Ash Wednesday | Associate Pastor: Matt Armstrong

At our first Ash Wednesday service.

Before we move into the homily, there's a I always want to recommend resources.

I know for some of you, this is your first Ash Wednesday service, not just for our church.

For some of you, this is old school.

But for whoever you are, I have two Lenten uh resources I want to recommend to you.

The first is a daily devotional by Henry Nallon called Show Me the Way.

It's excellent.

I've I've probably gone through that four or five times over the years.

The second one is new to me this year.

It was published a year or two ago by Esau McCaulay.

It's called Lent, the Season of Repentance and Renewal.

Also a great resource.

If you're curious, we want to know more about this season of the church calendar, or just be refreshed and renewed.

All right, Ash Wednesday.

What is it?

Why do we come to church on this Wednesday night?

We're not Baptists, you know.

Some of you guys are either twitching or your heart's kind of like strangely warmed that we're here on a Wednesday night.

You know, good news.

Ash Wednesday is about death.

There's no two ways about it.

Um the service is is known for uh ashes and and getting ashes, the imposition of ashes on the forehead.

In fact, I had a lunch or a breakfast meeting this morning at 7:30, and you know, I knew it would happen.

Five minutes after I sat down, a guy walked in with his daughter and and he had ashes on his forehead.

Uh we see it uh throughout um throughout this time of year, ashes on the forehead.

And we'll do that at the end of the service.

If you're not comfortable with that, it's fine.

If you if you just want to stay in your seats, um, but you're invited to participate.

The the purpose of the ashes and the purpose of Ash Wednesday is to pause in our busy lives and to remember our mortality, to remember our death.

When we receive the ashes later, I will say to you, remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

And I'm asking you to think tonight uh about your death, whenever it may be.

I remember uh in our church in East Atlanta, um, this may have even been in Decatur before that, uh, but one of my first Ash Wednesday services uh as a pastor, and uh Stacy brought our kids, uh, whichever ones were born at that point, up with her, and they received the ashes.

And I remember just kind of being jolted that I'm putting ashes on my own child's forehead, and I am saying to them, You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

It rocked me in that moment, and I had to hold it together.

Um again, Ash Wednesday and Lent invite us to pause and to part ponder our mortality.

We we live in a culture and we probably actively participate in a culture that hides from death, that pushes it away.

We color our hair, we get corrective eye surgery, perhaps plastic surgery, all trying to hide from the fact that we are aging.

But Jesus tells us that if we are his disciples, then we are to take up our own crosses and to follow him into death.

Yes, it's a spiritual death, and yes, it will be a physical death one day, but the reason is because paradoxically, because of the gospel, it is through death and only through death that true life and eternal life comes.

So for our meditation tonight, we're gonna look at and hopefully have a little image of this ashen cross that we'll receive on our foreheads, and we're gonna unpack briefly the story that this symbol tells.

First, ashes are a sign of mourning and repentance.

This is true throughout the scriptures.

When King Xerxes uh sends out a command that all the Jews are to be killed in his kingdom in the book of Esther, this is how the Jews respond.

That in every province, wherever the king's command and his decree reached, there was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and many of them lay in sackcloth and ashes.

Ashes have always been a symbol of repentance, of mourning, of crying out to the Lord.

Jesus spoke about ashes in a similar way.

When the Jews refused to heed his words, he said to them, Woe to you, Khorzin, woe to you, Beth Seda.

For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

When we receive this symbol of ashes on our foreheads, it's a symbol of us mourning over our own sin, our own need, our own loss.

It brings us back to perhaps our own conversions, if you can remember that.

The first time you repented of your sins and received Jesus as your Lord and Savior.

It also brings us back to the many times, perhaps daily, the times we've had to come and repent again.

To mourn our loss, to hate our sin.

How many times have you said, like I have, I can't believe I did that again?

Lord help.

Second, ashes are a symbol of sin and death.

More than just our mourning and repentance.

These ashes take us back to the origin of all of our pain.

The fall of our first parents.

When God said to Adam and Eve, You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

You see, Lent and Ash Wednesday, they're not about the general reality of our sadness and the fallness of the world, or even the inevitability of our own death, but they point us explicitly to the cause of death, which is sin.

We sin and we die and we suffer because our first parents disobeyed God, rebelled against God, wanted to be their own gods, turned their own way.

Sin and death were not a part of God's good creation.

Death is a foreign invader, and the Bible tells us that death is an enemy to be defeated.

On Ash Wednesday, we remember that we will die because of Adam and Eve's first sin and because of our own sin that we have participated in willfully.

But this is not a sense of grim acceptance, as if this is simply the way the story ends, but with we do it with a sense that death will not have the last word.

Amen.

All right, come on, Baptists.

Let's go.

Scripture tells us that we sin and die because of Adam and Seed.

Adam and Eve wanted to be their own God.

They wanted to go their own way.

And this sin from that very moment in history rippled like a stone thrown into a calm pond.

And it has rippled out throughout history to this very day.

