Ash Wednesday | March 5, 2025 | Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 | Paula Murray |

Gospel: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

¹Jesus said, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. ²Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. ³But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, ⁴so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. ⁵And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. ⁶But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

¹⁶“And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. ¹⁷But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, ¹⁸that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. ¹⁹Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, ²⁰but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®) Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

The evening begins with a sad recitation of Psalm 51, a wretchedly honest acknowledgement before God and one another that we are sinners, intrinsically opposed to Christ and His cross in the very depths of our beings. This is who we are, as a people, and as individuals. But it is not who we want to be. And in Christ Jesus, with the help of the Holy Spirit, it is not who we have to be.

And so, following the psalm, we confessed our sins, again before God and one another, reciting silently to ourselves the sins we know we have committed, the faults, the follies, the cruelty we practice wittingly. And then we gave to God those sins we are not aware of, sins that are often a part of our personality, or perhaps an attitude we hold, or even subtly harmful habits, and we ask God’s forgiveness for those sins, too. Our confession is based, as all are, on the Ten Commandments, all of which together can be characterized as a failure to love our God and our neighbor. We are bold to confess our failures of love, not holding back the truth about our sins from God or ourselves, because, as St. Paul reminds us, in Jesus, our elder brother in creation and in redemption, we have a Savior “who was made to be sin although He knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”

This is pure gift, for what have we to offer God for our salvation but the very sin that condemns us and demands our deaths? We are truly the walking dead, novels and tv shows have nothing on us. We are dust, as the ashen cross on our foreheads proclaim. We are stillborn in our trespasses, and unable to effect any change that might lead to our redemption. But we may lay down our fears for our future, earthly or eternal, for the Holy Spirit has called us by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified for our forgiveness and raised from the dead for our salvation. From sin to righteousness, from death to life, the Holy Spirits calls us and transforms us and even keeps us in God’s grace.

Now, with the recitation of Psalm 51 and our confession, we have begun our observance of Lent. For 1600 years or so the Church has struggled to observe Lent, to follow Jesus as He makes His way to the cross and His passion and death. Passion in this case means suffering, as Jesus knows that His journey to Jerusalem will result in His death, and that He is going to die not because sin condemns Him, too, but because sin condemns us. He will be the sacrifice for our sins in His crucifixion. This is why we spend so much time during Lent reflecting on our sin and repenting of that sin. When we repent of our sin, we are acknowledging that we are sorry for it, and wish to turn away from the world, sin, and the devil and return to the Lord our God .

Those are the three great forces aligned against us: the world, sin, and death. We observe Lent for 40 days because Jesus fought that battle against the world, sin, and the devil for forty days in the wilderness. Driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness after His baptism in the Jordon, Jesus fasted alone in the wilderness for that forty days while the devil provided Him with a series of temptations, all designed to lead Him away from God at a time He was weakened physically by the world. This is the Gospel text for this coming weekend, the first weekend in Lent, from the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Since Jesus’ temptations came after His Baptism, and the life of the baptized is one of resisting temptation and confessing our failures to resist, the season of Lent has also traditionally been a time during which we prepare new Christians for Baptism. For all Christians, therefore, Lent is a time of baptismal renewal, renouncing again the devil and all his empty works, and renewing our commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As a part of this time of baptismal renewal, and like those preparing themselves for baptism, we fast, except on Sundays each of which is a little Easter or celebration of the resurrection. And we pray more often and perhaps more whole-heartedly. We spend more time reading the Bible, and we dedicate ourselves to generosity, especially towards the poor. Basically, over the course of Lent we retrieve and renew with the aid of the Holy Spirit both our faith in the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ into which we were baptized and in which we will not only live but die, and also our willingness to live as those who follow Jesus to the cross.

Over the season of Lent we heighten what we do every week, making a bigger deal of what is basic to Christian discipleship. We retrieve and renew our faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit’s help because daily the world, sin, and the devil fight against us. When we say world, we do not mean geography or the planet on which we live. We mean an attitude or a mindset that is opposed to Christ and His cross and all they represent, including the love and mercy of God. We also acknowledge, as was said earlier, that we all have that mindset, and we call it sin. This is why we know ourselves to be sinners, and why we are so very grateful for the mercy we receive from Jesus.

That age-old mindset opposed to Christ and His saving grace has changed from eon to eon. But whatever the character of the devil’s work, he has tirelessly worked to oppose our Lord and His saving work. Sexual perversions are a favorite tool of our devilish enemy, and we have seen that operating under the guise of identity politics. But that is losing its hold on our culture, and soon it will be something else designed to turn us from God and His love. This is just a newer version of the age-old mindset against God. Humanity has always sought to define itself, not wanting to admit that we are subordinate to God and often even opposed to Him. We have always wanted to be our own god, which is why the Ten Commandments begins as it does, with this commandment, “That we have no other gods before God.” Today’s version of this sin includes a sort of hierarchy of victimhood, which lifts up some presumed victim of ill doing above others, and then requires those others to grovel and seek forgiveness of those who are higher up on the list of victims.

Our Christian faith proclaims that there is no hierarchy of sin or sinners. Rather, we teach that all people, regardless of ethnicity or sex or race or language or culture or national identity or wealth or power or anything else are born sinners doomed to die. All people. There is but one identity for all human beings, and it is not one we can change on our own. For our salvation we must depend on God, and only God. And God be praised it is His holy joy to save us. Jesus Christ willingly took on human flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary. This is what St. Paul meant when he said, “For our sake he made Him to be sin who knew no sin.” Our God, Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit is sinless, but by becoming incarnate of the Virgin Mary, took on our sins, and bore them, eventually, to the cross. We take our identity, the only identity that matters, in the end, from that act and from the resurrection that followed it.

We are baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection, so that even as He was raised from the dead so we might be also. The cross on which our savior died is our treasure, and we are its friends, not its enemies. But we retain that identity with difficulty, being daily forced by the world, sin, and the devil to fight against a mindset and values that are bitterly opposed to everything Jesus stands for in heaven and on earth. We are susceptible to the world’s blandishments in materialism, to sin’s temptations to be God for ourselves, and to the devil’s life-stealing, spirit-stealing lies. We need all of us frequent infusions of the grace of God in His Word, His Supper, and the holy conversation of Christian friends to bolster our identity as Christians and as friends of the cross.

And that is why we keep a holy Lent.

Pr. Paula Murray