“Life’s Better in My Hands!” (1 Peter 2:20-25), Ash Wednesday, Lenten Midweek 2016

1.             Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Amen.  The message for this Ash Wednesday is from 1 Peter 2:20-25 and is entitled, “Life’s Better in My Hands!” Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

2.             A seminary student recalls his teenage years. “What a great age! You’re just beginning to figure out who you are, your hopes and dreams, and best of all, you are at that age when you’re confident that you know it all. Ah, those were the days! “When I was growing up in Iowa,” he reflects,” 14 was the year we received our driver’s permit. I can still remember the first time my father had me drive the family car. He took me to a rarely traveled, two-lane county highway. Everything was going well until we came upon a narrow bridge. Comfortably cruising along at nearly 60 miles per hour, I couldn’t understand why my dad began getting fidgety. I’d never seen him squirm like that.  Finally I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ He fired back, ‘Are you going to move over?’ ‘Oh,’ I replied, ‘I didn’t realize.’ I didn’t realize I was about to shear off the whole right side of my parents’ car. But my father knew.” (deliver slowly) “I didn’t realize…But my father knew.” Can you identify with his experience? (pause)

3.             Thank you for coming to church. Ash Wednesday calls us together to hear again the stories of Lent, the stories of Jesus’ passion for you and for me. I’m sure that your life is busy and you don’t have the time to hear these stories in a mindless way. You don’t want to hear the stories in a routine, in-one-ear and out-the-other sort of way. You’ve come here for your spiritual growth. We want the word of the cross to go in both ears, to get into our heads and go down into our hearts. We want to leave worship with a new appreciation that, as the student said, “I didn’t realize…But my father knew.” As Jesus himself said on the cross, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” We want to leave worship knowing that life is best lived when we live it totally in the Father’s hands.

4.             We all know that life isn’t always better in the hands of other people. For example, is your life better when you leave it in the hands of the government? Surveys tell us again and again that we don’t trust the government to take care of us. Another example, is your life better when you leave it in the hands of Wall Street? A third example, is life better when we put ourselves in the hands of science and technology? Sure, we’ve been greatly blessed by science. But, to totally entrust our lives to it? If you have a car that you’ve had to take to the mechanic over and over again, you know that technology isn’t a fail-safe way to accelerate toward happiness. And then, my last example, the institutional church. A recent study shows that people between the ages of 16 and 29 believe the institutional church is judgmental, hypocritical old-fashioned, and out of touch with reality. And if you’re over 29, you can identify with some of those criticisms. We all know that life isn’t always better in the hands of other people.

5.             So what’s left? More and more people are saying, “Life’s better in my hands.” The seminary student was confident that he knew it all. He admits, “I didn’t realize that I was about to shear off the whole right side of my parents’ car.” Isn’t that an accurate picture of how many of us are living our lives? It certainly is true for me. People say we shouldn’t send a text message on our cell phones while we drive, we should think twice before we speak, we should stay true to our spouse, we should give quality time to our families, we should save some money for a rainy day, we should… Well, you get the idea. Review your own life. We’re living in a society of self-willed people and you and I often go our own stubborn ways as well. Plain old common sense makes us doubt that “Life’s better in my hands.”

6.             What’s left? Only the cross of Christ. From the cross we hear him say, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Shouldn’t Ash Wednesday repentance drive us to confess that life is better when we entrust it to our Heavenly Father? Let me say that again because it’s so important. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Ash Wednesday repentance drives us to say, “Life is NOT better in my hands. Life can only be better when I entrust my whole being 24/7/365 into the hands of the heavenly Father.”

7.             That’s what the Apostle Peter is talking about in 1 Peter 2:20-25. Peter wrote to Christian slaves in Asia            Minor. Many of them were leading miserable lives. Peter urges them not to strike out against their masters. He tells them not to take life into their own hands. Instead Peter points them to the example of Christ our Savior.  1 Peter 2:21 & 23 says, “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps… He entrusted himself to him who judges justly.”  Peter says, life is better when we entrust ourselves to our heavenly Father. But there’s something even more important here. As much as Jesus is our model for trusting our lives to God, the reason we’re in church is because Jesus is our Savior from sin. He’s forgiven you and me for taking life into our own hands. 1 Peter 2:24-25 says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”  The forgiveness he gives you and me is such a change from the world around us and the world to come, that we’re left to do one thing. Pray to the Spirit of God to lead us to put our lives into the hand of our Heavenly Father.

8.             So this Ash Wednesday we repent for the times we’ve thought, “Life is better in my hands.” Our Father forgives. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” Then God’s Word adds, “so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness.” True repentance is confessing our sin and receiving God’s forgiveness for Jesus’ sake. Then…and here’s something we too easily forget…in thanksgiving we’ll pray God’s Spirit to help us live holier lives.

9.             How? One way is to keep doing what you’ve done today, coming together around the cross of Jesus. I’m not talking about the institutional church now, whose faults are too well known. I’m talking about the Body of Christ, about you and me coming together to ponder the stories of our salvation. The stories heard so many times.  The story about Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem.  The story of Jesus remembering God’s deliverance of ancient Israel by eating the Passover.  The story of Gethsemane.  The story of the injustices wrought by the religious establishment and the government.  The story of his death, and His glorious resurrection three days later. Oh, we can’t let these stories go in-one-ear and out-the-other! These are the stories that keep going into both ears, get into our minds and sink into our hearts. The way this happens is by coming together again and again as brothers and sisters in the Body of Christ. Our life together in this church is different than any other association you have in your life. Life together here is a way the Holy Spirit keeps putting our lives in the hand of the heavenly Father.  “I love to tell the story, for those who know it best, keep hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.”

10.             Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who died at the hand of the Nazis, wrote in his book, Life Together, “Beware of being alone. Into the community you were called, the call was not meant for you alone; in the community of the called you bear your cross, you struggle, you pray. If you scorn the fellowship of brothers and sisters, you reject the call of Jesus Christ, and thus your solitude can only be hurtful to you.”  Life is better in the Father’s hands. Amen.