6 You see, at just the right
time, when we were still powerless,
Christ died for the ungodly.
7Very rarely will anyone die for a
righteous person,
though for a good person someone might possibly dare
to die.
8 But God demonstrates his own love
for us in this:
While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:6-8
My father was stationed in Germany just after the end of
the Second World War. He was there as
part of the occupying force that oversaw German life until that nation could
make a new beginning on the other side of the Nazi terror. One day, dad was walking through the remains
of a bombed-out city, a town obliterated by the Allied air attack. He stopped to look more closely at the pile
of rubble that once had been a German home.
All that remained were loose bricks, charred beams, and piles of
ash. Surrounded by the useless remains
of a ruined home, something caught my father’s eye, something that reflected
the sunlight, something shiny in this sea of incinerated darkness. He reached into the ashes and pulled out a
small crystal vase that somehow had survived the devastation. Dad wiped away the ashes that clung to the
vase and saw the beautiful engraving on its side. He brought that little vase home and gave it
to his parents as a kind of souvenir of his service in Germany and a reminder
that even after the horrors of that terrible war, something beautiful could be
pulled from the ashes.
This year, two very different events have fallen on the
same day, Ash Wednesday and St. Valentine’s Day. You might have wondered, as our church staff
did, if one day is big enough to give your heart and mind room to enter into
the spirit of both observances. How can
we celebrate the life-giving joy of love on the same day we mark ourselves with
ashes to confess our sinfulness and remember our mortality?
In our Christian faith, the story of God seeking and
saving a lost humanity, love and ashes belong together. The ashes are the charred burned-out remains
of our lives and our world devastated by the destructive power of sin. We wear ashes today because spiritually we
are ashes. Sin and death seemingly
reduce us to nothing. But then, love
enters the scene. Love walks into the
wreckage to find that something worth saving, that prize that can be rescued,
washed clean, and given a new life. Love
and ashes belong together because love, sent to us in the person of Jesus
Christ, poured his life into the mission of pulling something beautiful from
the ashes.
Paul marvels at how rare and precious such love is. He says that only very rarely will someone
sacrifice their life to save the life of a great person. Think of the degree of dedication demanded of
Secret Service agents as they stand ready to put themselves between harm and
the life they’re sworn to protect, to literally take a bullet to save the life
of the President.
But the love of Christ, Paul says, goes far beyond even
that rare kind of human sacrifice. Jesus
gave his life to pull us from the ashes.
Jesus died for us while we were still sinners. He stepped into our destruction to see us and
seek us and lift us up and wash us clean and give us a new life, a testimony
that Jesus found in us something beautiful, something worth saving, and pulled us
out of the ashes.
What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, that caused the Lord of
bliss
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul.
Ashes and love.
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