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The First Sunday of Lent – Mark S. Winward

The Grit of the Ashes

“You’re dust.” Does that feel like an insult? It shouldn’t. If you were in church this past Wednesday—Ash Wednesday—you can probably still sense the grit of the ashes on your forehead. Those haunting words still echo: “Remember you’re dust, and to dust you shall return.” With that reminder of our mortality, our sin, and our desperate need for redemption, we began our journey through Lent.

I’m not standing here this morning trying to be abusive, but I have to ask: how does that make you feel? If you’ve come here today with a crushed self-esteem, I owe you an apology, but I also bring good news—you’re indeed the “poor in spirit” Jesus spoke of, to whom belongs the kingdom of heaven.

However, if you’re like me—and I suspect like most of us—you might bristle at the suggestion of being called “lowly.” If you see it as an attack on your self-esteem, I’m here to tell you that we’re in great peril. At the heart of that bristling is a vice to which we’re drawn like moths to a flame. It’s the only vice in the world that everyone hates when they see it in someone else, but rarely notices in themselves. Lust, anger, greed, and deceit all pale in comparison to it. It’s a vice that separates us from every other human being and, ultimately, from God. It’s the fuel for wars, hatred, prejudice, and oppression. It’s the utmost Evil. It’s the curse of humanity known as Pride.

The Gift of Choice

The Bible, much like Lent, begins with a problem. It’s the story of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained; it’s the story of God calling humanity back to Himself. And that story begins with Pride.

Recall the story in Genesis. God created the heavens and the earth, and then He created Man. But there’s something unique about humanity. God made us from the earth, breathed His life into us, and we became “living beings.” In the beginning, man and woman lived as they were meant to: in harmony with their environment, with each other, and with God.

There was something qualitatively different about humankind compared to the rest of creation. God yearned for us to respond to Him in love—to freely give ourselves to Him. To make that possible, He gave us the greatest gift in all of creation: choice. For there to be true love, it can’t be under compulsion; it must be a choice. And for there to be a choice, we must be able to choose to obey or disobey. True love, in the end, puts the interests of the Other above our own.

The Serpent’s Lie

In the Genesis story, everything was fair game except for one thing. God gave Man and Woman the choice of whether to obey Him or eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In case that sounds petty, remember: love requires the possibility of betrayal. I can’t boast of faithfulness to my wife if we live on a desert island without the slightest opportunity to be unfaithful. The “magic” wasn’t in the tree itself; it was in the choice.

Let me say a word about the Devil. Many of you believe in angels, and many of you believe they’re at least as intelligent and special as humans. If they’re intelligent and possess choice, doesn’t it make sense that some of them would’ve made a choice against God, just as we do? If you believe in angels, “fallen angels” go along with the package.

The Essence of Pride

Enter the Serpent or the Devil. The Devil suggested that if the Man and Woman ate the fruit, they wouldn’t die, but would “be like God.” For a moment, all creation held its breath as humanity made a fatal choice. We chose to be like God, to put our wills above His, and to usurp His authority. We put “Number One” first, and in that moment, Pride was born. Pandora’s Box was opened, and we became tangled in a web of Pride we’re helpless to overcome.

C.S. Lewis tells us that since that fatal moment, Pride has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and family. Pride is essentially competitive. There’s a “good” pride—like being proud of a child’s hard work—but selfish Pride is different. It doesn’t just want to have something; it wants to have more of it than the next person. It’s the absolute antithesis of humility. Lewis explained it better than I ever could:

“In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you don’t know God at all. As long as you’re proud you can’t know God. A proud man’s always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you’re looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you.”

That’s why even the smallest sin is deadly serious. The essence of every sin is breaking God’s Law and placing our desires above His. In the end, all sin is Pride, and it’s just as deadly now as it was in the Garden.

The Second Adam

Since that first fall, humans have had a propensity for making the wrong choices. We were stuck in a Catch-22: under the curse of pride because we’re human, yet unable to free ourselves because we’re under the curse of being human. Someone had to “get it right” to break the cycle.

That’s why God had to come as a man. One of us had to get it right to make it right. As Paul tells us in Romans, Christ came as a “Second Adam.” He writes, “Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (Romans 5:18, NRSV).

