Sermon for Ash Wednesday: Blow your horn

Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 51:1-17; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10; Matthew 6:1-21
This is a day of polarities. We come to worship today, prepared to recognize our mortality hearing the words, “Remember that you are made of dust and to dust you shall return.” We receive the cross of ashes declaring our death to sin to the world, but we are alive and doing well. We hear the words of Isaiah telling us to raise our voices like trumpets and we are told not to act like the hypocrites who blow their horns in the square. We hear the list of polarities in 2^nd Corinthians. “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

In the midst of our practice of Word and sacrament, we are told that true worship is

“to loose the bonds of injustice, 

to undo the thongs of the yoke, 

to let the oppressed go free, 

and to break every yoke? 

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”

(that is to freely share your resources with your community in need).

These polarities may best describe the tension of Lent. In these forty days, we travel with Christ to the cross understanding that we will not die on Good Friday; Christ will not die on Good Friday. For the resurrection is a reality already. Christ died once for all. We cannot kill him again nor would we want to.

Lent in this way is a time for exploring what Martin Luther says is the human condition when confronting the divine. We are simultaneously saint and sinner; always in a state of grace and always needing forgiveness.

We cannot pretend to not know what is clear to us in and through baptism. We have died with Christ and we are raised up in Christ for the work of the gospel and the sake of the world.

There is a certain amount of external ritual and practice that is going to happen in the worship service today, but we know that these external signs are only symbols of our internal faith.

It is not done so much anymore, but many of you will remember at the end of the wedding ceremony, the bridal couple and their entourage got into their cars that were festooned with ribbons, cans and old shoes. The bridal couple’s car might have had a sign that said, “Just Married.” Blowing their horns, they would drive around the town and eventually stop at the place of the wedding reception.

Everybody knew that this behavior was not the marriage. The marriage starts the next day and grows and develops day by day until years of living together with Christ in their mutual living gives evidence of that desired state.

If we believe that the symbols are the relationship, then things do not go so well, but, when the symbols are truly signs of the deeper place of caring, that relationship of love and compassion, repentance and forgiveness, when our lives for each other grows beyond our own needs and embraces the needs of the community and world we live in, when hardships and troubled times can be looked back on as moments of growing interdependence, then we say, “that is a marriage.”

So let us enter into this time of polarity journeying to the cross confident in the resurrection. Let us wear the symbols of death knowing the reality of the empty tomb. When we fast and sacrifice, let us do it for the sake of others and let us blow our horns as a sign of joyful living in God’s abundant grace.

In the marriage of heaven and earth that has been made through the action of Jesus who came down for us, and opened God’s kingdom before us, we no longer seek glory for ourselves, but lift up the body of Christ in all that we do. Then our treasure is truly where are heart is. We can pray with confidence those words that Jesus taught us.