And it puts us at odds with one another, family members, people in our communities, people in other nations.

It puts us at odd at odds with God and it puts us at odds with ourselves.

The imposition of ashes reminds us that sin and death can't be separated.

Because we participate in our parents' first parents' sin, we too seek to go our own way.

We listen to our own lies and the lies of the evil one.

We are part of this whole mess.

And these ashes remind us that we cannot save ourselves.

But that brings us to the third and most hopeful point of all: that these ashes are in the sign of the cross, and they tell a story of God's triumph over our sin and death, and all of sin and death.

It is this symbol of the cross that we receive in ash tells an entire story of the foundation of all human hope.

It's the story of loss and gain.

It's the story of the incarnation of the Son of God and his glorious victory over sin and death through his life, death, and resurrection.

In the garden, after the first great disobedience, God did not immediately carry out the sentence of death, did he?

He said, I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers.

He will crush your head, and you will bruise his heel.

We now read this and recognize it as the gospel told far in advance, in seed form.

Christians have called this the proto-uangelium, the first proclamation of the gospel.

Jesus is the one born of a woman who crushes the head of the serpent, even as his heel is bruised, and he brings salvation to all of humanity.

The cross on our foreheads reminds us that even as we continue this slow march toward death, we serve the one who has already defeated this enemy who continues to stalk us.

Truly, we can say with the generations of our brothers and sisters who have gone before us, death is swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting?

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.

But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

I love this image.

Perhaps you have seen it before.

It's the picture of Mary and Eve.

It was done by Sister Grace Remington.

She is a Cistercian nun who just did this in her meditation.

I read an article, an interview with her today.

It's actually Mary comforting Eve.

She wrote it or drew it during the Advent season, and they sent it out on their Christmas cards.

You can see Eve holding the fruit, the apple, the symbol of her sin.

We see the serpent wrapped around her leg and Mary's foot crushing his head, symbolizing what her son would later do on the cross.

There's a note in that interview, she said that what she thought was so beautiful about this was that Jesus is there in the center of the picture.

When the interviewer asked her what she hopes people will see in her drawing, she said this.

One of the things I was pondering as I drew this picture was the question of why Eve said no to God and Mary said yes.

I started to think about how Eve had no idea what it would mean to live in a fallen world, to be separated from God.

Whatever purity of soul Mary had, Eve had in her creation too.

And yet, whatever innocence Mary had, she was not spared the experience of living in a fallen world.

First century Palestine was no Garden of Eden.

I wondered whether Mary was able to give her yes precisely because she knew the pain of life.

She knew how desperately we needed God.

Her eyes were open.

This was the part of what I see in her compassion for Eve in this picture.

She's not standing with folded arms on a pedestal above Eve.

She is standing with Eve, touching Eve, seeing her deeply.

She knows the gift she is carrying is for Eve as much it is for herself.

She does not need Eve to get herself together or even to drop the apple before inviting her in.

This is the message of Ash Wednesday in Lent.

If we take Eve out of the picture, we have a beautiful picture of pregnant Mary.

It's a beautiful, tender, touching picture.

A new baby is coming into the world.

But with Mary and Eve together, we get the whole story.

Something much deeper is happening.

The stakes are far higher.

The sin and death and evil that has covered the world is being defeated, overcome, and redeemed.

So too for us, Easter without Ash Wednesday and Lent can become a celebration without stakes.

We can think that God loves us because he should.

That's his job.

We're just good upstanding people, aren't we?

But when we remember sin and our sin, when we remember death and our death, and then we remember Jesus' death and resurrection and promise of our resurrection.

We remember all that he had to overcome.

We have real reason to celebrate.

Beloved, let's pray.

Our Father and our God, Lord, um it is not fun to think about death.

Some of us in this world, we are in this room, we have experienced death uh far, far very closely in our lives.

Some of us, it's still a distant idea, but it's it's not something that we enjoy.

And yet, Lord, you call us to this place because it is here.

It is it was through your death that you brought life.

You had to go to the cross in order to get to the resurrection, to defeat sin and death and to bring new life, eternal life.

And so, Lord, walk with us, we pray.

We invite you as you invite us, walk with us this Lenten season so that this Easter may be one of the most joyous in our lives.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So now we move into the imposition of ashes.

What we're gonna do, this is a small room, a tight room, and lots of us in here.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna come down this aisle.

Um we're not gonna get come when you're led, prepared, and ready.

We're gonna come.

You're free to stay in your seat, no problem at all.

But let's uh let's start with the front row.

We'll come down to the center.

I'll I'll put the ashes on you and um then return this way.

Make sense?

And if we uh if we have a traffic jam, no problem.

Okay.

We begin our journey to Easter with the sign of ashes.

This ancient sign speaks of the frailty and uncertainty of human life, calls us to heartfelt repentance, and urges us to place our hope in God alone.

Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the earth.

May these ashes remind us of our mortality and penitence, and teach us again that only by your gracious gift are we given everlasting life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.