Ash Wednesday Meditations
Katy Hinman
Oakhurst Baptist Church
February 9, 2005
Repentance
Scripture: Romans 2:1-11
“Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. You say, "We know that God's judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth." Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?”
“But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will repay according to each one's deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be anguish and distress for everyone who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality.”
Repentance isn’t a hot topic of conversation around the dinner table most nights. Heck, it’s not a hot topic of conversation most anywhere. In a time when many of our national leaders won’t even admit to having made any mistakes, it’s hard to conceive of a massive shift of our consciousness toward repentance. Yet that is exactly what we are called to on this day. Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, is the day we are called to honestly examine our lives and confess and repent of our sins.
It’s easy for us to point fingers and acknowledge where others might need to repent. Be honest, how many of you were nodding to yourselves when I made the comment about leaders not admitting they’ve made mistakes? I think a few of you may have even guessed that I was thinking of one leader in particular. We chuckle . . . or grimace . . . to ourselves over the folly of those who believe themselves infallible. Yet how do we view ourselves? The scripture from Romans should convict us that we are in no place to judge others because we ourselves are guilty of the same sins, or worse.
What would we find if we honestly examined our own lives? Where would we see our sins? What do we stubbornly hold on to, insisting that it’s right, or at least okay, even when the evidence is piling up against us? If we actually undertook a rigorous self-examination, where would we see the need for repentance?
As we enter into the season of Lent we are called to just such self-examination. We must look upon our lives with unclouded eyes. We must not assume that, just because we go to church, say our prayers, and tithe (you do tithe, don’t you?), we have bought a free pass. Paul puts it well: “Do you despise the riches of God’s kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” It may be hard for us to think of just going along doing our own thing as “despising” God’s kindness. After all, we say prayers of thanksgiving, don’t we? How is that despising? But God’s kindness toward us is based on our own unworthiness. We have nothing to offer God that God cannot get for Godself. God does not need us, but we need God.
That’s important, so let me repeat it. We need God. Not want God, not it’s nice to have God around, not I’ll have my people call God’s people. We need God. And when we decide that we have nothing to repent of, that we are doing just fine our own thank you, that it wasn’t really all that bad anyhow, we are despising God. Despise means to regard with contempt or scorn, to regard as unworthy of one’s interest or concern. We are saying, “we have no need of your values of your judgments, God, and who are you anyway to tell us what to do?” All of our sins, no matter the magnitude or who is affected, are ultimately caused by pride, by us deciding that we have no need of limits, that we have no need to care for others, that we do not need to be ruled by the One who created us all, that we are in charge.
God’s kindness to us is that, if we reject that pride, if we turn to God in humility, then we will receive God’s blessing, then we will enjoy God’s salvation and presence in our lives. How do we do this? Through repentance. Ash Wednesday calls us to remember our sin, however painful that may be, and to feel remorse for that sin. But more than that, it calls for us to reject our sin, to change our hearts and minds. This can be difficult. There are a number of sins that we don’t necessarily want to reject. I mean, sure, we know they are technically sins, but they’re so much fun, and they don’t hurt anybody. We may even give them up for Lent. But unless we truly change our hearts and minds regarding them, and thoroughly reject them from our lives, we have not repented.
Repentance is a difficult thing. Especially because the things we need to repent for can be painful to even think about. We’d much rather ignore them. Or we can think we don’t really need to repent for things we didn’t do. After all, how can doing nothing be a sin? But we are convicted by the words of Jesus. We know that our actions toward others are of concern to Jesus, for he said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” But our inactions towards others are also his concern, for he said “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”
I challenge you this Ash Wednesday to examine your life and honestly confront your need for repentance. I do not say this lightly, for it is not an easy task. But we, as Christians, must face our sin. Our sins of action and, especially, our sins of inaction. When have we lied, been unkind, or hurt others? And when have we, by our silence, been complicit in the oppression of others, the destruction of creation, and the spread of violence in the world?
We must approach God as we truly are, empty and unworthy. We are dust and to dust we shall return. Even Job, a man who is described as blameless and upright, an appellation we can surely not aspire to, when confronted with the glory of God, realizes his own unworthiness and repents. Even Job, who, being blameless, presumably had no sin to repent for, confessed to God, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. . . I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”
On this first day of Lent, we are invited to repent of our sin and pride, to lay our true selves at the feet of Jesus, to acknowledge our own unworthiness, and to surrender our whole selves to God. Amen.
