Ash Wednesday

Palm leaves with paper bearing the burdens that are holding
some people back.  We are giving it all to God

Ash Wednesday

                This is the beginning of the 40 day journey to Easter.  As Christians our eyes are ever on the empty tomb of Jesus as the source of our hope.  But these 40 days we turn our gaze inward and zero-in on the brokenness of our human nature, we contemplate our mortality and commit to a more God-focused life.

                It would be easy to overlook the difficult things of our spiritual journey and go straight to the cross.  Our faith tells us that we have forgiveness for our sin because of the sacrificial love of Jesus
Christ and what he did on that cross. 

                We have been justified! We have been redeemed! We have been saved!

                It would be easy to take the truth of what Jesus did and lay that over the story of our lives and say, “it’s all good.”  Well, my friends, that’s not the whole picture.  Jesus did sacrifice himself for humanity.  Your sins are indeed forgiven when you have faith in him.  But that does not mean that you are getting the full measure of the love that he is trying to pour out on to you.  You are not necessarily receiving all the blessings that God has intended for you.  It’s because those who have life eternal may be mostly dead and have only the appearance of life about them. 

                The appearance of life. 

                There is no escaping death.  There is no other alternative on this earth.  We are all temporary inhabitants of this world we are all impermanent.  The palms used nearly a year ago for our Palm Sunday celebration were green and leafy and apparently full of life.  But the moment they were cut and delivered to the flower shop where I picked them up they were essentially dead, though they had the appearance of life. 

                We took those green leafy branches and we celebrated and remembered the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem.   There were shouts of great joy.  Then when the celebration was over I took the remaining palm leaves and I stored them for nearly a year. Slowly the chlorophyll faded from them and they turned brown.  They were no longer supple.  They were rigid.  And just this morning I burned them.  And what was once green and leafy is now a pile of ash.  We too, in our mortal bodies, are living.  But if we are not connected to the eternal source of life; if we are not connected to God, we only have the appearance of life and are, in fact, dead already.  When we have that connection to God, through Jesus Christ we have eternal life, though the mark of death is still in us. Our mortal bodies will still die.  We have weakness in our body. Our bodies fail us.  Cancer cells develop. We have weakness. Temptations arise. Sometimes well-meaning folk give in to those temptations. Sometimes we do things that distract us from the eternal source of life.  We have to be careful not to cut ourselves off from communion with God.  We have to take care to keep ourselves connected to our God through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. 

                While we live on this earth we would like the mark of death to be as slight in us as possible, and the connection to God through Jesus Christ as strong as possible.  We cannot earn merit before God.  We cannot do well enough on our own through good deeds to merit eternal life. Just like no matter how good that palm leaf that you held in your hand was. It may have been a beautiful palm leaf.  No matter how much joy it brought, since it was already cut off, it was already dead. 

These 40 days are about making the connection to God stronger than ever.  Faith and trust in Jesus Christ does that.  Eliminating things in your life that distract you from your relationship with god helps you live by faith.  We have to take care though.  We cannot make the sacrifice the center of our attention. 

I hear it every year, “what are you going to give up for Lent?” 

Chocolate?

Coffee?

Meat?

The question should be, “what are you going to change in your life that will bring you closer to God?”

And really it shouldn’t even be a question that you ask or answer.  If we look at the words of Jesus on the matter of our devotion to God, he says that we ought not to let people know what our devotion entails. That everything we do should be done in secret.  If we get “credit” for being pious from our friends and neighbors then we have received our reward.  But if we are devoted in secret, if we are praying, giving and fasting outside the attention of everyone but God then our rewards will come from God. 

That would be a good measure of your own faith.  Do you need the attention and approval that your service brings or are you pleased to give it to God and let the blessings fall where they may?

Yes we have been justified! We have been redeemed! We have been saved! And we cannot add a single thing to that.  But we ought not to mistake the justification of our souls for the justification of our actions.  God loves us where we are; and God expects us to grow in Him.

So how is it with you the beginning of this Lenten season?  What are the things that you need to let go of so that God can get a better hold of you?  

The Ash we use to mark ourselves as a reminder of our mortality and our
need for repentance.