We see the temptation scene played out again with Christ—this time not in a lush garden, but in a barren desert. Satan tempted Jesus to take the easy route: turn stones to bread, jump from the temple, or worship him to gain the kingdoms of the world. Satan essentially said, “If you’re God, then dazzle me and act like God.” But Jesus’ reply was, “Only God makes those decisions; therefore, I’ll do nothing at your command.” But for the first time in human history, a Man got it right. Jesus chose to obey God rather than the Evil One. He knew the way to win humanity wasn’t through tricks, but through love and sacrifice.

Deeper Magic

In the desert, Jesus chose the difficult path to the Cross, knowing it was the only way to undo the curse of Adam. C.S. Lewis illustrates this beautifully in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The great Lion, Aslan, voluntarily gives his life for Edmund, a boy who’d sold his life to the White Witch. Aslan dies and triumphantly rises again. When the children ask what it means, Aslan explains:

“It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there’s a magic deeper still which she didn’t know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could’ve looked a little further back… she would’ve read there a different incantation. She would’ve known that when a willing victim who’d committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”

Jesus’ innocent death—the only obedient human among the lot of us—destroyed Death and Pride. Something miraculous happened: death began to be undone.

Our Choice

Like the first Man and Woman, Christ has freed us to choose. The choice today is between embracing Christ or embracing our Pride. That starts by affirming our own need. As John writes: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth isn’t in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8-9, NRSV).

Lent recognizes that we can’t be redeemed until we admit we are in need of redeeming. We’re faced with the choice to admit our need, find our place, and look to the One who is immeasurably higher than ourselves. In the end, it all begins with that simple, humbling realization: we’re but dust, and to dust we shall return. Amen.

Ash Wednesday – Mark S. Winward

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Those are the words I will say as I apply a small, cross-shaped smudge of ashes on your forehead as a reminder of your mortality. Many of us don’t need to be reminded of this, as we bear the grief of a cherished loved one or close friend. But if we are realistic, we are aware that any day might very well be “our day,” when we will not see another earthly sunrise.

Besides reminding us of our mortality, since biblical times ashes have represented our desire to turn from our sins. Now sin is not a very popular topic nowadays. After all, preachers go on and on about God’s grace—but we hear less and less about sin. The problem is this: unless we admit our own sin, we can have no grace. Grace implies there is something wrong for which we receive God’s unearned mercy.

Ash Wednesday, pure and simple, is about sin—sin with a big “S” and sin with a small “s.” As I remind you to “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” I am directly quoting Genesis, chapter 3, when God imposed the penalty for the sin of disobedience. Whether you accept the Genesis account literally or not, the message is that at the dawn of humanity, something went terribly wrong. The human race turned against its Creator with devastating consequences. Sin became not just an aspect of humanity but a normative one. After all, we are only human, right? But although we were created in the image of God, we suddenly began not to reflect it. Idolatry, envy, lust, hatred, jealousy, and murder entered into the world, and a huge, seemingly insurmountable wall went up between God, our neighbor, and ourselves. Humanity was truly lost. That was Sin with a big “S.” The result was a kind of spiritual self-destruction and spiritual death.

So now we live in a world where doing our will comes more naturally than doing God’s—where sin is more natural than righteousness. Of course, we’ve developed a number of defense mechanisms to live in our own skins. With Sin came an immense capacity not just for deception but for self-deception. Like a badly fitting shoe, habitually walking in sin shapes us in its image. When that happens, we convince ourselves it really isn’t so bad… After all, the definition of sin is what we think it is (not the Creator). Unfortunately, without reliance on the Creator, we depart from the Source of Life. And like Sin with the big “S,” the result of our own personal sin is a kind of spiritual self-destruction and spiritual death.

The Good News is that God didn’t allow us to be our own worst enemies. The Psalmist depicts God as a patient and loving father—full of compassion and mercy. But while God desired to pardon us, all of us were under the condemnation of a spiritual law that couldn’t be undone without God Himself breaking His own law. Without a heavy price being paid, God would be like a corrupt judge who flaunted the law he was charged to enforce. So God sent His Son to live as one of us, to call us back to Himself, and to pay the heavy price for what we have done wrong. The cross was the collision of God’s unfathomable love and God’s responsibility of justice. So God paid the price for us and, in the words of St. Paul, “made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Quite simply, unless I grasp my personal need for forgiveness, I can never really personally know the meaning of redemption. So any good news of God’s mercy and grace must begin with me reflecting on how I fall short.

