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| February 25, 2009 -- Ash Wednesday Service
-- Service Guide Text: Romans 2: 23-24 Theme: Our Father - Our Only Hope Our Father Who art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy Name. You who boast in the Law, do you not dishonor God by breaking the law. For it is written, the Name of God is blasphemed "among the Gentiles because of you." This evening we begin our Lenten penitential season with our traditional Ash Wednesday service. It is a time for us to reflect on why it is that God in His mercy has sent His Son into the world. It is a time to reflect on our need for a savior from the ravages of sin that plagues each of us. We have been invited to come forward to receive a visual reminder of our frail corrupt condition and the true extent of sin’s corruption on our fallen human condition. On our foreheads we have received a token sign of how sin has rendered us children of Adam. The curse of the ground has left us with a problem of sin that has numbered our years here on earth. We live with a frailty in both body and spirit that involves a life that has us constantly in need and sinful sickness unto death. It is important to reflect on this condition as we prepare for the our journey with our Lord to Jerusalem. If you cannot appreciate the problems that sin has created for which we have no remedy - it is difficult to see anything appealing or helpful about the passion and death of Jesus. As an aid to surveying our needy, deficit situation, you are invited to reflect on different aspects of the needs that your sinfulness has rendered on the basis of midweek meditations based on the petitions of the Our Father. This is the prayer the our Lord taught sinners who have a multi-faceted problem of sin. If prayer is rightly understood as talk with God, then the Lord’s Prayer must be understood as that kind of prayer that brings to God all of the important issues of life in light of our sinfulness for which we are in need of His intervention and blessing. You simply cannot pray the Lord’s prayer and then say - now that we are done with the formalities, let’s bring to God attention the really important matters of our lives. When we get to the doxological ending - for thine is the Kingdom - we have already covered all of what we really need such that there no further need to pray for anything more. Every aspect of the deficits to your existence that sin has created will have been addressed. And we must also add, that if God is merciful to you and blesses you with all that you ask of Him in the Our Father, you will be lacking nothing. To reflect on the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer therefore provides us with an opportunity to survey the length and depth of our sinfulness and conversely how our Creator through the saving work of Jesus our Redeemer intends to deliver us and bless us with every good thing that He planned for us from the start of his work of creation. We begin this evening with the introduction and first petition: Our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy Name. The Law demands us to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul, but our sinfulness has put ourselves at the center of our heart, mind, and soul. At a minimum, the Law demands that we are to hallow - to make holy his Name in all that we do and say. But surely, when we pray this petition, we are reminded of God’s Law, the First Commandment and how our lives simply do not reflect or express the holiness of God’s name in all that we do and say. We have become our own greatest concern and we often display this self-idolatry by invoking the Name of the God of heaven to be simply our witness, or we seek to make God the arm of retribution - to send upsetting things, conditions, and people to perdition - just what they deserve. As the Jews taught the pagans how to take the Name of the God of Israel in vain, so we often make a similar witness in our own world. And to the contrary, we strive to have our name hallowed wherever we can here on earth. We are more concerned about how our name fairs than the Name of our Creator and Redeemer. We have not written his Name large in our plans for the concerns of each day, yet He has written us large in his plans for redeeming his fallen world. We make our journey to Jerusalem with Jesus with a sense of confidence about our creator God because we have been there before. We have not only observed his suffering and cross, we have become united with Christ the crucified in our baptism and have received the righteousness from his atonement for our sins. Our God has reconciled himself to us, overcome our problem of sin and death through the sacrifice of His Son. In Christ, we have been adopted into God’s family as his sons and daughters and we therefore can confidently address him as our Father. His Name has been made holy by the perfect devotion and obedience of His Son who has come into this world to do the bidding of His Heavenly Father - an obedience even unto death - so that we might be received back into His plan for us in creation, a plan that our sinful rebellion destroyed. Apart from our Heavenly Father, in who’s Name Jesus enters Jerusalem with palms and shouts of hosanna . . . apart from this Heavenly Father who offers up his only Son in our stead, the verdict ashes to ashes and dust to dust become our destiny forever. Moreover, apart for the Messiah who begins to make his journey to Jerusalem, our Creator remains simply a frightful, wrathful, condemning judge who’s sentence of death would hang forever over our heads. No loving Heavenly Father here. But because of God’s reconciliation for the sake of His Son and our adoption into his family, we may make confident our address to God as our Father in Heaven in the Lord’s Prayer; and we may be confident that as we reflect on the needs that sin has given us in the petitions that follow, we can journey again to Jerusalem with confidence. Jesus goes there to die for us, because the will of our merciful Father in Heaven, before the foundations of the world, wrote our names in His book of life - names made holy as He is holy by the blood of His chosen lamb. Once we were no people, now we have become the people of God. Once we were spiritual orphans, but now we have become the children of God who is our Father in Heaven. Hallowed be Thy Name . . . and in the cross of Christ and what we have become united there with Him . . . it is. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. A-men. |
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