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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
I have to admit that, for a long time, I did not understand why the Gospel Reading we heard tonight is appointed for Ash Wednesday, the beginning of what is sometimes called the Lenten Fast. Now, I will be the first to say that, among pastors out of the seminary for as long as I have been (and even among some out of the seminary for less time), I do not have as much experience as others preaching the lectionary regularly, having spent both years in a parish with only part-time responsibilities and years more-focused on teaching at the university level than preaching in a parish regularly. And, even when I have preached on Ash Wednesdays in the past, I avoided preaching on the Gospel Reading because I did not know what to make of it in the context where ashes were being imposed. Of course, I grew up in Lutheran congregations that did not impose ashes, so when I started to be exposed to Lutheran congregations that did impose ashes, I sort of expected a text that supported the use of such external signs of repentance, instead of a text that opposed them, which the Gospel Reading, seems to do, at least on the surface. Yet, when one goes beyond the apparent meaning of the Gospel Reading on the surface, one realizes Jesus essentially expects His followers to fast, and He certainly does not prohibit them from using external signs of repentance, such as ashes. So, our primary focus tonight is on the Gospel Reading’s three verses related to fasting, with the theme: “When You Fast”.
With these three verses from our Gospel Reading, St. Matthew, by divine inspiration, uniquely reports Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount teaching us about fasting. The teaching about fasting comes after that about both giving to the needy and praying to Our Father, and the progression from praying to fasting is logical, in some sense, since fasting often accompanied praying. Such fasting and praying could also make use of such things as sackcloth (something like modern-day burlap), and such fasting and praying could also make use of dust and ashes, which were thrown up towards God and then settled on one’s head and face. Such fasting, praying, and using sackcloth and dust and ashes all had biblical precedent and great meaning. For example, public or group fasting was commanded in connection with the Day of Atonement, and individual people such as Job, Tamar, and Mordecai all voluntarily mourned or repented using ashes. Using dust and ashes indicated such things as one’s contrition and one’s dependence on God, Who had first made human beings from the dust of the ground. Well, if fasting and using ashes had biblical precedent and great meaning, why does Jesus in the Gospel Reading appear to tell His followers not to fast with external signs of repentance?
The key to properly understanding Jesus’s teaching about fasting with external signs of repentance lies in His command to stop fasting as the hypocrites fast. The hypocrites’ did not intend to deepen their personal devotion, but they intended to win the approval of others by attracting others’ attention to how pious they could appear. Like actors in a movie, they might paint their faces pale or otherwise disfigure their faces with ashes to appear to have a humble attitude or posture before God that they did not actually have. They might go beyond the commanded, public fasts to voluntary, private fasts and might even have thought that their fasting and using ashes might move God to grant them what they wanted, as if their outward fasting and use of ashes were an achievement and as if their inward attitude towards God did not matter (much like the misperception of indulgences at the time of the Lutheran Reformation).
One wonders whether fasting and using ashes could even help win the approval of others in our time. Those watching the Republican candidates for U-S president debating tonight in Arizona may or may not even notice whether or not Roman Catholics Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are wearing ashes. Already two years ago on Ash Wednesday, a Roman Catholic British T-V host mistook Joe Biden’s ashes for a bruise on his forehead and speculated on the air that the Vice President had walked into a door! So far gone from public consciousness are ashes as a sign of repentance. More than twenty years ago, when I worked in T-V news, I had one Roman Catholic anchor who came into the station to put on his makeup before he received ashes so that his ashes would be on top of his makeup and visible to everyone who watched the evening newscasts. Other anchors put their makeup on around the ashes. People who really knew those anchors usually thought that, in doing so, they were hypocrites, in a sense disfiguring their faces, as Jesus puts it in our Gospel Reading, that their fasting may be seen by others.
But, criticizing my former co-workers is a little too easy. For, while they truly may not have had the inward attitude of repentance to go with their outward show, in many ways you and I are no less guilty of hypocrisy. There is often an equally jarring contradiction between what we externally show or say to others about our lives as Christians and what is really going on internally. We may give the outward appearance of repentance, but inwardly we may not be repentant of all our sins (maybe we are holding onto favorite sins that we like repeating), or inwardly we may not completely forgive others (maybe we are harboring resentment towards someone over something we do not think is forgivable). Too often, like the hypocrites against whom Jesus speaks in our Gospel Reading, you and I use an appearance of right conduct to conceal our failure to do God’s will. For such sin, God speaks to us as He spoke to our first parents, as was spoken to ash-receivers tonight: “You are dust, and to dust you will return.” Death is our sentence for all our sin, as the committal formula of the funeral service reminds us: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Yet, even as we struggle with our own hypocrisy, God being willing, we also hear and respond to God’s call for us to repent. And, call us to repent He does, as He did this evening in our Old Testament Reading and in the Appropriate Verse for Lent, which we used tonight and will be using this whole Lenten season. He says, “Return to Me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.” Here we are! We have consecrated a Lenten Fast, called a solemn assembly, and gathered the people. We know that our sin makes us loathsome and without value. We speak of our shame and deep distress. We act according to God’s sovereignty and our complete dependence on Him, our own insignificance and nonexistence apart from His grace. In short, we repent: we turn in sorrow from our sin—our sin of hypocrisy and all our sin—and we trust God to forgive our sin. For us, ashes outside are a sign of genuine repentance inside.
