by Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
Ash Wednesday 2015
2 Corinthians 5: 20b-6:10
I’ve only shot a firearm once, when I was pastor of my first church in Virginia. It was not AT one of my parishioners, but WITH one: one of my deacons, Don Herring, was a retired Navy firearms instructor. He took me out to his private firing range out in the woods to fire a musket–Don and his wife were big Civil War re-enactors as well. He showed me the complicated loading process, which involved ramming the powder, wadding, and ball in exactly right, and in the right order. He pointed out that to this day they’re finding old muskets on Civil War battlefields loaded with unfired balls stacked up on top of one another, from panicked troopers loading their muskets incorrectly.
I was, of course, a terrible shot. Don put up a playing card face forward, and said, “You can’t miss it! The card is bigger than the ball!” That logic made no sense to me. I kept missing. Don, of course, turned the card sideways, edge on, and cut it in half every time. Then, by the way, he said, “The ball is bigger than the card! You can’t miss it!”
If Don had been an ancient Greek archery instructor, he would have called my poor performance “hamartia,” an archery technical term that means “missing the mark.” If he’d been a Jewish archery instructor of the same period, he would have used their technical archery term for missing the mark, which was “sin.”
As we begin Lent, and especially on Ash Wednesday, we begin a conversation about that uncomfortable topic, sin. Sin is missing the target. Sin ultimately is the barrier to God. We miss the mark in many ways. For instance, we fail at obeying the Ten Commandments well. But Paul in another of his letters points out that even if we were perfect at obedience to the Ten Commandments, the Jewish Law, we’d still be sinners. So doing right or meeting some goal of perfection isn’t the way to hit the target.
If we were shooting an arrow, there would be a few ways to miss the target. One would be to fall short: As Paul says in another place, “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Our arrow falls to the ground: We simply don’t make it to the target. Another way to miss would be to overshoot the target. That’s the problem, Paul says, with “perfection.” If we achieve some ideal of moral or personal perfection, we become proud. Self-perfection becomes our goal. We convince ourselves we don’t need God.
The real problem with sin is that we get confused about what our target really is. Our target is not moral or personal perfection, doing right instead of doing wrong, being good people, or even going to heaven after we die. Those are all ultimately self-involved targets. Our target is a relationship with God. That’s where we fall short. Ultimately our very self-involvement becomes a barrier.
We can obsess over how sinful we are, constantly in a state of worry over the condition of our souls. When we do that, we are allowing our self-hatred block the grace and love of God freely given.
Or we can obsess over perfection, being righteous and pure. When we do that, we block God’s grace by believing somehow in our own perfection or perfectability, thus denying we even need God; and we alienate ourselves from other more “fallible” human beings.
Or we can obsess over going to heaven, the desire for heavenly reward, ultimately also an extremely self-involved concern–unless we understand that the whole purpose of eternal life is not our own eternal self-preservation, but rather to spend eternity wrapped in God’s love and pursuing the knowledge of God.
Our goal is God: to live eternally in relationship with the eternal God who loves us with an infinite love. That’s our target.
When I went out target-shooting with Don Herring, the goal wasn’t actually for me to shoot well. We went out because we enjoyed each other’s company. I trusted Don to be the first person I’d ever try something like this with. I didn’t think he’d judge me or laugh at me or lose patience with me if I didn’t do well. Our goal was a strengthened relationship. Because I could trust Don, I knew my inevitable failure to hit the target wasn’t going to damage our relationship. The fact that I could trust him motivated me to do something I otherwise would feel uncomfortable doing, because I suspected I wouldn’t be good at it. I missed the target–I sinned, in ancient archery language–but Don and I came away with a much stronger, deeper relationship.
This is our relationship with God. Jesus has taken away the power of our sins–our shortcomings–our imperfections–our failings–to be a barrier between us and God. Because we trust in God’s love, we try that much harder to die more to sin and live more to righteousness. Sin has obscured our view of the target, like fog on a shooting range: but in Jesus God has cleared the fog away, and now we see clearly our true target, our true purpose, our true goal–our true fulfillment: a relationship with God who loves us and wants more than anything to be reconciled to us, and will do anything to make that reconciled relationship a reality.
Thanks be to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.