Thursday, February 15, 2024

Out of the Ashes


 

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. 

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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