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From 2 Corinthians chapter 5, we implore you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God. For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. So far the text.
People have many ideas about Lent. Some see it as a time to deny themselves some pleasure. You may have even been asked the question, “What are you giving up for Lent?” Others seek to try to conquer some sin or another. Some may try to reform some aspect of their life that causes them difficulty or strife. And certainly, Lent is a time of repentance. These are worthy outward ways to keep the Lenten fast, as it were.
But do you suppose that that’s really what God is seeking to do with you? No. Is it a reform of some aspect of your life or the conquering of some vice that God is looking for you? Is that what he wants from you this Lenten season? I would hazard to say that your sin and my sin can’t really be reformed. I suspect you already knew that. That vice that you struggled so long to overcome, was it perhaps replaced by some other vice? That sin that wages and rages against your flesh, does it seem to win the war more times than not?
I’m not saying that people can’t change their outward selves or that an addiction or vice that haunts you can’t, by the grace of God, be overcome. My point is simply that it always seems that some other sin or some other struggle has a way of finding us. We can clean up our sin, and we can make it look better on the outside. We can polish it up and make it look shiny. Perhaps we can hide it from almost everyone. We can make promises to ourselves and to others, even to God, about how we’re going to do better. These promises are no doubt genuine when we make them, and from time to time, we may even be able to make good on some of them.
When Moses gave the commandments in the Old Testament to the people of Israel, all the people exclaimed, “All these things we will do.” We know how that turned out. There’s always something, isn’t there? Some aspect of our lives that, try as we might, we just can’t control or conquer. We just can’t fix.
And to make matters worse, you see, in fact, God really doesn’t want you just giving up that one sin or that one vice. He doesn’t want to be the God of one aspect of your life. He wants all of it. He wants all of your life. He wants you and I to have no other gods before him all the time. So perhaps our Lenten promise should simply be to give up sinning in thought, in word, in deed, vowing to do always what is right in every circumstance. Are you willing to make that pledge before God?
So if God isn’t merely seeking to reform you or to tweak one little deficiency, a little nip there and a tuck there, that you can identify in yourself, and you’re unwilling to give all of yourself over to God, what is he going to do with us? Well, he seeks to kill you. That’s the only way to deal with sin. You have to kill it. He wants to destroy for all time the sin that plagues you. He wants you to deny yourself. He wants you to die to yourself in order that he can raise you up again.
Often, repentance is portrayed as this thing that we do when we’ve done something really bad, as if we’re just saying, “I’m sorry” to God. If that were true, why do we need a whole 40 days of it every year? But repentance runs deeper than that. To repent daily, as Luther urges… It says, “Who knew no sin.” God made Jesus to be sin. To be sin. This perfect, pure, meek, humble, always merciful, always gracious person. God made him into the embodiment, the personification of sin. God in the flesh was made sin in the flesh. For our sakes. And he died.
In your sin. In my sin. It died with him. In your baptism. In your baptism, God drowned that one thing that you can’t do anything about. He killed it. He didn’t just clean it up a bit. He didn’t just polish it. He didn’t make it look pretty. He didn’t tweak it here and nip it there. He killed it. And he raised you up. God killed sin through Jesus’ death so that we might become the righteousness of God, so that we are right with God.
This defies logic. It defies what we see in ourselves. We’re dust. We’re righteous dust. We’re sinners. We’re saints. We look in the mirror of God’s law at ourselves, and we see nothing but death. We see our lies. We see our lust. We see our envy and our hate and our theft and all those things. And God sees what? God sees perfection. He sees the perfection of his Son. Christ’s righteousness put on you in your baptism. That’s what God sees. And that’s what God sees in each of these, your brothers and sisters in Christ.
As we journey through Lent again, we know what awaits us at the end: the cross, the empty tomb, and our lives are mirrors of that. The same thing happened to you. You died spiritually and you were raised up again to new life in your baptism. We know what awaits us at the end of our journey through this life. You and I will die physically, and though our bodies return to the dust, they will be raised physically. If we are united through baptism with a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
Because God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God. So I urge you, brothers and sisters, to make your Lenten promises. Deny yourself something, if that is your practice. Keep the Lenten fast as you remember the one who gave up everything for you. But more importantly, come in daily contrition and repentance. In the name of Jesus, amen.
