Ash Wednesday – March 1, 2006
Psalm 120
 
            It happens to everyone. Sometime, somewhere you get caught up in a lie. The advertising world did it to me recently. I was at a web site to download something for my computer when the advertisement caught my eye. It offered great results for the speed and agility of your computer. It was compelling. The ad offered a product so good that it seemed immediately to me that no one could be without it. So I bought it. And $29.95 poorer, I discovered I had been deceived once again. The product made little difference, if any, for my computer.
 
            How often are we caught up in the lies of the world? If you eat a certain diet, you are told, you will most likely not have breast cancer. Then, a study is made that proves this theory wrong as well. Meanwhile, many ate the diet thinking it would save them.
 
            Or, there is the 30% lie. Researchers discovered that most people feel their financial problems would go away if they earned just 30% more. I remember well my friend in Charlottesville who went to his new job in another state ecstatic that he would increase his income by almost 50%. A year later he visited and shared with me that in no time at all he and his family had raised their needs such that his salary increase was no longer adequate. How easy it is to move up our need for comfort and gadgets so that any increase is spent and we find ourselves once again wishing for that 30% more.
 
            It is at that moment we realize we have bought the lies of the world, the lies that just a little more effort, or just the right place to live, or just the perfect something will take care of all our problems.
 
            The writer of Psalm 120 has had their fill of such lies. The Psalmist opens asking for God to deliver them from the lies of the world. You can read it in the first two verses. God has delivered the Psalmist before, and once again, the Psalmist turns to God for deliverance, this time from the lying lips of the culture they live in.  Note that in verses five and six the Psalmist laments living in the alien culture, the far away place, among people of the lie.
 
            And their greatest lie? The people of evil say they want peace, but pursue war. The Psalmist is caught in a world of lies, the greatest of which is that war is peace.
 
            And we seek peace, do we not? Certainly I have heard no one say they would not like a world at peace. Certainly I have heard many people say they would like God’s serene peace within their own lives. Yet, even as we seek peace, we go to war thinking that war is peace. It is another lie of the world according to the Psalmist.
 
            So, how shall we live? How shall we walk the path of a pilgrim in this Lenten season as we walk to the cross of Jesus? What will guide our feet? Will the lies of the world?
 
            May I suggest that the grace of the cross guide us in our journey? Lent is a journey for us, from the lies to the truth. It is a journey from our desire to buy the lies to humbly acknowledging our need for the gracious truth of God in the cross. Our pilgrimage in Lent is the Psalmists journey from a foreign and alien land to being home with God in the grace and mercy of the cross, the place where forgiveness is God’s gift to us.
 
            Today, then, we mark our foreheads with ashes to remember who we are: people of the lie that are only redeemed through the grace and mercy of the cross. It is a symbolic marking, to remind us of our dependence on God and our true need to embrace the truth that we have messed up so much, even turning peace into war.
 
            Today, we mark our foreheads with ashes and begin a journey, a pilgrimage back to God. Today, we begin what the church has always called repentance; it is the act of saying “no” to the lies and “yes” to God. Repentance is a discipline, an obedience we perform by the grace of God. Going from “no” to “yes” is only possible by the love and mercy of the cross enabling us to walk the Lenten pilgrimage faithfully. Turning around our lives only happens by the grace of God.
 
            Janet’s grandmother journeyed from her native Ukraine to the United States as a young teenager. With millions of others she entered the United States through Ellis Island in the early years of the 20th century. She was a pilgrim, moving to the new land, a new place, with all the possibilities that offers.
 
            Lent is such a journey for us. As pilgrims, we walk from the lies of the world to truth of God in the cross of Jesus. It is a walk of faith. It is a walk of obedience. Amen.