I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about Ash Wednesday, nor about Lent and Holy Week, nor about sin and our need of confession and conversion. Ash Wednesday is not so much about sin as much as it is about forgiveness. When we say to you today, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” and impose ashes on your forehead, we are not encouraging you to wallow in your sins, or to be resigned to your mortality; we are reminding you that you are in Christ, and that it is in him and only in him that you can have peace, the assurance of forgiveness, and the promise of life in the power of the Spirit. On Ash Wednesday we appeal to you that you turn to him, or turn back to him, so you may truly live

We get the same message from Paul’s entreaty in 2nd Corinthians that we be reconciled to God. “We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” We should note the connection here to Paul’s startling confession in that same passage that it was “for our sake [that God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him [i.e., in Christ] we might become the righteousness of God.” We cannot be reconciled to God unless we are in Christ. They mean the same thing. And so we are reconciled to God through Christ. Ash Wednesday is not so much about our estrangement from God because of our sin as it is about our reconciliation as sinners to God through Christ, who though sinless, bore the full weight of our sin, perversion, weakness, and sickness unto death in himself, so that we might become like him in his sacrificial love for the world. That is what it means to say that God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

In the same way, and in order to make precisely the same point, using the image of matrimony, Luther spoke about our new life in Christ by emphasizing what he called the “happy exchange,” whereby we are united with Christ through faith as a bride with her bridegroom in which the two become one flesh. Luther writes: “Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sin, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sin, death and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul’s; for if Christ is the bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride’s and bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers? Here we have a most pleasing vision not only of communion but of a blessed struggle and victory and salvation and redemption…[for] by the wedding ring of faith [Christ] shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are his bride’s. As a matter of fact, he makes them his own and acts as if they were his own and as if he himself had sinned; he suffered, died, and descended into hell that he might overcome them all. Now since it was such a one who did all this, and death and hell could not swallow him up, these were necessarily swallowed up by him in a mighty duel; for his righteousness is greater than the sins of all men, his life stronger than death, his salvation more invincible than hell. Thus the believing soul by means of the pledge of its faith is free in Christ, its bridegroom, free from all sins, secure against death and hell, and is endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ its bridegroom.”

A modern interpreter, the great Swiss Reformed theologian, Karl Barth, spoke of the same reality but in a slightly different way. He said: “[Christ] is the man who entered that evil way [of sin], with the result that we are forced from it; it can be ours no longer. But that means that it became his way: his the sin which we commit on it; his the accusation, the judgment and the curse which necessarily fall on us there. He is the unrighteous amongst those who can no longer be so because he was and is for them. He is the burdened amongst those who have been freed from their burden by him. He is the condemned amongst those who are pardoned because the sentence which destroys them is directed against him. He who is the one person the electing God and the one elect man is as the rejecting God, the God who judges sin in the flesh, in his own person the one rejected man, the Lamb which bears the sin of the world that the world should no longer have to bear it or be able to bear it, that it should be radically and totally taken away from it. This is undoubtedly the mystery of the divine mercy.”

Ash Wednesday and Lent are powerful reminders that we are now only who we will be in Christ. Our very selves, our true selves, our identity and our life rest not in us, but in him. Our true selves still await us in the power of his resurrection from the dead. Every day and every moment we are being transformed into the likeness of Christ. It is a process of transformation that begins now in faith. “See,” Paul says, “now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!” Now is the day of salvation even though you doubt, suffer, sin and die; for even as you hear the gospel proclaimed, your life takes on new meaning and you are no longer simply your own. Your life--a life I dare say, that is prone to weakness, suffering and death--belongs to God in Christ, and it is he--the sinless and deathless one—who lives in you through faith.

What does this mean for us here and now? The main thing is we can have hope, and that though throughout our lives we contend with, hardship, pain, suffering, evil, sin, and death these no longer have any real or ultimate power over us: they do not determine, control, or characterize who we are and where our fate lies; for only the gospel’s promise is stronger than death. Only the gospel is dependable and true. And if this is so, then we do not have to merely exist. There is point and a trajectory to our lives; for the powers of death have more than met their match in Christ, enabling us to face the world forgiven and free. In him our path is the road to righteousness, peace, hope, and love. Thus too, all the things we put so much stock in--reputations, possessions, honor, our cherished opinions and beliefs, as well as all the darkest of our secret lusts, animosities and fears--give way to a new and more profound understanding of ourselves, each other, the world and God. Those who live a purposeless, aimless existence can have their hope restored, while those who are complacent will be challenged to grow in service, love, sacrifice and compassion for others. Regardless of where we find ourselves on that spectrum running from fearful to prideful, our lives now have a new meaning, a new starting-point and a new goal.

So as we ponder the fact that we are dust and to dust we shall return, we can be reassured that, having died to sin and emptied of our pride, we shall be recreated in the image of Christ so that we may share fully in his righteousness, peace and life.

-Amen-