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At our Ash Wednesday services, we hear an Old Testament reading from the prophet Joel:

“Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! … the day of the LORD is coming… a day of darkness and gloom… Yet even now, declares the LORD, return to me with all your heart… rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful…” (Joel 2:1–2, 12–13)

That’s vivid and startling imagery from Joel – he grabs our attention with his cry of alarm, and talk of darkness, gloom, and ‘rending’ of hearts.

Ash Wednesday, and the season of Lent, are an annual reality-check for us. In the Ash Wednesday service, there is an invitation for ashes to be marked on the worshipper’s forehead as a sign of our fragility and of this world’s temporary and fragile nature. In this, God’s Word tells us the stark truth about our human condition. Yet these ashes are traced in a particular pattern—the pattern of a cross. So even as God speaks his confronting word, he also speaks his comforting word: the truth of what he has done for us in Jesus Christ. God’s rescue has come, by Jesus’ cross and resurrection. And so God’s last word to us is his grace and mercy.

This year other images were fresh in our minds on Ash Wednesday.

As we considered darkness, gloom and ash, the reality of Victoria’s recent bushfires was particularly vivid for some.

The image of a stately old tree, destroyed by fire and covered with ash, bears witness to a day when things were fragile, frightening, and temporary. This image is of an historic tree at Keith and Sally Lockwood’s property at Natimuk. Numerous homes were destroyed, including a former manse next door to the Lutheran Church.

Our prayers are still needed for those who survived and are carrying the shock – and further afield for those who lost loved ones in other parts of the state.

In a firestorm, what we thought we could rely on can ignite and become ash with terrifying speed. This is a reality check.

But Ash Wednesday is not the Church being grim for the sake of it. It is God’s kindness returning us to reality through the call to repent.

We misunderstand repentance though, if we think it is a religious self-improvement project — “I’ll try harder… so that God will be pleased with me… so that God will overlook the ‘other stuff’… so that God will see that ‘at least I’m trying!’

Each of those “so thats” is merely a bargain, a religious cloak that we drag on, an attempt to manage God on our own terms.

No, repentance is a gift. “God’s kindness leads you to repentance” says Paul in Romans 2:4.

And God delivers this gift through his Word, as he speaks to us in the two ways that our Lutheran tradition has called God’s two ‘words’: his first word that exposes and kills the lie (the law), and his last word that raises and restores us with Jesus (the gospel).

Listen to Joel again: “Return to me with all your heart… rend your hearts…” (Joel 2:12–13). God is not asking for a performance. He is after our heart—because our heart is the problem.

God’s first word names the truth that we want to avoid: the world is broken—and we are involved. The brokenness is seen in the environment’s attempts to kill us – and our attempts to kill the environment. The Bible gives us language to describe this: “the world is fallen” from where God intended it to be. St Paul says: “the whole creation has been groaning” (Romans 8:22). We see it and feel it in the fragility of things, when the “normal” conditions we assume should be with us every day suddenly disappear in a storm of ferocious fire – or when our health fails or some other unexpected suffering lands.

But, ultimately, God’s Word refuses to let us hide behind the delusion that the problem is “out there somewhere.” Because repentance calls us to recognize that the deepest crisis is not in the atmosphere, or the politics, or the stupidity of other people. The deepest crisis is in our own human heart.

Our propensity to love and trust things other than God, and our propensity towards selfishness, has destructive implications for our relationships, within families, between husbands and wives, between parents and children. Between the two sexes generally. Between Christians. Between Christian groups.

The problem of sin is not ‘out there’. The Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”. This is why the Psalmist does not pray, “Help me polish myself up,” but: “Have mercy… wash me… create in me a clean heart” (Psalm 51). He is pleading for divine action, not human effort.

And here is the good news: God has taken divine action. God does not speak his first word to you without intending that you also hear his last word.

After fire, what do we see: in time first shoots push through what has been a dead landscape. The ground is cleared, the undergrowth opened, gentle life-giving light reaches places it hasn’t reached for years. Repentance has this shape too: God clears away the dense undergrowth of self-deception and sin, and then God’s light, the light which is Jesus himself, reaches us—reaches into us, with the consoling word of forgiveness.

God’s last word is Jesus.

On Ash Wednesday the ashes speak to us of God’s first word – but the cross shape that they come in speaks to us of God’s last word. Joel puts it like this: “Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful…”

And so, also on Ash Wednesday we hear St Paul writing with the same kind of urgency as Joel: “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God… now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 5:20; 6:2).

And how does God reconcile you? Not by telling you to climb back up to him, but by coming down right to where you are – in his Son: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

And so God’s last word, the gospel, does not say to us: “Achieve.” It says: “Receive!”

God does not say: “Fix yourself,” but “Look!, behold my perfect Son, given for you.”

I saw an illustration of the divine help of the gospel back in 2009, right after another Victorian bush fire. That was the year of the cataclysmic Black Saturday bushfires. Many will remember the horrific scale of loss—lives, homes, communities, and the long shadow that followed. At the time, I was serving as pastor at Greensborough, and we had parishioners in the fire zone north of Melbourne. When Sunday morning came, the news was still unfolding. We were fearful for our members; phone calls were made, but communications were out.

One member had prepared as well as he possibly could—but in truth, he probably should have left earlier. He fought off ember attacks, but as the fire approached, his equipment failed. And in that moment, when careful preparation hit its limit, he did the only thing left to do: he got inside his home, shut the doors, and waited and prayed. He described the roar outside like a freight train. The sky went black. The air turned to grit. Heat pressed in. With nothing left to do, he could only hunker down and cry out “Lord, please save me!”

What saved him and his home was help from outside. The firefighting helicopter nicknamed, “Elvis”. Help arrived in the form of a massive, drenching deluge: thousands of litres of cleansing, quenching, cooling water hit the property.

Hearing him tell the story, I couldn’t help but be reminded of our baptism — in that fire, my parishioner was ‘buried’ in saving water. St Paul teaches us: “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? … we were buried with him… in order that… we too may live a new life” (Romans 6:3–4).

My parishioner was the recipient of a reality check that day. He discovered what he could not do. He also discovered the difference between self-salvation and rescue.

We are led into repentance when we realise all of our “so that” strategies are useless, when our old self hits the end of its resources.

And then, God meets us with grace from outside ourselves. Christ’s death and resurrection deliver to us, again, the needed rescue.

So, each Ash Wednesday when ashes say, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the cross says the deeper thing: you are not abandoned dust. You are dust claimed by Christ — washed, forgiven, and made new. Dust with new life breathed into it.

God’s last word to you is not “try harder.” God’s last word is Jesus: crucified, risen, and given for you.

Return to the Lord, yes. But hear what that really means: return to the One who has already returned to you.

In the name of Jesus! Amen.