When we so repent, God forgives our sin, whatever our sin might be. Hannah and the psalmist declare to us that “God raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.” Though Jesus Himself fasted forty days, He did not do so out of a need to repent. As we heard in the Epistle Reading, He knew no sin but was made sin for our sake so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. Thus, now is the favorable time; now is the day of salvation. With Jesus’s death and resurrection for us, He, in the words of Isaiah, gives us “a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning.” By Jesus’s agony and bloody sweat, by His cross and passion, by His precious death and burial, our good Lord helps us, as will pray in the Litany. On account of Jesus, our Father in Heaven, Who knows even our secret repentance, “does not deal with us according to our sins,” as the Psalmist put it, “nor [does He] repay us according to our iniquities”. Rather than as a just judge, as a Father He shows compassion to us, His children; He remembers that we are dust, and He removes our transgressions from us as far as the east is from the west. Those who fast to be seen by others receive their reward here and now, but our reward is above and, in some sense, yet to come. Until then, the world may persecute us, but, instead of its rejection and hatred, God graciously shows His love to all believers in Christ.
When I was in sixth grade, my science fair project was about homemade soap. I was surprised to learn that something as dirty as ashes could be an ingredient in something used for cleansing. Some today might even still cleanse with ashes when soap is not available. In the Bible ashes were an ingredient in special water used for ceremonial cleansing, usually by sprinkling with a branch of hyssop. That ceremonial water points forward to the water of Holy Baptism; so, even ashes can remind us that there, at the Baptismal Font, God, as we heard in our opening psalm and will sing in the offertory, cleanses us from sin, washes our iniquity, washes us whiter than snow. Made God’s children in Holy Baptism, we move from the font to the rail for the family meal, the Sacrament of the Altar.
Now, there is an interesting thing about today’s Gospel Reading. The reading omits some intervening verses where Jesus teaches us to pray the Lord’s Prayer to Our Father, including asking Him for daily bread. Some find striking that teaching such a prayer for food is followed by teaching about fasting. Religious fasting has always been a way of preparing for contact with God, and some see in the Lord’s Prayer’s petition for daily bread a connection of some sort to the Lord’s Supper, where we have our greatest contact with the Divine. Of course, public fasting is not what identifies us as community, but participation in the community meal identifies us as community. Yet, as we confess with The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther in the Small Catechism, “Fasting and bodily preparation are indeed a fine outward training”, especially for receiving Christ’s body and blood in, with, and under bread and wine. But, as the Small Catechism continues, “he is truly worthy and well prepared who has faith in these words, ‘Given and shed for you for the remission of sins.’” The fasting before the Sacrament can serve to remind us of the death we deserve before we receive the life we do not deserve, but such fasting (or any other fasting) can never itself become an act of worship or something that we think earns us anything before God.
Jesus begins our sermon text by saying, “When you fast”, which means He expects that we will fast. So, we can and do fast at times, both publicly as a group, as we do with our Lenten Fast, and privately as individuals, without necessarily letting others know, as we might before receiving the Sacrament. Such fasting may be a temporary abstention: from all food, from a specific food, or from some other thing we enjoy. (However, one can legitimately question, I think, whether a Lenten Fast can be made by giving up something that is sinful or harmful, especially if one has the intention of taking back up the sinful or harmful thing, either on Sundays in Lent or when the Lenten season is over.) Ashes and other external signs of repentance can testify to others of the hope that is in us because of the genuine repentance in us. Ultimately, the external signs of repentance and the fasting itself flow from our saving faith in Jesus Christ. That saving faith enables us to make the other kinds of fasts of which the Bible teaches, such as giving to the needy, feeding the hungry, clothing the homeless. That saving faith also enables us not to look gloomy at any time, but to be joyful at all times, whether repenting, mourning, or even undergoing afflictions. Ultimately, our attention should not be directed to others for what they think about us but in order for us to help them. In the end, when it comes to “When You Fast”, we remember St. Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians: “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +