Rend Your Hearts

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This past Sunday, we celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord. We were privileged to have the heavens opened and the voice of God speak to us. We saw the face of our Lord bright and shining as the sun. And now the heavens are shut up tight.

Epiphany is a season of having the gates of heaven flung open to the whole world. The Lord of Hosts is here. And now we enter in to the season of Lent, where the doors are closed. The way is barred. The gates are locked. You may not enter heaven, not even in a vision. You may not hear the song of the angels. No glory resounds in the sky now. Mankind may not enter into heaven, but must remain on earth. You must sit beside the waters of Babylon, weeping for your sins and praying for a Redeemer. Mourn for yourselves, for your children, for the consequences of your sin. Transfiguration is over; today is Ash Wednesday.

Ashes were a symbol of mourning in the OT. You put them on yourself, heaped on your head like Job. You did not have others put them on you. That was none of anyone else’s business. And it was not a little dab but a pile. You also wore sackcloth. Scratchy, itchy burlap. “Sackcloth and ashes.” Sackcloth and ashes were visible, tangible symbols of mourning and of sacrifice. You wore them to show the contrition and grief that had already rent your heart inside. There does not seem to be much of a market for sackcloth these days. Just a respectable little dab of greasy ash from last year’s palm Sunday fronds.

Rend your hearts, not your garments, declares the Lord. Torn garments were another sign of mourning. Costly to the wardrobe too. But God desires neither torn clothing or soiled foreheads. What He desires is broken and contrite hearts. Hearts that have felt the hammer of the Law. Hearts that have been plowed under. Hearts that recognize there is nothing whatsoever in you that should obligate God to you. Empty, broken, crushed hearts are what the Lord seeks, not self-imposed ceremonially sooty foreheads.

Jesus does not impose ashes on you. Christ does not soil you with sin. You do that to yourselves. Christ does not pronounce a death sentence over your head. He saves you from death. He marks you with His cross. He baptizes you. He washes away the dust of Adam and makes you a new person in Him. He raises you up out of the dust and forgives you all of your Sin. “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.”

Jesus does not put ashes on you. He does not make you dirty; He makes you clean. Perhaps a more fitting Ash Wednesday symbol would be for each of us to soil our own faces with ashes and dirt and then come up to the font and I would wash them clean and have all the dirt stay in the font and you leave here with your faces scrubbed. That would work. But then we would be inventing some new little ritual, and we already have plenty of those. We do not need a new ritual; we need renewed repentance. Rend your hearts, not your garments.

Adam sinned. He disobeyed the Word of God. He refused the gift of God in the tree of life, and so he forfeited his life at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “Dust you are and to the dust you will return.” His food would be hard-earned bread. His work would be sweat-producing toil in the ground, in the dust whence he came. His life one of sorrow and sweat. His wife would suffer in childbirth. His marriage would be a struggle for dominance. Tears and sweat until the man of dust returns to the dust.

Yet in the midst of it all, God gave a Promise. “I will make enmity between you, the serpent, and the woman. Between your seed and her Seed. You will wound him. You will crush his heel. And he will destroy you. He will crush your head.”

You cannot save yourselves. The disease of Sin runs too deep. Adam cannot cure himself. He is but dust. It takes a second Adam. Not from the dust, but from heaven. Born of a woman, born under the Law, yet above the Law and outside the Law. The sinless, unblemished Lamb of God. Where Adam sinned, Christ obeyed. Where Adam brought death, Christ brings life. Where Adam brought condemnation to all, Christ brings acquittal to all. Where Adam brought death, Christ brings resurrection from the dead.

You are baptized. Your sooty, soiled foreheads have been washed clean and marked by the Lord. You are one of His. We trace that mark of ownership whenever we make the sign of the cross. But why would we want to soil it with Adam’s dust? In Baptism, your sins, though scarlet, have been washed white as the snow. In Baptism, the soiled soot of Sin has been washed away in the cleansing flood of Jesus’ death.

This calls for repentance. Not one Wednesday out of the year, but every day the Lord gives you. Daily dying, daily rising. Adam must die, Christ must rise. Return to the Lord your God. He has come to you. He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. He will not pronounce a death sentence over your head, deserved though it would be. That Jesus has heard and taken upon Himself. You have a life sentence pronounced over you. Forgiven, washed, justified, sanctified, holy. What Adam has done, Christ has undone and more.

Do you want a sign for mourning over your sin? Then look not to your foreheads but to the cross of Jesus. There you will see the grief and suffering your Sin caused the Son of God. Never such grief was there than this.

Our tears can only dimly approximate the tears of our Lord shed over us. You can never approach the mount of Calvary and play a part in the Crucifixion, any more than you can rend heaven and peer into the glory of the Transfiguration. You will suffer in this world, and it is because of the sin you bear, but let it serve as a reminder that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Let suffering serve as a reminder of your fragility in this life.

And when your fragility is exposed, when you are afflicted by violence or treachery, the victims of cancer or slander or simply our own perversions, never suspect that God has withdrawn His mercy. Pain and suffering, loss and sorrow, hunger and thirst, also serve God´s mercy. Let all tragedies and conflicts, all hardships and trouble, all wants, needs, and desires, whether they be from ice storms and tsunamis, cancer and migraines, cheating spouses and lying co-workers, false preachers and barking dogs or just melting ice cream, let all of them serve this purpose: to remind you that you are dust, that this is not your home, nor your destiny.

This is not the way that created the world. It is sad and broken, imperfect, and unsatisfying. It contains but occasional glimpses of the true good to come. The joy we sometimes now know, the blessed memories and friendships, the love of wife and children, the pleasures of food and wine and the marriage bed, even the Holy Gospel and the Sacraments, all good things pale in comparison to what God has planned and won for you in Christ Jesus.

You do not yet have your reward. This stuff, broken and sad, happy and nice, is at best only a foretaste, a sampling of the truly good things to come. The ashes are a reminder of the temporary nature of this dying life. Almost nothing lasts forever. But one thing does. And something better than ashes, more than merely a reminder is given to you this day: the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. That will not burn on the last day. You are given a promise, a communion with God, an indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the forgiveness of sins.

You are given a Name, made into a people, bestowed with a Life. You are joined to the Godhead Himself through the risen and ascended Messiah who laid down His life for you and took it up again to open heaven.

Do you want a sign of your life and forgiveness? Trace the sign of that cross, upon your forehead and upon your heart, where God Himself marked you in Baptism as one redeemed by Christ the crucified. Walk about through this life not with a pat of ashes on your head, but with the sign of Christ and the Name of God engraved on your forehead.

The gates of heaven may be barred to sinful men, but they are flung open to receive the Son of Man who comes in glory, with the salvation of the nations to bestow. The crucified, resurrected, and ascended Lord has opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. While we must forgo the songs of heaven for a time, that we may mourn our sins, there will be a time, even very soon, when the Lord will raise us from dust and ashes and clothe us with everlasting righteousness and eternal life.

Return to the Lord, your God. Return to the font of your Baptism, to the altar of His Body and Blood give and shed for you. Return with broken hearts. Lift up your hearts unto the Lord. And He will raise and restore you, as He always does and always will, in Jesus.

Why no ashes on this Ash Wednesday? Answer: You are baptized. It is finished.

In the Name of Jesus. Amen.