Ash Wednesday
March 1, 2017
“Dear Christians,
One and All Rejoice: Rejoicing in Repentance”[1]
Text: Psalm 51; LSB 556:1
“Dear
Christians, One and All Rejoice”… in repentance? This may seem an odd theme for Lent, and
especially for Ash Wednesday as we smear our foreheads with the dust and ashes
of repentance, and upon us is pronounced the sentence for every sinner:
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It’s a more poetic way of saying, “You are a
sinner, therefore you must die!” Rejoice
in that? Yes. Because that is not the end of the
story. That is not the end of you. Remember that those ashes are smeared in the
sign of the cross, the cross made over your forehead and your heart at Baptism,
to mark you as one redeemed by Christ, the crucified. You are baptized into Christ! You have put on Christ! His death is your death. His resurrection is your life. And so, while the ashes declare the truth
that the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23), the cross declares the truth that
Christ took your death upon Himself, O sinner.
You will not die, but live, eternally, with the crucified and risen
Christ. And though your body must expire
when your earthly life has run its course, still, you live, with Christ, in
heaven. And the risen Christ will raise
your body from the grave on the Last Day, and you will live eternally in your
body in the New Creation inaugurated on Easter with the bodily resurrection of
Jesus Christ.
And
so, Dr. Luther’s magnificent hymn is just the right theme for this Ash
Wednesday, and for all of Lent. If
preaching ended with the Law, if we simply smeared your forehead with a blob of
ashes and told you that you were going to die, and then left you in your death
and condemnation, there would be no joy, there would be no rejoicing. In fact, there really wouldn’t be
repentance. Repentance is a turning from
sin and from self and from all that causes your death and condemnation to the
God who saves you in the flesh of Christ.
In other words, the Christian life of repentance is the life lived under
the shelter of Christ’s salvation, His saving you from your slavery to sin and
the condemnation of the Law. This is
great joy! This is reason to
rejoice! Repentance is God’s gift to
you. We too often think of repentance as
something we do, a feeling of sorrow
we evoke from ourselves by singing sad hymns and putting on sad faces. That’s not it at all. God is the one who turns you. The Spirit convicts you of your sin in the
preaching of the Law. The Spirit kills
you, crucifies Old Adam, by the preaching of the Law, and then raises you to
new life, faith in Christ, by the preaching of the Gospel, the forgiveness of
sins and restoration to the Father by Christ’s saving death and resurrection
for you. That’s the turning. That’s repentance. God turns you. God repents
you. It is all His work. And that calls for praise and thanksgiving
and great rejoicing.
King
David was a man on the run from God. He
was hiding in his sin. You remember the
story. One day as he looks out upon the
Holy City from his palace, he beholds the beautiful Bathsheba, bathing in the
light of day. And he desires her for
himself. He lusts for her. There is just one problem. She is married. To Uriah the Hittite, a faithful soldier in
David’s army. But David is the king, and
Uriah is conveniently occupied in the battle.
He’ll never know, thinks David.
And so the king summons Bathsheba to his chamber. It’s the stuff of soap operas. It’s also the stuff of the real lives of real
sinners. Adultery. Lies.
A cover up. Bathsheba is
pregnant. Uriah is too honorable, when
summoned home, to sleep in his house with his own wife, to unwittingly
cooperate in the scandal. So David sends
a letter by Uriah’s own hand to General Joab.
Put him where the fighting is fiercest and withdraw so that he
dies. Murder. And now David can take Bathsheba as his wife
and there will be no public scandal. You
can read the whole sordid story in 2 Samuel 11.
David is saved.
Except
he isn’t. David is lost. David is dead in his trespasses and
sins. David is the dust of the earth,
and he acts like it, and so to dust he shall return. I’m sure David was sorry, deep down, that it
had to be this way. But that sorrow is
not repentance. It is not a
turning. And it is no cause for joy. All the sorrow David can drum up in his heart
will never be enough to turn him out of himself. If there is to be a turning, if there is to
be repentance, God must do it.
