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Sermon for the First Day of Lent
Joel 2:12-19 + Matthew 6:16-21
One of the earliest and most divisive conflicts within orthodox Christianity was the conflict over when and how to celebrate Easter: what the date or the day of the week should be, and how long one should fast before the feast. Some said the date should be set by the Old Testament lunar calendar for Passover, whatever day of the week that fell on. Others said it should be on the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the vernal equinox. Some fasted for 24 hours before the feast began. Some fasted for 40 hours before the feast, from 3 PM on Good Friday until 7 AM on Easter Sunday. (The forty-day fast that became the Lenten season didn’t develop until after the Council of Nicaea in the year 325.) At the end of the second century, the conflict over fasting and the date of Easter became so heated that Victor, Bishop of Rome, almost succeeded in excommunicating the whole Eastern half of the Christian Church because their practice of fasting and their date for Easter were a little different than his. Thankfully, godlier voices, like those of the Church Father Irenaeus, prevailed and the unity of the Christian Church was maintained, even though their manmade ceremonies were different.
For as much as fasting has been an accepted part of Christian tradition from the earliest days, it’s still troubling that the Church ever tried to make binding rules about when and how Christians were to fast, since God never gave any such rules in Holy Scripture. One can see the “mystery of lawlessness” already at work, as St. Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 2, the antichristian influence of human traditions, laws, and rites as they turned into matters of right or wrong, good works or sins, as if the New Testament Church were a matter of external things, like so much of the Old Testament ritual was.
If the Church had listened to Jesus about fasting, they would have avoided those conflicts and those errors.
Jesus warns His Church in today’s Gospel about turning fasting into an outward show. He warns us not to go around like the hypocrites, with a sullen expression. They disfigure their faces so that people can tell that they’re fasting. Notice, He doesn’t forbid fasting, just as He doesn’t forbid giving alms, giving to charity, as He discusses earlier in the Sermon on the Mount. He forbids turning it into an outward show. He wants it done in private, not as a public mark of being a Christian. Who are you fasting for? Do you fast out of devotion toward God and as a way to discipline your flesh so that you can focus on Him? Then it can be useful. Or is it to follow some church rule, some tradition? Or is it to impress the people around you with how religious you are, or to impress God with how zealous you are, or how deserving of His favor? Then it has become something sinful. If you fast, when you fast, whenever you engage in any religious activity that God has left up to you in Christian freedom, don’t let it be for an outward show, and don’t let it be an attempt to earn God’s favor, but let it be done in connection with inward repentance, as an act of true devotion toward God.
The Prophet Joel urged the same thing: Turn to Me with fasting, God said, but also, Rend your hearts and not your garments. The Hebrews had the external custom of tearing their shirts open as a way of expressing the internal emotions of anger or grief. There was nothing wrong with it, but, as Joel told them, God wasn’t at all interested in what they did to their garments. They weren’t doing any service for Him, weren’t doing any meritorious work for Him by fasting or by tearing their shirts open. He was only interested in heartfelt grief over their sins, in genuine repentance, in recognizing the ways in which they had turned away from the Lord God and from His Word.
But then He invited them back after they turned away, didn’t He? Their many sins hadn’t driven God away. There He stood through His prophet, inviting them, urging them to turn to Him, to turn back to Him. Why? Because of who He is and what they can count on if they repent, not on the outside, but on the inside: He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, of great kindness, and quick to be grieved over punishment. Or as Psalm 130 puts it in the form of a prayer, There is forgiveness with You, that You may be feared.
You know how it went for Israel. It was always a cycle that repeated itself. They rebelled against God. He sent some judgment to bring them to see their sin. They repented, and God relented and forgave them and rescued them from the judgment, until eventually the cycle fell apart—not because God changed His pattern, but because they changed theirs; they didn’t repent any longer, no matter how bad the punishment became. They didn’t acknowledge their sins and turn back to the Lord.
That cycle didn’t end with Israel, because our flesh, the disease of original sin, didn’t only infect Israel but infects us all. Eusebius writes in his Church History about the Great Persecution of Christians that took place especially between 303 and 311, a terrible, empire-wide persecution of Christians that involved the torching of churches and the unspeakable tortures and senseless killings of countless Christians. Eusebius was alive at that time and witnessed much of it. Do you know who he blamed for it, ultimately? Yes, the cruel emperors and their officials were to blame. But ultimately Eusebius lays the blame on the Church itself.
