Ash Wednesday 2023
2 Peter 1:2-11
February 22, 2023
The ashes show us the end. The end of the gods we serve.
The gods of pride, power, pleasure. You serve them with prurience, preening, pouting. You prate and prattle, but do you repent? Do you change? What has your service to the gods of this age really achieved? Where will it get you? Dust and ashes, nothing but.
You’re never wrong; it’s always the other person. You nurse grudges and remember slights, ever seeing your self in the best light.
Have you even once, from a pure heart, obeyed God? Or do you act from fear, vainglory, or self-interest? The years are flying, and soon they will be gone, your significance like the ashes staining your forehead.
The ashes mark all of us the same. The pastor addresses us not by name. Or rather, we are addressed with our common name: Man, Adam. The newer liturgies have unfortunately omitted our common, collective name: “Remember, O Man, that thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return.” Male or female, we all were and are in and with our first father, Adam. He was the entire human race, and in him we all fell; in him we all died and are still dying.
Into that darkness speaks the Epistle for Lent’s beginning. Peter speaks about life not as future hope but a gift already received. “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence” (2 Pe 1:3). To us the things of life have already been given.
Now the New Testament has two separate but related ideas that are often both translated life. One of these has to do with your money and clothes, your food and your homes. We talk about our salaries as “making a living.” But of course, you can’t keep on making a living, for eventually there’s no more living to make; we lose our strength, we lose our mind, we lose our breath, we lose our life.
But there is a higher life, a lasting life that comes from God who is Himself the Life. “I AM,” God is named; He is The Living One; and in the Lord Jesus, that Life is joined to our human nature. “I am the resurrection and the life,” He says; and “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” So St. John tells us, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.”
That life, St. Peter says, is already yours because it was poured on your head in the baptism that gave you the knowledge of God, the relationship that makes you children of the Father and disciples of Jesus.
Now this life has a new and better goal than all the things we formerly pursued and that caused us anxiety. Our goal is that we “may become partakers of the divine nature.” In the fall, our nature became corrupt – a corruption that kills the body and the soul.
God’s Word tells us that this corruption “is in the world because of sinful desire,” or lust. This has two meanings: Corruption entered the world through the disordered desire of our first parents – the lust to be equal to God without communion with Him. And the second is the continuation of these lusts within each of us. St. John sets forth three forms of that lust:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever. (1 Jn 2:15–17)
This lust, or disordered desire, serves as a world-principle, in total opposition to the self-giving love of God.
Lent, then, is not a call for mere religious exercise, like some new diet plan or workout regimen. When Jesus calls a man, He bids him come and die. Jesus calls you to die to yourself, your disordered desires, and follow Him to the self-giving love of the cross.
There we find forgiveness of our disordered desires – that’s faith, which looks only to Jesus for righteousness. See, though, how faith becomes the beginning of what our Lutheran Confessions call the New Obedience. St. Peter sets forth our program for Lent. It is not giving up sweets, but giving up the love of self.
Giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For he who lacks these things is shortsighted, even to blindness, and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins. (2 Pe 1:5–9)
You won’t go wrong this Lent because you didn’t try hard enough. St. Peter says you go wrong when you forget about the forgiveness of sins. That’s the ground of everything else. Jesus forgives you; and you through self-control learn to resist those sins you lament, and through love learn to forgive those sins committed against you.
The stain of the ashes can be washed away. The power of death has already been conquered by the Jesus we follow. Already marking your head was the cross traced there when you were baptized.
Together we will keep a good Lent. Death stains our foreheads, foreshadowing our doom. Life will grace our mouths, foreshadowing our resurrection. +INJ+