’ve all had relatives or neighbors who have died. But we don’t like to think about it, especially our own death. We live in a culture that wants to hide death, to clean it up as quickly as possible, to not think about it. We leave sickness and death to the professionals, even to the point where we come up with greeting card euphemisms for death to avoid saying the word “death.”

Honestly facing the reality of death, particularly our own death, is uncomfortable. Facing the reality of our sin, facing the reality that we are mortal – that’s hard!

The beauty of Ash Wednesday is that it forces us to confront our need for a savior. When you have ashes on your head, you can’t hide your dirt. In the Bible, when people wanted to express deep, deep sorrow, they’d put on sackcloth and sit in ashes.

Ashes are a sign of sorrow and repentance. They’re dirty. Ashes are what’s left over after something’s burned up, after the fire’s gone out.

Yesterday was the first time I’ve made ashes the traditional way, by burning the palm leaves from last year’s Palm Sunday service, and when I came in the house, I felt dirty.

I felt like there was smoke clinging to me. Ashes are hopeless; they’re dust. They’re a symbol of the realities in our lives that we try to ignore, to hide or clean up before anyone else might see them.

Ash Wednesday is a difficult, uncomfortable service. Letting people see inside our dirty, dusty house is a hard thing to do, let alone allowing God to see our dirt, our dust, our sin.
And yet, Ash Wednesday is about hope. The Lenten journey is about joy. Facing the reality that we are dust and that we’re going to die is freeing.

Accepting our mortality frees us to live. Acknowledging our sin and our need for a savior allows us to receive God’s forgiveness, to understand who God is and what God has done for us.

As Christians, we understand that the reality of death includes the promise of life in Jesus. When her brother Lazarus is dying, Mary wants Jesus to be present with them, but she misunderstands: Jesus does not prevent death; Jesus has defeated death.




In this sinful, broken world, death is still a reality. But death’s power has been defeated. Death’s reign as the ultimate end of our lives has been broken.

Listen to what Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” That’s a promise for you and for me. While we’ve tried to defeat the power of death by hiding from it and pretending it doesn’t exist, Jesus has dealt with death directly and won.

In the person of Jesus, God entered into our world to die. Jesus came to experience death, to take on the absolute worst our world could offer, and then he refused to allow that to be the end of the story. Raising Lazarus from the dead is something only God could do, but it’s just a preview of what’s to come, because when Jesus himself dies, he doesn’t stay dead. On the third day, Jesus is resurrected.

And in Jesus’ resurrection, the power of death is defeated forever. We are still people made of dust who will return to dust, but in the resurrection stories of Lazarus and then of Jesus, we see that our dusty reality can’t stop God.

We’re here tonight to repent of our sin and to believe the good news. The good news is that God has already seen inside our dusty houses and our dirty lives. God knows all the junk we’re carrying. God knows every sin we confess, even those we’d never mention to anyone, those no one else knows.

And knowing all that, God does not give up on us. Instead, God invites us to come to the table, to be nourished for our new life that lasts beyond death.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return, but also remember that the one who is the resurrection and the life can do some pretty awesome stuff with dust.

God loves dusty people. Jesus died for dusty people. The dust you’ll get on your head will be in the shape of a cross, and that’s not an accident – it’s a symbol of hope.

On the cross, Jesus takes on our dustiness and the ashes of our lives, and out of our dust, God makes beautiful things. This is a song by Gungor, called “Beautiful Things.”