After nine different periods of persecution over the previous 270 years, the Christians had finally begun to enjoy a time of peace and prosperity and acceptance. But Eusebius notes that greater freedom brought with it arrogance and laziness. Christians began to envy and attack one another with “weapons formed from words.” Church leaders attacked one another, laymen formed factions against laymen, hypocrisy and pretending reached their limit. Pastors quarreled bitterly with one another (even though they were all in fellowship with one another) and they claimed tyrannical power for themselves. The initial judgment God sent to get their attention was limited to Christian soldiers in the army losing their positions, and yet still there was no repentance, no recognition of how they had gone astray, so the judgment grew far worse.
Now, God used that Great Persecution for many good purposes: for judgment against some, yes; but also as a glorious testimony to His Gospel and its power; as a witness to the faithfulness of Jesus, who was willingly tortured and killed that we might live forever in God’s kingdom and in whose footsteps Christians were glad to walk; and as a powerful confession that Christians do not live for this life, but for the life to come in the presence of God.
Would you say that Christians in our day have given the Lord cause again to bring judgment on the visible Christian Church? I think you know the answer. From false doctrine to an apathy toward the doctrine of Christ, from hypocrisy to misplaced zeal, from pride to false humility, from the teaching of justification by works to the teaching of justification without faith, from the tyranny of bishops, priests, and pastors to the erasing of the office of the holy ministry, from the insistence on certain ceremonies to the abolition of all useful ceremonies, from the denial of the six-day creation to the acceptance of abortion and homosexuality, from the downplaying of the Sacraments to the refusal to practice closed Communion, to mistreating one another, to love growing cold, to the lack of conviction, to the unwillingness to be despised by the societies and cultures of the world, to a refusal to believe in God’s promises, the 21st century Church is more than ripe for judgment.
This isn’t to say that every Christian is living impenitently in the above sins or that every Christian body has fallen away. In fact, that’s one reason why we don’t use ashes on this day, because historically, they symbolized that a Christian had publicly fallen away from the faith, even denied Christ, and was now being brought back into the church in “sackcloth and ashes,” as it were, with inward repentance that was simply reflected with an outward “show” of humility. But you know as well as I do that the state of the Visible Church as a whole is dismal.
So what to do? Joel told Israel, Consecrate a fast! Call a sacred assembly! In other words, Take the Lord’s judgment and your sins seriously! Now, the Church is no longer united around the world. We can’t gather the Baptists or the Methodists, the Roman Catholics, or even the other Lutheran synods together. No, we can’t even gather all our ELDoNA congregations in one place for a sacred assembly. All we can do is gather here in this sacred assembly around Word and Sacrament. And so we do. We, the baptized, we, the Church in this place, gather tonight, gather to confess our sins regularly, to hear God’s Word, to receive His correction and rebuke, but also His absolution and His comfort and the Sacrament of His body and blood, the very price of our redemption, and the seal and pledge of His forgiveness being applied to each communicant.
We shouldn’t expect that our sacred assembly will cancel out the judgment that’s coming on the whole Church and on the whole world. But we should expect that God will see the inward repentance and faith in each of our hearts, and that He will spare us from wrath for Jesus’ sake, even as He calls us to make repentance, not a once-in-a-while exercise, but a daily attitude and practice, so that we don’t drift away into sin or apathy or outright unbelief, as members of His Church have done over and over again throughout history.
That’s why we’re here today. That’s why we observe the Lenten season. Lent is simply a good time, every year, to make sure you haven’t begun to drift, to be called back if you have, and to warn you not to begin to drift, if you haven’t, because it’s in our very nature to drift, and generations of God’s people have had to face God’s judgment, either temporal or eternal, because of their drifting. Renew your determination during this season to take seriously God’s Word and repentance and faith and your Christian life. Check your life for sin and avoid it. Be renewed in love. And most importantly, remember Jesus Christ and Him crucified and the free forgiveness of sins you have in Him. In doing these things, you will be storing up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy. Amen.
