Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Ash Wednesday
March 2, 2022
Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy
mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is
coming, it is near— a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick
darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army
comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in
ages to come.
Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing. Who knows whether he will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him, a grain offering and a drink offering for the Lord, your God? Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people. Sanctify the congregation; assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy. Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep. Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations. Why should it be said among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’”
“Return to me,” says the Lord. “Return to me.” That’s the message tonight. We gather to pray and sing, listen and respond, all in the intent to make the journey back to God, who is both our source and destination. For those who wish, the sign of ashes will be offered, as a recognition of our mortality. Time is short, but the invitation stays ever before us. “Return to me.”
And how shall we make that journey? That’s the concern for the prophet Joel. His land has been ravaged by a horde of locusts. The army of insects has mowed down the crops, adding insult to the famine across the land. The ecological disaster has gotten everybody’s attention. Is this the judgment of God? Are they being punished for something? Who can say?
Yet if there is to be a return to the Lord, it must be taken seriously. Nothing superficial will do.
In one of his stories, Garrison Keillor tells about the return of those who wandered away from Lake Wobegon. It was Christmas time, he says, and the exiles came home to their small town that doesn’t appear on any maps. One of them is Larry Sorenson, who he dubs, “Larry the Sad Boy.” He had been saved twelve times in the Lutheran church, an all-time record. Keillor goes on:
In the course of eight years, he threw himself weeping and contrite on God’s throne of grace on twelve separate occasions – and this in a Lutheran church that wasn’t evangelical, had no altar call, no organist playing “Just As I Am Without One Plea” while a choir hummed and a guy with shiny hair took hold of your heartstrings and played you like a cheap guitar – this is the Lutheran church, not a bunch of hillbillies – these are Scandinavians, and they repent in the same way that they sin: discretely, tastefully, at the proper time, and bring a Jell-o salad for afterward. Larry came forward weeping buckets and crumpled up at the communion rail, to the amazement of the minister, who had developed a dry sermon about stewardship, and who now had to put his arm around this limp soggy individual and pray with him and see if he had a ride home. Twelve times. Even (the) fundamentalists got tired of him. Granted, we’re born in original sin and are worthless and vile, but twelve conversions are too many. [1]
He's got a good point. All of us are prone to wander from the Lord we love, but how many times do we wander back? And when is it mere play-acting?
Joel knows the time-honored rituals for repentance: fast from your meals and devote the time to prayer; grieve over your sins, mistakes, and miscues; gather with others for support and mutual devotion; and rip your clothing. This is the Jewish sign for mourning, an outward sign of the inner torn emotions.
This is where Joel pushes further. Don’t rip your clothes, rip your heart. Get to the essential center of the soul – in Jewish thinking, the heart – and open it completely. If change is to come, if repentance is to be real, it must come for the deep place where thought and action coincide. Otherwise we keep going though the motions and no return truly takes place.
Like Larry the Sad Boy, who kept repenting and repenting, and effected no change in his behavior. Keillor says, “He came up on Christmas and got drunk and knocked over the Christmas tree. That was before 2:00 p.m. He spent the next eight hours apologizing for it, and the penance was worse than the crime.”[2]
Perhaps old Larry didn’t understand the true character of God. He imagined a finger-wagging Deity, dishing out guilt and retribution. He was consumed by his own wretchedness, too immobilized to make a change. But the prophet Joel perceived a different Mystery at work. Reaching deeply into Israel’s greatest statement of faith, he declares God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.”
This is our hope, too, for we have seen God in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. His invitation persists, once, twice, a dozen times, a thousand times: “Return to me,” says the Lord, “with all your heart.” Your broken heart. Your cracked-open heart. Your defenseless heart. Your available heart. “Return to me.”
And let that
return be congruent with our behavior, so that God knows we are serious.
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
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