Without sin, I have no need of the cross—and without laying my sins at the foot of the cross, I cannot know the abundant life Jesus Christ brought with His victorious resurrection.

Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent, a period of personal spiritual preparation as we lead up to our remembrance of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and victory over death—Good Friday and Easter. Christians throughout the world observe this time of year with reflection and personal discipline. Many choose to fast in one way or another, while others choose special acts of devotion. But whatever you do, it is not to pay a price that has already been paid. Rather, it is to glorify God personally in the practice of self-discipline and begin to grasp God’s unfathomable love. Because only when we grasp the full weight of our sin can we truly appreciate the freedom and joy a devoted life in Christ brings.

16th Sunday after Pentecost – Katharine Armentrout

In the last two Sundays we have listened to two of the toughest parables Jesus told – both of them on the subject of wealth and how to be faithful.

Jesus was talking to the Pharisees who, as the scripture tells us, loved money. 

Basically what Jesus is trying to help us understand is that there can be a real tension between accumulating wealth and living a life of faith.  

And he was challenging the Pharisees, and us, to open our eyes and our hearts to the teaching of both the Old and New Testament 

– the teaching that the accumulation of wealth while neglecting the needs of others can wall us off from God and God’s loving, wonderful world.

And speaking of opening our eyes, have you ever heard of the crime of willful blindness? It is a crime that is sometimes charged when the law holds accountable someone who deliberately avoids learning of, or acting on, facts that make up a crime…You see, it is a crime to hide from facts that constitute a crime and not take any action. 

For instance a person who has reason to know that a package he is to deliver contains illegal drugs but chooses to go ahead and deliver the package can be found willfully blind and convicted of a drug crime. 

Or a business executive who ignores his own employee’s fraud on a customer, can be held liable under willful blindness for the fraud of that employee, just like the executives at the Enron Corporation were.

In effect the law can hold someone accountable for the effort to hide from uncomfortable facts  – and that is exactly what the Rich Man did in this painful parable. The parable is really a play in three acts about willful blindness. 

Act One – We see that day after day Lazarus was at the Rich Man’s doorstep, in ragged clothes, with oozing sores. The Rich Man’s dogs knew he was there, even licking the sores of Lazarus. But the Rich Man hides himself behind the locked gates of his home, behind the elegant curtains that blocked out the sights on his front porch;

And, if he goes out the front gate, the Rich Man probably just steps over Lazarus as he leaves. 

Thus he can avoid seeing or greeting or helping the pitiful man lying on his doorstep.  All the while he eats sumptuously, dresses in fine purple clothes and hides himself from any sight that might be distressing.

He walls himself off. 

He is willfully blind to the man who is slowly dying in front of him and blind to his needs. 

What are the consequences of his deliberate avoidance? We learn that in Act Two of this parable.

We learn that both Lazarus and the Rich Man die.  But, for those listening to Jesus, there was an unexpected turn of fortune –

The Angels carry off Lazarus off to be in the bosom of Abraham – which the faithful would understand as heaven.  

But the Rich Man is summarily buried and he descends to Hades where he is being tormented.

The Rich Man then looks up and sees Abraham far away and with Lazarus at his side. The Rich Man seems puzzled by this chasm between them but he calls out to Abraham.  

He calls out to “Father Abraham”, as if he had been a faithful Jew who knew the Torah.  He pleads for mercy..

Now let’s remember that Jesus had been telling this parable to the Pharisees and they would have been deeply shocked at this turn of events.  Why?  

In the Jewish world of this time wealth was seen as a sign of God’s favor. At the same time, illness, poverty and hardship were seen as a sign of the man’s own sin or the sin of his parents. 

“How could a beggar go to heaven” would have been the question on their minds, “while a Rich Man suffers in Hades?” It would have been a complete, disturbing paradox.  

And, as we see, the Rich Man still did not fully understand his true state, his utter abandonment to Hades.  

So…hopeful, but still in his arrogant and self-blinded way, the Rich Man asks Abraham to send down Lazarus to bring him some water. 

