A Call to Return Joel 2:12–19; Ps. 51:1–13; 2 Cor. 5:20b–6:10 Matt. 6:1–6, 16–21

Grace, mercy, and peace be with you, from God our Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, who calls the world to return God.

Return to the Lord, is our theme for Lent this year. That’s a very Lenten sounding theme, with a message of repentance and renewal.

It’s taken from Joel 2:12-13: “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to Me with all your heart… Return to the Lord, your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…”.

Today introduces our series, with the theme, A Call to Return. We’ll see how God renews our hearts to faithfully follow Him.

Next Wednesday the theme will be, Return to Prayer. We’ll talk about how Jesus prayed, and how He teaches and renews us to pray.

The following Wednesday, March 3, the theme will be, Return from Betrayal. We’ll talk about Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, and how God would have welcomed him back if he would have repented, and how God welcomes back and restores all who have fallen away.

The next Wednesday, March 10, our theme will be, Return from False Witness. We’ll talk about those who lied and bore false witness against Jesus, but how Jesus told the truth. And about how Jesus taught His disciples to be His true witnesses, and how he renews us to speak the truth in love, and bear witness to His love in our words and deeds.

Then Wednesday, March 17, our theme will be, Return from Denial. We’ll see how Peter, and all the disciples, denied Jesus and let Him down when he needed them most. And we’ll see how Jesus restored them to boldly confess the Gospel, and how He restores us to confess the Faith in our sometimes faithless world.

Finally, March 24, our last Wednesday evening Lenten service, our theme will be, Return to the Kingdom of God. 

We’ll see how Jesus confessed before Pilate that His Kingdom is not of this world, a spiritual Kingdom, and how we are restored to His Kingdom of Grace on earth, and will be raised in His Kingdom of glory forever.

Today, A Call to Return, based on Joel 2:13, Return to the Lord, your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…”.

Lent is a season of repentance and renewal, as we slow down to consider why Jesus went to the cross. Our sins, our shortcomings, and our failures are ever before us, and ever before God. 

God, who is rich in mercy, bears no grudge against us. He promises to forgive us completely for the sake of His Son, and He renews us in a better life with Christ.

Ash Wednesday, perhaps more than any other Wednesday in Lent, is a day of deep reflection. This deep and sincere reflection brings us low, reminding us of God’s words to Adam and Eve after the fall into sin, in Genesis 3:19: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return”. Your life will reduced to ashes and dust. 

What a sobering thought, that my life will amount to nothing more than a small pile of ashes, mere dust to be blown away by the wind.

That’s the truth of life without Christ: in the end, it blows away, small and forgotten. 

There was a movie made some years ago, entitled “Troy”, about the fall of ancient Troy, starring Brad Pitt as the Greek hero, Achilles. And in the movie, Achilles is obsessed with being remembered and revered when he’s gone. He’s driven by that pursuit of glory.

Worldly glory or not, life ends the same for us all: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

The difference is in how it begins again: raised to glory in Christ, or raised to shame without Christ.

God earnestly wants to raise you in glory someday. He desperately wants to restore you in His grace today.  

So, in His Word, through the prophet Joel, God calls us to come back to Him. 

“Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to Me with all your heart…” As I love you sincerely, so return to me sincerely, with all your heart; not just with words and rituals, but with faith and deeds. Return to me in every way, and I will bless you in every way for all eternity.

The appointed Gospel Reading for Ash Wednesday is Matthew 6: 6:1–6. Instead, tonight we used our first passion reading for Lent, as we often do.

In Matthew 6, Jesus warns us about hypocrisy, insincere faith and false repentance. God isn’t looking for us to just go through the motions, or to use our morality to try to impress others. To try to use your morality to try to impress others, is an immoral thing to do. 

Jesus says, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. 2 “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

It starts in private with you and God; when that’s right, then what you do in public is more likely to be right. 

This doesn’t mean we make no mistakes in life, in our private and public lives. There’s hypocrisy and insincerity in us all. We’ve all tried to make ourselves look better than we really are.

The irony is, that’s a miserable way to live, to always try to make yourself look better to others, or better than others. Much better to let down your guard and be real. 

God sees all. He sees who your really are. He sees the insincerities and inconsistencies, and He sees the sincerity, and the true repentance.

God sees you as you are, and yet He loves you with all His heart. And He calls you back to a life lived in His mercy. That’s a life that’s honest; that doesn’t have to pretend; a life that falls at the feet of Jesus, and is lifted up to serve and rejoice. 

Jesus saw us as we really are, as sinful, fallen beings whose lives are reduced to dust. But because of His mercy, He refused to let it be that way; He didn’t give up on us. Not because He thought we could make things better by ourselves, but because He knew He could make things better for us.

Although the task was the greatest ever assigned to a man, Jesus sincerely embraced it: He took on our sin. He lived a life of holy love; He died a gruesome death for our sins; and He capped it all off by doing the impossible for us, rising from death, that we might have a far better life with Him, now and in eternity.

To that life Christ won for us, we are called. To the life and love He gives, Jesus would call the whole world. His grace is far too great to give to just a few; Jesus would give it to all, and so He calls all to repent and return to their Creator and Redeemer, and for us to share this good news with all.

Every day, as we repent of our sin and insincerity, of our worldliness and selfishness, our God is sincere to forgive and renew us. His Spirit is sincere to help and empower us to grow in our walk with Christ.

Day by day, week by week, year by year, Ash Wednesday by Ash Wednesday, we are on this journey of returning and walking ever closer to God. He takes this pile of dust, and by His Spirit, by His Word and Sacraments, rebuilds it to His glory, a life to bear witness to the life-giving power of the Gospel for the world.

May the world, may we all, quit pretending that we’re something we’re not; that we can somehow do this without our Savior; and let us be real to repent, and happy to embrace God’s life-changing grace.

And as we do, may His peace, which passes the world’s understanding, guard us with true hearts and minds, in Christ Jesus, our real and merciful Lord. Amen.