For Whose Sake?

Today we come together to mark the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday. Honestly it feels like we have been living in a perpetual state of Ash Wednesday for 2 years. Recently the CDC has relaxed its recommendations of masks and other pandemic related guidances, but to be honest we don’t know how this will play out. I made that mistake when the pandemic first hit two years ago. Following the guides and projections of the CDC and the thoughts of the world and the community around me, I thought we would be out of the pandemic post Easter in April of 2020. Boy was I and other pastors very wrong about that. Instead we endured for 2 years and it really does feel like a constant state of Ash Wednesday and Lent. I don’t know how else to describe it in biblical terms.

For you see it is today that in just a little bit I will take some ashes and place them on your head and remind you that you are dust and to dust you shall return. In plain terms, I am reminding all of us of our mortality. I don’t think anything has reminded us or made us more aware of our mortality and our our ashen nature than the pandemic. According to the website Our World in Data, there are a total of 5.96 million deaths since the beginning of COVID19. We have been in constant awareness of the finite nature of our existence.

As a part of the fragility of life I think many people have begun to ask and wrestle with the question of what are the most important things in life and how they should be living their lives. Some people continue to think that fame and fortune and recognition are the most important things in life and that the more of it you have the better off you’ll be and feel.

That was the mentality of some people during Jesus’ time. I want to make sure to emphasize that Jesus is talking about a group of people not every person in Israel. But that group of people felt that not necessarily wealth and fame were the end goal, but they did feel that very public and very grandiose gestures of faith would help their public image and show everyone how faithful they were. We see Jesus talk about people who give alms and those who pray, those who fast and store up treasures, and the difference between doing it for show and doing it because that is our response to God’s love for us is what is vital here. The part about almsgiving reminds me of the time when Jesus was sitting by the temple treasury and watched people loudly putting in their large sums of tithes and then the widow offering the two copper coins. She gave her everything while the noisy others gave only a small portion of their abundance but you bet that others heard the large amount being given and were very impressed by it. If you are giving or praying, fasting or storing up your stuff for the sake of others to see and know and think you are so incredible for it then perhaps you aren’t doing those things for God but for self recognition.

What Jesus is telling us and God wants from us is a shift from public recognition and boasting to and understanding that we do this as a thanksgiving to God for God’s great love for us. I think in a way people are beginning to feel that shift with the pandemic. The wilderness journey of two years in Ash Wednesday and Lent has helped some people to see that life is more than money and recognition. That God calls us into a deeper relationship with God through Jesus. Do we spend this life for our own personal selfish gain or do we do it for the sake of this world? A pastor I had the pleasure working with for a number of years said in a sermon one time: what are you going to do with this one precious life you have been given?

Are we going to spend this one precious life that we have been given by the grace of God to make ourselves as noticed and well thought of so that we can be praised by other people and feel good about ourselves based on that; or are we going to live a lift according to the life that God has called us to live through the life of our Savior Jesus Christ? Or in the words of Jesus at the very end of our story today in Matthew 6:21: “21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

As each of us receives ashes today may we all remember the path and the journey Jesus took, not for himself, not for his personal glory, but for sacrifice and personal loss so that we might receive the most powerful gift of all, forgiveness and grace. That is something to be shared and lived out for the sake of God, and shared to give God glory and to show God how much we appreciate God’s unending love for us and this whole world. Amen.

Related Media

Related Sermons