Well… did you notice he at least has learned the poor man’s name but still, in his arrogance, the Rich Man thinks of Lazarus as a servant who can be directed to bring him relief.  

But Abraham is having none of it. He reminds the Rich Man that in his life time he was showered with rich things while Lazarus had only bad things.

It is almost as if Abraham is saying “it was your willful blindness to God’s commandments that has led you here. Your willful blindness to the Great Commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. ” 

So, in what we can call Act 3, it appears that the Rich Man finally understands that his life of riches and leisure, without attention to God’s commandment, has relegated him to Hades permanently.

And, perhaps with a pang of conscience, he begs Abraham to at least send Lazarus to warn his five brothers about what has happened to him. He wants to warn them so that they won’t end up as he did.  

But Abraham did not relent. Instead he reminds him that those brothers have everything they need to keep them from Hades 

if they will just listen to Moses and the prophets, clearly something the Rich Man did not do.

Abraham is clearly saying that there will be no special help for those who refuse the needs of the wretched at their gate. 

Saying that if the Willfully Blind will not hear the Scriptures and be merciful, then they have placed themselves beyond the reach of God’s mercy.    

Tough words but I don’t believe that the Lord is without mercy or that this would be His last word on mercy, even for the willfully blind.  

I think we know from the parable of Prodigal Son that those who truly want to come home to God, to Jesus, then they are welcomed with open arms. 

Instead this parable seems aimed at the stiff-necked and willfully blind, the self-indulgent who care nothing for God’s children or creation 

Who care only for their own seeming progress in the world of wealth and power. 

And I also know, and you know, that those of us who are here this morning are not deliberately “walled off” and oblivious to the needs of others like the Rich Man, 

You would not be here in church, or volunteering at CARES or Angels on Horseback or Habitat if you did not care about the world and the people our Lord has created.  

But…and there is always a but…

It is easy to get caught up in our own world of family, some volunteering, Football Saturdays, and myriad other things that distract us from the world right outside the doors of this church or our homes. 

In other words walling ourselves off from confronting the world as it is…

Perhaps looking at the world through the fingers of our hands, like a little child does, so she won’t see something painful. 

This parable is Jesus’ call to take our hands from our eyes and to continue to look for the Lazaruses who are in our community. No willful blindness here.

So you might ask: “Do we really have such folks in Jasper?” “Is there a Lazarus here?”. 

And the answer is “Yes”.  

Just about two weeks ago a homeless young man died here.  He had a name – Dakota James Massey. He was only age 27.  He and his father were living in their car parked at our Walmart.  He died from seizures early one morning in the car.(I wonder if he could not afford his anti-seizure medication)  My prayer is that the angels carried him off to heaven just as they did Lazarus. 

And almost every time we have Financial Assistance at CAREs we see someone who is homeless and is living in their car or on the streets or is about to get evicted.

And we know that our local government erects very restrictive regulations so that people spurred by the Gospel are unable to get permits for a homeless shelter.  

Additionally we know that homelessness is being made worse by lack of affordable housing in Pickens County.  We have long, long waiting lists for the very few subsidized Section 8 houses here.  And we have not had any new low-income housing built in Jasper since the late 1980s. And if regular apartments are available the rents are sky-high.

So I can hear you thinking: “Ok Katharine, so what do you think we can do about this?”. 

I think the first step may be to refresh our eyes. To really see what is in our community.  No willful blindness here! 

One easy, but eye-opening thing you can do, is sign-up to help with Serve Pickens on Saturday, October 18.  It is an opportunity to see our non-profits at work, to understand God’s needs in Jasper, to learn where the Lazarus’ of our community are and how we might be able to offer more help. 

Our God is faithful and just, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…

So instead of seeing this parable as a big warning to those of us who are considered rich by the world’s standards,

I think the Holy Spirit is inviting us to receive the “fullness of [God’s] grace,” as our collect says, and to have our eyes and hearts open to God’s needs.

As one writer put it: “Friends, Jesus invites us through this teaching to let our guards down, keep our gates unlocked, our ears unplugged, our eyes wide open, so that our souls may become less guarded and more and open to the flow of Holy Spirit’s generosity. Amen.”