Ash Wednesday 2024

Happy Valentine’s Day and thank you for celebrating this day of love at church, with ashes rather than roses and dinner.

Ash Wednesday like Valentine’s Day is about love, although Ash Wednesday is about divine love, the love that God has for us as opposed to romantic love.

As we gather here tonight, we are reminded of the depths of God’s love for his creation, a love that puts itself in harm’s way for humanity, in which God not only says “I love you to death” but proves it on the cross on God Friday.

And then, as if sacrificing himself for us wasn’t enough of a grand gesture, God destroys the power of death for all times.

What did we do to deserve that?

(PAUSE 1 2 3 4 5 )

Our second reading tonight starts in 2 Corinthians 5:20 b.

But listen to the verses which come just before, in 17 thru 20.

 17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.

Who does the work in this passage?

All this from God, who reconciled himself to us through Christ…

God is the one doing the work.

Is that important?

Absolutely.

Do you remember the parables of the lost coin and the lost sheep in Matthew’s Gospel?

A woman loses a coin and then goes searching for it. When she has found it she throws a party.

A sheep wanders from the fold and the shepherd goes in search of the sheep and when he finds the sheep he picks it up and carries it back on his shoulder.

 

What did the coin do to be found?

NOTHING?

What did the sheep do to be found?

NOTHING?

The parable that follows these two is the story of the lost child also known as the prodigal son.

While the son does repent and returns to his father’s home, he expects to be disowned.  He expects nothing from the father-son relationship.

He doesn’t expect his father to acknowledge him, or to receive him.  And he is okay with that because he knew he had been a spoiled, rotten brat and did not deserve the forgiveness of his father.

The son came back because he knew his father was a fair man to his employees and that he would be better off as a servant in his father’s home than feeding pigs somewhere else.

 

And yet…

And yet, when his father sees him, he hikes up his robes and begins to run.

The father reconciles himself to his child.

Did the son deserve forgiveness?

No.

Nor did the son seek his father’s forgiveness.

The son simply wanted a roof over his head and food to eat.

But. the father loves his child and therefore is willing to forgive him.

 

And so, it is with our heavenly Father.

God is always waiting, always watching, always reading to reconcile us to himself.

When it comes to being forgiven by God, we are the lost coin, sitting on a shelf, waiting to be found.

We are the sheep, who wandered away from the flock, unable to find our way back.

We are the wayward child, who has no reason to expect anything other than to be disowned.

And yet, each is found. Each is reconciled.

 

When Paul continues in our reading tonight, he tells us in

2 Corinthians 6:1:

6:1 As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain.

God’s gift of grace is not something to take lightly.

Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent, and as such, I invite you to not take this gift of grace in vain.

And grace is a gift, it is not something we have earned or deserve.

 

Martin Luther spent many years trying to earn God’s love. But he was constantly aware of his sinfulness, his failure to live up to God’s standards.

When Luther first read the scriptures for himself and discovered that God has reconciled us to himself; that God, through the gift of grace has saved him, it forever changed the world.

God reconciled himself to us, through Jesus.

That’s grace.

And Grace changes us, grace changes how we look at the world.

Because when we realize that God’s love for us is not dependent on us;

that God chooses to reconcile himself to us out of divine love, then we can not help but be changed.

Nothing we have done or can ever do will ever result in us earning God’s love.

And nothing we have ever done or could ever do would cause God to stop loving us.  That’s grace.

And once we experience that unconditional love of God, who willingly died on the cross to prove his love for the world, how can we not be changed?

Happy Valentine’s Day.

You are loved, always and forever.

You are forgiven, now and forever.  Amen.