So
the LORD sends a preacher. The Prophet
Nathan comes before David and tells him a parable about a rich man who has many
sheep of his own, but takes the one and only dearly loved sheep from a poor man
and slaughters it to entertain his guest.
David is filled with what he supposes to be righteous anger. Sinners are really good at being angry with
the sins of others. “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to
die, and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and
because he had no pity” (2 Sam. 12:5-6; ESV).
Nathan preaches the Law. “Thou art the man” (v. 7; KJV). And all at once, the whole false narrative
David has constructed to deceive himself and protect his kingdom, the whole
house of cards comes crashing down.
David is cut to the heart, as God intends His Law to do. He confesses to his prophet, his pastor, “I have sinned against the LORD” (v. 13;
ESV). And Nathan, God’s called and
ordained servant of the Word, pronounces the Absolution: “The LORD also has put away your sin; you shall not die” (v.
13). And so God turns David by the
preaching of His Word from sin to salvation, from death to life, from
unbelief to faith. And there is greater
rejoicing in heaven over this one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous
Pharisees who need no repentance (Luke 15:7).
There
is one catch, though. The sin must still
be atoned for by a death. David’s Son
must die. Oh, yes, the fruit of David’s
union with Bathsheba dies as a consequence of the sin. But that is not the Son we’re talking about
here. That son is but a type of the Son
of David who will come for this very purpose.
That Son is Jesus, who dies for David’s sin, and for the sin of the whole
world. He dies for you. This is how the LORD also has put away your sin; you shall not die.
So
we sing Psalm 51 with King David. David
wrote this song in his repentance over Bathsheba and Uriah. With David, we come before God with the
sacrifice of a spirit broken by sin, a broken and a contrite heart which God
will not despise (Ps. 51:17). We confess
our sin and pray that God will wash us with that alone which can make us pure
and clean… the blood of David’s Son, the Son of God, Jesus Christ. We pray that we may hear joy and gladness
once again, that the bones God has broken with His holy Law may rejoice in the
sweetness of the saving Gospel (v. 8).
We pray that God would create in us a clean heart and a right spirit,
that He would not withdraw His Holy Spirit from us, that He would restore to us
to joy of His salvation (vv. 10-12). We
are praying that having been repented by God, having been smeared with the
ashes of death, but in the shape of the holy cross, we would rejoice. That we would rejoice in repentance. That we would rejoice in Christ.
In
the canon of Luther hymns, “A Mighty Fortress,” gets all the play, and it is a
marvelous hymn which you should commit to memory, and in fact we’ll be singing
it this coming Sunday. It’s the appointed
Hymn of the Day for the First Sunday in Lent for all the congregations in the
Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, whether they sing it or not. But this hymn we’ve chosen for our meditation
in our midweek services is perhaps Luther’s best. It’s Law and Gospel, it’s the whole story of
salvation, applied to you personally.
This one delivers the goods. In
Lent, we put our alleluias away for a time.
We do this in Christian freedom, as a discipline, to remind us where we
are without Christ, dead in our trespasses and sins, self-bent and
hell-bound. But we know the Day is
coming. We know this path leads through
Good Friday and our Lord’s suffering and death on the cross for our redemption. And we know that on Easter morn, the tomb
will be empty. Jesus Christ is risen
from the dead. On that Day, we will sing
our alleluias with full throated joy.
But even in this penitential season of Lent, dear Christians, we
rejoice. For this is the unfolding of
our salvation in Christ. And here at the
font, in the pulpit, and at the altar, is where God turns us from all that
stinks of death and hell to Himself and the joy of His saving work. The LORD has taken away your sin. You shall not die. The right arm of Christ has won the victory
by receiving the nail, pierced for your redemption. Praise the Lord! In the Name of the Father, and of the Son +,
and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] The theme and structure of
this sermon is from John T. Pless, “Dear Christians, One and All Rejoice,”
Lenten Preaching Seminar 2010, Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, IN.
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