Scripture: Isaiah 58:1-12
“Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins. Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God. "Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?" Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.”
“Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.”
“If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.”
I have challenged you already to a difficult task. Repentance is not something that is achieved in a 45 minute worship service or in a single moment when a cross of ashes is drawn on your forehead. It’s not even something that happens only during the forty days of Lent. It must be an ongoing process. But if that’s the case, then why a special day? Why a special season? Besides being a season of repentance, Lent is traditionally a season of fasting, abstinence, and self-denial in preparation for Holy Week and Easter. The forty days represent the time that Jesus spent in the wilderness when he was preparing for his own ministry.
We hear a lot about people giving things up for Lent, about the self-denial aspect of things. Most of us no longer fast, but lots of people give up chocolate or beer or TV, things that we enjoy, but that we will reject for a period of time in an effort to remind ourselves of the truly important things. This aspect of Lent, in fact, is so ingrained in our attitude that when I proposed doing an environmental study for Lent through my job at Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, the steering committee didn’t want to, because they did not want it to seem as though taking steps to be more environmentally friendly was in any way connected to self-denial. To me, that seemed silly. Isn’t Lent all about preparation for Jesus’ resurrection? What better way to prepare than to make sure we are caring for what God has entrusted to us? It may seem hypocritical for me to even point out this as a possible stumbling block given how strongly I stressed repentance and unworthiness, but I think that we are missing a crucial aspect of what true self-denial means.
Self-denial should not mean giving up little things that we enjoy in an effort to make ourselves more “holy” or “godly”, or in an effort to punish ourselves for our sins. Rather, self-denial is the humility of which I spoke before. It is realizing that we, ourselves, as humans, have no worth apart from God. This is not to set ourselves us for a nice evening of chastisement and flogging, however. It is to prepare for complete surrender to God. To rededicate our lives to the One to whom we owe everything. Our response to God’s kindness is repentance and humility. Through that humility, we empty ourselves, and through self-denial, we prepare ourselves to be filled with God.
When we honestly realize our own pride and reject that pride through repentance, we have set the stage to become new creatures in God. We are not fasting as punishment, but as a symbol that we are nothing without God. Does God want us to only sit around and meditate on how awful we are? No. Repentance leaves us empty, and emptiness must be filled. We fill this empty space by earnestly and hungrily seeking after God’s will and God’s ways.
Thus, Lent is not just a season in which we recognize our own failings, but it is also a season in which we respond to God’s kindness through rededication, through putting ourselves completely and utterly at God’s disposal. Our Lenten fast is not a punishment, but an opportunity. God calls us to do God’s work. But we can only truly respond to this call once we accept that, to do so, we must give ourselves totally over to God.
In Psalm 40, the psalmist declares, “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.” In a time of emptiness and utter worthlessness, God will restore us. And how should we repay God for this? The psalmist continues: “Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said, ‘Here I am; in the scroll of the book it is written of me. I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.’" Our response to God is to place ourselves at God’s disposal, to do God’s will.
Though we receive the mark of ashes, to remind us of our “dustiness,” the ashes are not our sacrifice to God. Repentance in ashes is our preparation. Our sacrifice, our Lenten fast, requires a complete shift. We must no longer think of ourselves. While repentance involves complete self-examination, the Lenten fast requires self-release. Fasting for its own sake tends to focus our entire thought on ourselves: “I am so hungry. When do I get to eat again? Aren’t I holy, doing all this fasting?” The Lenten fast must be focused on God and on God’s work. Thus the words of the Lord to Isaiah: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”
Indeed, God’s fast again reminds us that we are convicted both by our action and our inaction. Where we have not “done for the least of these,” now we are called to do. This is the fast the Lord chooses.
God has given us a wonderful gift, the chance to cooperate in God’s action in this world. But to do so, we must repent and we must rededicate. We must repent of our pride and our sin, and we must rededicate ourselves to live for God and God alone. We are dust. But we are dust with a mission. Amen.