Ash Wednesday 2020

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Joel opens with a vivid image of the day of the Lord. It is near, it is coming, it cannot be avoided.

Notice the alarm is sounded not in Babylon, Assyria, or Egypt, but in Israel! God often judges his own people before he judges others. As the Church, then, we must not think we have escaped judgement by being the “elect”.

God’s army is unable to be counted, unable to be stopped. When the Day of the LORD comes, then, who can endure it? No one!

Yet, says God. God is not content to see his people destroyed. He leaves us with a way out, a way forward. God longs to give us life instead of death.

Returning to God is a conscious decision we make. Yet, none of us can do that without the help of God himself! ()

The New Revised Standard Version Shining as Lights in the World

for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

The New Revised Standard Version Shining as Lights in the World

work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; 13 for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Yet we must also “work out our salvation with fear and trembling”. For Joel says, “Who knows whether God will turn and relent?”

We must not presume on God. He is Lord, he is free to do as he wills.

Thus we must return to God, repenting with humility and not prideful arrogance. We cannot presume God must give us grace. Grace is, after all, a gift given of God’s free choice.

“Who knows whether God will turn and relent?” Yet if no one can endure the day of the LORD, God’s mercy is our only hope! We have nowhere to turn but to God, and hope and pray he shows us mercy in the name of his son, our Lord, Jesus Christ.

The true saint is the one who knows he is a sinner. This is what Lent is all about. This is what tonight is all about. We must remember that “We are dust, and to dust we shall return.” We must remember that we are powerless to stop it, that death is an inevitable, inescapable reality for us. Our only hope is in the mercy of the Lord, and so in sackcloth and ashes, with weeping and confession of sins, we must beg the mercy of the Lord.

And yet, while we cannot presume that the Lord must accept us, we can kneel before him confidence that he wants nothing less!