2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10
New International Version
20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin[a] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
6 As God’s co-workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain. 2 For he says,
“In the time of my favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you.”[b]
I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.
Paul’s Hardships
3 We put no stumbling block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. 4 Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; 5 in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; 6 in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; 7 in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; 8 through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; 9 known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; 10 sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.
Lenten Series
Lent and Easter as we know, are busy times in the church. So many more services, preparations, Easter and Holy Week services to plan, trying to make sure we get people to do the sound and video for all the services, we make our musicians work harder. It can be downright daunting, or exhausting even to think about.
But this year I wanted to approach it all as a unit, so I sat down and read all the readings for every Sunday in Lent in one go, to see if I could find a theme running through them all like a thread, something that would help us move from one to the other in a structured way, holding something in all the messages from Ash Wednesday until that resurrection morning.
And I believe that I have found something. It was hidden there in the Epistle lessons for each Sunday in the lectionary.
I was looking for something new in this material that is 2000 years old, some new emphasis, some new way of looking at the same old same old, so that it did not fall into the trap of just turning the crank, and churning out another Easter season that would not really mean much to us.
And instead of finding something new, I found that every one of the Epistle lessons was talking about a “different” new thing. And it is this newness that we need EVERY Lenten season.
The Lenten significance is not about cranking out the old, it is not about monotonous repetition, but instead it is an invitation for us to look again in a new way at what Lent is, and in doing that, we will have a different focus on what Easter really means for us.
In the Epistle lessons for the period of Lent, we are going to explore: A new Confession, a new citizenship, a new morality, A new perspective, a new tenacity, a new exaltation, and in Holy week, a new covenant, a new and living way, and a new resurrection life.
But before we get to all of them, tonight as we come with ashes, we are going to explore a new humility, a new attitude that stands before God and cries: we are sorry.
If you do a quick look around church websites you will see that there are not very many churches that do midweek Lenten services anymore. There are not many churches that do Ash Wednesday services anymore. I wonder why this is?
What has lent fallen out of favour?
How many people recognise Ash Wednesday?
How many people come with sorrow and ashes to admit that they have sinned?
How many people are ready to admit that God is worthy to judge them, as judge of the living and the dead?
Sin puffs us up and makes us believe that we are our own Gods, that no-one or nothing has the right to judge us. This is a sin against the very first commandment.
But is it just an arrogance problem, is it just like a faith problem? Should we be so quick to do what many Christians choose to do and just blame those outside the walls of the church who are not in here? They should be, right? What is wrong with them?
Well sadly is there somewhere a little bit closer to home that we as Christians have to look? This will take some humility.
Perhaps we could ask the question :”Who today believes that the church has the right to talk about repentance? With the terrible examples that many churches around the world seem to be setting, can we blame people for not wanting to come to us to hear about their own sin?”
Do the Christian churches on earth have a problem with the log in their own eye. while trying to point out the spec in everyone else’s?
I would answer yes, because the church is made up of people. And as people we are all sinful. (romans 3:23 all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.)
So this Ash Wednesday, before we start looking to others and blaming them because they are not here, perhaps we need a new humility for ourselves.
All many people have seen of the church over the last few decades are TV evangelists, sex scandals, child abuse.
And this has led many people to believe that the answer to bad religion is no religion.
But it isn’t. We believe that the answer to bad religion is good religion.
Every year, we need to start again.
There used to be a professional golfer on the circuit by the name of Nick Faldo. He was an Englishman. A very successful golfer he won some major tournaments, but he had a really good practise. Every year as soon as the tour finished, he would go to his coach and say to him:
teach me how to swing a Golf Club.
And beginning with his stance moving into his grip and his swing they would work together on learning how to swing a Golf Club in the best way possible.
I believe what he was trying to do was get rid of bad habits, to not let things develop that would get in the way, that would be a stumbling block to his game.
Because practise doesn't always make perfect. As my mom always used to say: “Practice makes permanent.” We can practise bad habits into our lives, and not even know we're doing it.
The better saying is: “perfect practise makes perfect”.
That perfect practise, that ability to believe that we know nothing and that we need to learn it again from the ground up, that takes humility.
So instead of thinking that everyone else out there needs to change, Ash Wednesday is a good opportunity to look at our own Christianity, our own faith practices, and to try to see what we are doing wrong as we minister to each other and to the world.
How can we turn the bad religion of human beings into the good religion that befits a disciple of Jesus?
It is only when we really walk through that death, that we can experience resurrection. So tonight with our confession, we let any idea of our superiority to anyone else outside theses walls, any delusion of our goodness, and how blessed God must be to have us, we let it go. We wear the ashes as a symbol of our contrition and repentance, and we start again.
Dust we are, and to dust we shall return.
God will look after his church without us. When we are long gone and our bodies are in the ground.
So we leave behind the unhelpful behaviours, the arrogance and the stumbling blocks we place in the path of others, and we ask God to show us what these are in our lives, as we turn to him and rededicate ourselves in humility to living his way.
Amen.
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