Psalm 30:1-5

  ¹  I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up

and have not let my foes rejoice over me.

²     O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,

and you have healed me.

³     O Lord, you have brought up my soul from Sheol;

you restored me to life from among those who go down to the pit.

It is a quiet marvel to me every year that Christians around the world deliberately take time to lay themselves low in the season of Lent. Fasting, setting aside some favored item or activity, and the simple willingness to look inwardly and honestly at their sins. Martin Luther famously suggested in his 95 Theses, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ``Repent'' (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” Still, as true as Luther’s observation is, repentance is hardly attractive or winsome to us at the best of times. It is real, difficult, and painful work to hear the Law of God as it winnows through the dross in our souls. It often takes a consistent commitment to humility to make that internal change.

Nevertheless, each year people open their ears, hold out their hands, and accept how empty they really are. They accept the ashes, the rebukes, the bright light of the Lord as it shines a spotlight on their hearts and minds. They go down to Sheol, to that place of death, humility, and repentance, and they accept as true God’s judgment that they are deserving of death, that God’s assessment of their life can only be given the yes and the amen; they lay down in that dark place of the tomb and simply wait.

It is there, in the pit, in the recesses of a tomb that is a fitting end for sinners, that every Lenten season something amazing happens. Light dawns, life floods in, the downcast chin is lifted up and the souls of the dying are brought back and filled with the resurrection power of Jesus Christ. In the lowest place, even a place from which nothing can be redeemed and out of which no one ever returns, Jesus descends to meet us, thereby transforming the signpost of the dead to a birthplace for new, abundant, and brilliant life.

Come, lie down in the ashes, let go of the sins you have clung so tightly to, let the light of the Gospel expose the dark corners of your heart and forgive what is wrong and evil in your words, thoughts, and deeds. The pit may be frightening, Sheol a gaping maw, the tomb a place for endings, but Jesus will descend to meet us there, that he might raise our souls in a new beginning.

Waiting patiently with you in the tomb this Lenten season,

Pastor Devin Murphy