During my time as a college student at the University
of Alabama, I noticed that the most well attended service by college students
was the Ash Wednesday service. This was
surprising to me because Ash Wednesday might be the most sobering service we
attend all year. And let’s just say
college students aren’t necessarily known for being sober.
On Ash Wednesday, you are marked with a cross of ashes
and reminded that you are dust and to dust you shall return. This statement from our liturgy is a nice way
of saying, you are mortal, you are imperfect, you are wasting away, you are
temporary, you are going to die.
Why would anybody especially college students who are young
people, people who have their entire lives ahead of them gather to hear a
message that reminds them of their mortality?
Why do you gather today to hear that kind of message? In a culture where we are bombarded by news
of sin and death, why do we gather in a church to hear about sin and death?
You can’t open the paper, turn on the radio or TV, or look
at your phone without reading or hearing about sin and death. Just yesterday while I was writing this
sermon my iPhone alerted me that a child went missing in Brewton. I was notified about the funeral plans for a
young 9-year old girl who was accidentally shot and killed by her 3-year old brother. CNN told me about a train
collision in Germany that left 8 dead and many injured.
It seems that every day I find myself reading about a
teacher who is caught having improper sexual relationships with their students. I read about how gang culture claims yet
another life. We’ve seen the terrible of
images of Syrian refugees, many of whom are children, who have drowned in
attempts to escape the threat of persecution.
Every day, I read, we all read, about someone or some group of people
who are crying out from a proverbial rubble of ashes desperate to find
hope.
Haven’t we all seen enough sin and death? Isn’t it time to turn off the TV, cancel our
subscription to the paper, block all breaking news notifications from our smart
phones? I am afraid that if we do that
then we have let the powers of sin and death defeat us. If we ignore the sobering reality of sin and
death, then we deprive ourselves from seeing how the loving touch of Christ is
healing a broken and sinful world.
Ash Wednesday is about confronting the heartbreaking reality
of sin and death in our world and in our lives.
Ash Wednesday is about acknowledging that we are a broken and sinful
people living in a broken and sinful world.
But Ash Wednesday is also about receiving the good news that Christ
comes to give dignity to sin and death, Christ comes to redeem sin and death,
Christ comes to take on the terrible reality of sin and death and turn it into
something new.
I believe one of the reasons that people file into churches
on Ash Wednesday is because somewhere deep down inside of us all exists a hope
that our world will one day wake up from the nightmare it seems to be living. Somewhere deep down inside of us we know that
sin and death can’t be all there is to life.
Somewhere deep down inside of all of us there is God crying out from the
rubble of our ashes saying, “Behold, I make all things new.”
When I paint ashes on your forehead in just a few
minutes, I will paint the image of the cross.
This smearing of ashes into the image of a cross is an outward and
visible sign of how God is taking on sin and death in Christ and turning it
into something new. The ashes will
include the same oil that you were anointed with in baptism, oil that is a
reminder that you are marked as Christ’s own forever.
Ultimately, these ashes remind us that while we are a broken
people living in a broken world, we are destined for something more, we are
destined for life eternal in our God who lives life beyond the grave. Even sin and death are temporary, but God’s
enduring love in Christ is eternal.
Today we are reminded that we cannot outrun sin and
death no matter how fast we run. Today
we are reminded that ignoring sin and death won’t make it magically disappear. We are reminded that we can’t minimize evil
and expect everything to be OK. We can’t
pretend death isn’t a reality for all of us even for college students.
Instead, you are invited to look at the nightmare of
our world and see how God’s love in Christ can bring order, bring dignity,
bring redemption to any story of despair.
You are invited to look at the most damaged people in this world and
trust that God’s love can transform even the most broken hearted. You are invited to look at your own broken
heart and see how God is turning you into a person who believes in a story of
hope, a story of love, a story of redemption.
Above all, you are invited to look to the One who did
not back down but instead took on the full force of evil and death. You are invited to look to the One who
transforms a story of death into a story of life by following the way of the
cross. You are invited to look to the
One who killed the story of sin and death with a story of love and kindness, a
story that outlives despair, a story that never ends.
And best of all you are invited to follow the One
whose story is marked by a cross of ashes and discover a new life that is
marked by a love that never ends.
Amen.
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