In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Ash
Wednesday is a unique day in the Christian year. On every other day of the
year, our focus is outward – we focus on caring for those in need, or the
environment, or the Church and we focus on glorifying and praising God.
Certainly, we praise God in all things, Ash Wednesday included. But today is
unique because our focus is not outward, but rather inward. On Ash Wednesday we
come face to face with our sinfulness, our mortality, and our neediness. It’s
important that we spend one day a year doing this sort of introspection
because, for one, it’s honest, but also because such reflection prepares us to
receive more fully the grace of God.
We
can hear this inward focus in St. Paul’s words to the Church – “We entreat you
on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” When we look inward it becomes
clear that we need reconciliation because there is brokenness within and among
us. It’s interesting that the word St. Paul uses isn’t the typical word for
reconciliation that is used in religious contexts of sacrifice. Instead, the
word he uses is political, it’s the word you’d use to describe trying to find
common ground after a political or legal dispute. When we look inward we see
that the situation isn’t a small imbalance in the register. The sort of
reconciling that needs to be done isn’t like reconciling a checkbook that is
out of balance where you just need to find a transaction or two that are wrong.
Sin is so much bigger than that. Sin is something like a cancer that is foreign
to us, yet is still very much a part of us. And sin infects all parts of our
lives. As St. Paul writes elsewhere, Sin makes it so that the good that we want
to do, we do not do; and the bad that do not want to do is exactly what we do.
Sin is not a few transactions being out of alignment, sin is being so in debt
that the bank won’t even do business with you anymore. What is needed is not a
quick fix, but rather a radically new relationship.
And
this is exactly what God gives us in Christ. When St. Paul tells us to “be
reconciled,” it’s in the passive mood. We are not told to reconcile ourselves
to God, but rather to be reconciled. It’s an incredibly difficult phrase to
translate because English doesn’t have the same tenses as the Greek of 2
Corinthians. This word is what a grammarian would call an aorist passive
imperative.
When we think
about an imperative, we think of future action. But the verb here is actually a
past-tense form, signifying a completed action. So it’s a command that’s
already completed and its passive which means that the action is done to us,
not by us. And as complicated as that all is linguistically, it is spot on
theologically. Reconciliation is something that has already been done for us by
Christ. Just before today’s passage began, St. Paul writes “God reconciled us
to himself through Christ.” That’s the easy part – that’s the passive in the
past tense. That’s essentially the message of grace – that God does all of the
work in overcoming Sin.
But
the radical part is that “be reconciled” is also imperative, meaning that
reconciliation is not something that happens to us, but within us. St. Paul
tells us that we are “ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal
through us” and further says that “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew
no sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God.” We might skip right
over that phrase, but it’s an incredible claim – not that we receive the
righteousness of God, not that we are declared righteous by God, but that we
become the righteousness of God. This is where the imperative kicks in – it’s
not simply that we are reconciled to God, but rather that we become the
reconciliation itself.
Now,
what allows St. Paul to make such a claim as this is what he says just a few
verses prior to today’s reading. He writes, “So if anyone is in Christ, there
is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become
new!” It’s not merely that Christ has fixed the problem of Sin and Death for
us, it’s that he’s brought us into a new reality where Sin and Death are robbed
of their final power to condemn us forever. Christ has brought us into himself
– his love, his grace, his Resurrection are where we live, and move, and have
our being. Because of Christ’s reconciliation, we no longer belong to this
world, rather we belong to God. This is why looking inward isn’t narcissistic
navel-gazing – because when we look inward we find that our need for
reconciliation has been taken care of by Christ who has made us the
righteousness of God.
Where
this proclamation that we are in Christ impacts our lives is in how we see
ourselves. On Ash Wednesday and throughout Lent, the Church talks a lot about
Sin, not because we think it’s a topic people are clamoring to hear about, but
because though Sin has been defeated, it still has a gravitational pull on our
lives. And if we are not firm in our understanding that we are reconciled to
God, we might fall into the despair of thinking that we are stuck in Sin. It’s
important to remember that though each and every one of us are sinful, sin is not who we are. Rather, we are the righteousness of God. That is to say that we are all caught up in sin, but sin is not
our identity. Our identity, as St. Paul makes clear, is that we are in Christ,
and in Christ, we know that there is no darkness at all.
So
the message of the Gospel is not about hearing that we are forgiven, it is not
knowing that we are forgiven, it is not believing that we are forgiven, but
rather the Gospel is about us being forgiven, exuding forgiveness, being a
symbol of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not merely something that happens to us,
it becomes our identity.
Faith,
then, is about enjoying our forgiveness. It’s about being unshackled from the
laws and customs that weigh us down. Being forgiveness, being the righteousness of
God means that we don’t have to live in such a way that we try to earn our
righteousness. God isn’t going to love you more if you give up chocolate for
the next forty days or if you read the Bible more in Lent. God’s love isn’t a
meritocracy. Rather, Lenten disciples are done for two reasons. The first is
that you’re probably going to fail to keep your discipline or really struggle
to keep it. And that reminds us of our reliance on God to save us. If we
struggle with giving up meat for a few weeks, how are we going to take care of
the problem of death? The difficulty of fasting brings us closer to God not
because it makes us holier, but because it makes us needier and when we are
aware of our need, we are more ready to encounter the God who meets us in our
needs.
The
second thing that a Lenten discipline is good for is that it helps to remind us
that we are, indeed, in Christ. Though we live in this world, we are not of the
world because we are citizens of Christ’s New Creation. So, making a commitment
to come to a service of Morning or Evening Prayer at least once a week in Lent
is about having our calendar reflect our in Christ-ness. And being reminded of
that, it will change how we see ourselves and others. Coming to Confession on a Wednesday in Lent is about coming to get off of your chest those things that
are weighing you down and be reminded that God loves you and forgives you.
Fasting, or giving something up is done to remind us that because we are in
Christ, we don’t really need other things. Instead of giving up something
trivial, like a kind of food or drink, you might consider giving up something
that makes you feel prideful or self-sufficient. Such practices help to remind
us of our identity in Christ.
And
our being in Christ and being the righteousness of God is given to us for a
purpose. The word that St. Paul uses for “be reconciled” is the root word katallasso, which is where we get our
word “catalyst.” Our reconciliation with God changes things, it sets off a
reaction of grace in our lives. As we look inward on Ash Wednesday, yes, we see
our great need for God because we are infected with Sin which leads only to
Death. But deeper than that, we see the righteousness of God planted firmly
within us. In being reconciled to God, all things are made new. This Lent, let
grace be a catalyst in your life, have righteousness as your identity, and
enjoy your forgiveness.
