Ash Wednesday
A Wounded Savior for a Wounded People
Joel 2:12–19
Text
“Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to Me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and He relents over disaster. Who knows whether He will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind Him, a grain offering and a drink offering for the Lord your God? Blow the trumpet in Zion; consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly;gather the people. Consecrate the congregation; assemble the elders; gather the children, even nursing infants. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her chamber. Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep and say, “Spare your people, O Lord, and make not Your heritage a reproach, a byword among the nations. Why should they say among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’ ” Then the Lord became jealous for His land and had pity on His people. The Lord answered and said to His people, “Behold, I am sending to you grain, wine, and oil, and you will be satisfied; and I will no more make you a reproach among the nations.” (Joel 2:12–19)
Sermon: A Wounded Savior for a Wounded People
We heard it at the start of today’s liturgy: dust you are, and to dust
you shall return. The ashes for which this day is named show no one
that you are fasting—for who knows if you are?—but they do show
everyone that you are dying, and of that you and everyone else may be
sure. Dust we are, and to dust we return. Such is the wages of sin.
But then we stare in amazement tonight at One for whom those
words sound so wrong. We see Him and cry out: “O sacred Head, now
wounded, With grief and shame weighed down, Now scornfully surrounded
With thorns, Thine only crown!” (LSB 450:1). If ever there were
a head that did not call for the ashes of this day, it is His sacred head!
Why thorns, when it should be a golden diadem? Here we see in our
flesh the One who formed us from the dust at the first. Here is the One
who in unfathomable love for our fallen race became dust for us. And
now He will even lay down His head into the dust? But there is no sin
in Him! In Him, there could be no death. How and why will He die? We
will spend all this Lent pondering in awe such questions.
When Joel declares a sacred fast, when he urges the trumpet to sound
and the people to gather, we discover that the occasion is one of return.
Lent is always about a return… to. We so often think of it in terms of turning away from—what we are giving up, what we will fast from. Make no
mistake about it: it is a good thing to fast. Did not our Lord assume that His disciples would do so when He said in tonight’s Gospel: “when you fast”? When, not if! But by itself fasting, going hungry, can be nothing more than an empty religious exercise. The Lenten fast goes deeper than your decision to deny yourself some tasty treat. Rather, it invites, it summons, it urges you back to someone, to the Lord. “Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and He relents over disaster” (Joel 2:13). A Lent that is anything less than a return in faith to the Lord is only a religious game and worth less than nothing.
Rather than play games with God, hear in this sacred season His summons
to you is to come back to Him, to return to Him now. He does not
want some piece of you, some outward display, torn garments and such,
a few minutes tossed His way one day a week. No. He wants you, your
heart. Hence, rend your hearts!
“A broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise” (Psalm
51:17). A heart that is torn open, is a heart that is wounded, damaged, and broken. Such a heart God receives from you as a pleasing sacrifice.
When, from the depths of your being, you plead, “O God, have mercy
on me, a sinner! I have made such a mess of it all. I have hurt so many
people and failed so often to show Your love, and You know how terrible
my thoughts and how soiled my desires are with sin. Have mercy on me,
O Lord! Have mercy!”
Lent is not for pretend sinners. Lent is for real, honest-to-God sinners
who have failed in their love of God, who have failed in their love of
neighbor, who see this reality, and who by God’s grace despise their sin
and ache for His forgiveness and for strength to do better. To such the
invitation rings out as sheer refreshment: “Even you, even now: Return!”
Return, and see the sacred head of Your Savior now wounded. This is the
One we are summoned to return to. He is the One who knew that we, on
our own, could not come to Him, return to Him, find Him; so He came
to us, returned to us, and found us.
And we marvel this Lent at how far He went to find us. For it is a
marvel indeed that the God of Israel, Yahweh, should take on flesh and
blood—as He did in the incarnation. That is enough to leave us astounded
forever. But He went further. Not only did He take on our flesh and
blood, not only did He become dust for us, but He also went so far as to
lift off from us the burden of our sin, to bear it in His own body to death, to own all our failures to live in love as His very own. Indeed, in the words of St. Paul: “He, who knew no sin,” became sin for us “so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
He not only died, but He also died as the greatest sinner of all time, with the sin of the world upon Him—all of it. Yours. Mine. Everyone’s. Thus the Lord revealed that He is indeed merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Look to the cross and see! He bore your sin to death that neither death nor sin might be the end of you. Such is the measure of His love.
During Lent, when the Church calls us to return, she is calling us to
return to Christ, to draw near to this Savior who was wounded for our
transgressions, who was bruised for our iniquity, upon whom was the
punishment that brought us peace, and in whose stripes we find healing.
She reminds us that the only real life in this whole world is fellowship
with Him, communion with Him, and that every time we have settled
for anything less, we have allowed ourselves to be deceived and cheated
of the great gift of which Baptism made us heirs.
As often as she sets the Table, the Church calls for all her children
to return, to come to this wounded Savior who bore our wounds in His
own flesh, spilling His blood for us, so that His flesh might be our living bread from heaven and His blood the blotting out of our every sin.
Dust we are, and to dust we shall return, and so the ashes. But the
shape of the cross recalls that we have a Savior who became dust for us,
sacred head, now wounded whose sacred head was laid in the dust of death that the dust of our corrupted being might be rendered incorruptible in Him. Is it any wonder that, pondering such love, the Church raises her voice to that sacred Head and joys to call it her very own, her greatest treasure?
AMEN
LC-MS Sermon
LEARNING ABOUT LC-MS LUTHERANS.
Lutherans during this season reflect upon the will and work of Jesus, about our true need for Jesus; His Forgiveness, His promises. We know we are not worthy of anything Jesus has given us. We furthermore recognize that we can not come to him by our own reason or strength, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Therefore, we base our relationship not on what we do or say but soley on the basis of His Word & Gifts. The music we sing during this time is often somber, like the song, "OH SACRED HEAD NOW WOUNDED". We also usually seek to avoid words that reflect Christ’s resurrection, that is, until Easter when we no longer hold back but, shout to the rafters that Jesus Has Risen! :-)
