Ash Wednesday – “Life’s Better in My Hands!”
Joel 1:19-21, I Peter 2:2-25, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
St. John, Galveston 2/22/2023
Rev. Alan Taylor
+ In Nomine Jesu +
Grace and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
A young man recalled his teenage years. “What a great age those years were (he says)! You are just beginning to figure out who you are, your hopes and dreams are much larger than yourself, and best of all, you are at that age when you are confident that you know it all. Ah (he says), those were the days!
“When I was growing up,” he says,” fourteen was the year we received our driver’s permit. I can still remember the first time my father had me drive the family car. He took me to a little traveled, two-lane road. Everything was going well until we came to a narrow bridge. Comfortably cruising along at about 60 miles per hour, I couldn’t understand why my dad started getting fidgety. I had never seen him squirm like that before. Finally, I asked him, ‘What’s wrong?’ He fired back, ‘Are you going to move over?’ ‘Oh,’ I replied, ‘I didn’t realize.’ I didn’t realize I was about to shear off the whole right side of my parents’ car on the bridge guardrail. But my father knew.” (deliver slowly) “I didn’t realize…But my father knew.” Can you identify with the young man’s experience? (pause)
I’m glad you’re all here this evening as we begin yet another Lenten Season together. As you know, Ash Wednesday, and the entire Lenten Season, call us together to a heightened sense of our sin, to hear again the story of Jesus’ passion for you and for me. As we gather each Wednesday evening, we want the word of the cross to go in both ears, to get into our heads and to go down into our heart. We want to leave here with a new appreciation that, as the young man said, “I didn’t realize…But my father knew.” Jesus himself said, “Not My will but Thy will be done,” and “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” And so, we too want to come through this Lenten season knowing that life is best lived when we live it in our “Father’s hands.”
I think, too often, we are convinced that the opposite is true though, namely, that “Life is better in our hands.” In many ways, our lives are a continual struggle with the will and the ways of God. The teenage driver was confident that he knew it all. He admitted, “I didn’t realize that I was about to shear off the whole right side of my parents’ car.” That’s a pretty accurate picture of how we often live our lives, isn’t it? It certainly is true for me. People say we shouldn’t text while we drive, we should think twice before we speak or put something on Facebook, we should save some money for a rainy day, we should… Well, you get the idea. We’re living in a society of self-willed people, and you and I often go our own bull-headed ways, often putting ourselves in grave danger.
In the passage of Scripture you heard earlier, from 1 Peter, Jesus is held up as an example of what it means to entrust ourselves to God. Through all that He endured, through all that He suffered, Peter says, “(Jesus) continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.” He did the same thing in the Garden of Gethsemane when He prayed about the cup of suffering that was before Him. “I would, Father, that you would take this cup from Me. Yet, Father, not My will, but Thy will be done.” And, of course, from the cross, the moment that He drank fully of that cup of suffering, He said, “Into Your hands, O Lord, I commend My Spirit.” Jesus knew the importance of entrusting His life into the hands of His Father. Of course, He was and is God, and we’re not. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
What Jesus modeled in life was perfect obedience and trust in His Father.
And, while He is the perfect example of how we ought to live our lives, He’s so much more. As you struggle to entrust yourself into the hands of your heavenly Father, you can be ever mindful that everything Jesus did, He did in your place, in your stead, for your benefit.
We talk a lot, as we should, about Jesus on the cross. It is, after all, the most crucial moment in the history of world. God takes the sins of the world on His own shoulders and suffers and dies for those sins, that you and I might have forgiveness, life and salvation. He literally, as the Scriptures tell us, “was made sin, so that you and I might be the righteousness of God in Him.” It is an amazing exchange that took place, one that was given to you in the water of your baptism. Jesus became your sin and you became His righteousness. It’s what theologians refer as the passive righteousness of Jesus. “He became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” And, “the Father laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
In life, “(Jesus) continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.” He is the second the Adam. He came into the world to live a perfectly pure and holy life. And that too, He did in your place, in your stead. As you go through this Lenten season and you find that moment once again where you struggle to entrust yourself into the Father’s hands, where you wonder how many times God will put up with the tug of war that you and I are so intent on investing ourselves in, Jesus stands forever as your substitute in life. Why else would the Father ever be able to welcome you home, saying, “well done, thou good and faithful servant?”
“But Christ, the second Adam, came
To bear our sin and woe and shame,
To be our life, our light, our way,
Our only hope, our only stay.”
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.
+ Soli Deo Gloria +