Living in daily contrition and repentance

Sermon for the First Day of Lent

Jonah 3:1-10  +  Psalm 51:1-19  +  Joel 2:12-19  +  Matthew 6:16-21

Let’s take a moment this evening, at the beginning of Lent, this season of focused repentance, to discuss mortal and venial sins. All people are sinners. That includes believing Christians. As St. Paul writes, All have sinned. As St. John says, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. All sins offend God. All sins need to be paid for by the blood of Christ and washed away through Baptism and faith in Christ, if a person is to be forgiven for them and admitted into God’s kingdom. But not all sins are mortal sins.

Mortal sins are sins against God’s commandments, committed knowingly, intentionally, and stubbornly, where repentance does not follow the sin. They often cause grave offense to others as well. They drive out faith and the Holy Spirit and place a person outside of Christ and His Church. And so they are sins that “lead to death.” Mortal sins are the sins in which the tax collectors and public sinners lived before they heard the Gospel of Christ and repented. They’re the sins in which the Pharisees lived who stubbornly rejected Christ. In fact, all people are born in a state of mortal sin, and everything that an unbeliever does is mortal sin, because “without faith it is impossible to please God.” But when the Law of God is preached and sinners are brought to repentance, to grieve over their sins, when the Gospel is preached and sinners are brought to faith in Christ, then mortal (deadly) sins become venial (forgivable) sins. Those are the sins that we commit every day, in fact, every moment as penitent believers in Christ. We’re never rid of our sinful flesh and its sinful desires in this life, and sometimes, in our weakness, the sin of our nature erupts into our thoughts, words, and deeds. Those things are still sins, and they would condemn us eternally if we strayed outside of Christ. But as we live in daily contrition and repentance, as we live in Christ, we also live in daily forgiveness.

As we’ve discussed before, Ash Wednesday got its name from an ancient practice in the early Church of placing ashes on the heads of Christians who had fallen into mortal sin, causing great scandal and public offense. The ashes were a public symbol to the Christian community that the sinner had repented and had, therefore, been accepted back into the communion of the Church. It was a custom, neither commanded nor forbidden by God, but it served a practical purpose of highlighting the danger of mortal sin and the need for repentance in order to be forgiven and restored to fellowship with Christ and His Bride, the Church.

At some point over the centuries, that custom changed. And the Church started urging all the faithful, who were guilty only of venial sins and were already living in daily contrition and repentance, to have ashes put on their heads once a year. Luther and the Lutheran Reformers didn’t think the practice was very helpful, and so, although some Lutheran churches participate in the ashes of Ash Wednesday, we don’t here.

But it is still essential that we live in daily contrition and repentance, that we avoid falling into mortal sin, or that we turn to repentance if we do fall into mortal sin. It’s important that we learn the lessons the Holy Spirit teaches in all the readings of Ash Wednesday. So let’s see how they all fit together tonight to lead us on the right path of contrition and repentance.

Let’s start with this evening’s reading from Jonah. Jonah, the prophet of Israel called to leave the land of Israel to preach to the heathens in Assyria, in the city of Nineveh. Those Gentiles were living in mortal sin, without repentance and faith in the true God. So Jonah (after he finally agreed to go, after spending a few days in the belly of the whale) preached a stern warning from God: “Forty more days, and Nineveh will be destroyed!” And by the power of the Holy Spirit, working through that word, the Ninevites were brought to repentance. They fasted. They put on sackcloth. They sat in ashes, as an outward sign of their inward repentance. And God spared them, because He doesn’t delight in the death of a sinner, but that all should come to repentance.

Next, consider the reading from Joel. Joel preached repentance to the impenitent Old Testament people of Israel, who had fallen (again) into idolatry and persistent mistreatment of their fellow Israelites. Turn to me with all your heart, with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning.” Rend your hearts and not your garments, and turn to the Lord your God! But he also gave them hope that, if they would repent from the heart, God would keep His covenant of forgiveness with them, for the sake of the coming Christ. For he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, of great kindness, and quick to be moved to grief over punishment.

Some did repent at that time, and at other times. But mortal sin would eventually overtake most of the nation of Israel, so that, by the time of Jesus, He could pronounce the terrible judgment: The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and indeed one greater than Jonah is here.

That has applications for the New Testament Church. We, like Israel, have been called into a covenant of God’s grace. But sin is our constant companion, too, and if we grow proud and stubborn, as they did, if we think we can go ahead and break God’s commandments freely, without consequence, then we will be overtaken by mortal sin, as they were.

If that happens and we fall away from faith, as king David once did after committing adultery with Bathsheba and plotting the murder of her husband, then God still cries out to us through His ministers to come back, to turn to God in repentance and live. That’s what Psalm 51 is all about, which we heard earlier this evening. David wrote it after he had been called back from mortal sin through the prophet Nathan. This Psalm is a confession of sin as well as a confession of faith in the God who “washes me clean of iniquity and cleanses me of my sin,” even mortal sin, when we acknowledge our sins and confess them to God. As St. John writes, If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Why? On what basis? Because, if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world. And how is His propitiation or atoning sacrifice applied to us? Through Holy Baptism. Through the pastor’s absolution. Through the Sacrament of the Altar. And always, through faith.

That same Jesus who is our Advocate and Propitiation has something to teach His disciples in the Gospel you heard this evening from the Sermon on the Mount. He’s addressing penitent believers in these verses, those who are certainly guilty of venial sins, but not of mortal sins—not at the moment. But since the devil is always seeking a way to lure us into temptation and sin and impenitence and death, Jesus provides some guidance.

As you live in daily repentance and produce the fruits of repentance, you may choose to fast, to go without food for a short time. Observing a fast is not a form of worship, since God has not commanded it. Observing a fast is not a form of righteousness; it can’t earn you either God’s favor or God’s ear, since Christ alone has earned God’s favor and God’s ear. But Jews in the Old Testament and Christians in the New have sometimes found it to be a useful discipline, as even Jesus embarked once on a forty-day fast that we’ll hear about on Sunday. It may give you extra time or extra focus to pray, or to read or to ponder the Word of God, or to be of service to your neighbor.

But if you fast, Jesus says, don’t tell anyone you’re fasting. Don’t broadcast it. Don’t publicize it. Don’t do it so that other people can see. Only let God see. Only let His opinion matter. Only let His reward matter, His heavenly reward.

Let heavenly treasures be the only treasures you store up, not the earthly treasures that moth and rust destroy. Notice, Jesus doesn’t say to secure for yourself a place in heaven or to earn a place there for yourself. You can’t. Eternal life is a gift, not a wage. No, He says to store up things for yourself for when you get there, like God’s favor and the goodwill of the saints, like the rewards God has promised to give for a life lived in devotion to Him and to our neighbor and, specifically, to our brothers and sisters in Christ.

What exactly will those rewards be? Scripture doesn’t say much. But it will include perfect joy, perfect relationships, perfect communion with God, with the saints and angels, an inheritance described by St. Peter as incorruptible, and undefiled, and unfading, reserved in heaven for you who are kept by God’s power, through faith, for the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.

And how do you store up those treasures in heaven? By doing things that last beyond this life. By learning and growing in knowledge of the truth, hearing and pondering God’s Word, using the Sacraments, praying, confessing the faith before men, resisting temptation, struggling against your sinful flesh, fulfilling your vocations, bearing the cross with patience, devoting your days to serving one another with kindness and in love.

That’s practically the whole Christian life, isn’t it? It is! And it can be summarized with one phrase: living in daily contrition and repentance. Living as baptized children of God, who live in this world, but not for this world, whose hearts and minds are fixed, as Paul says, on the things above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. So set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Amen.