Sermon - Ash Wednesday (2/26/2020)
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Mt. 6:1-6, 16-21
The prophet Joel says: “Return to the Lord your God, who is gracious and merciful, who is slow to anger and abounds in steadfast love, who relents from punishing.”
In our lectionary, we hear twice from the prophet Joel – the beginning of the story is read each year on Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent and our preparation for Easter, and the end of the story is quoted by Peter, in the Acts of the Apostles, on the day of Pentecost, at the end of our Easter celebration. The story Joel tells is of a time of fear and chaos and uncertainty. He speaks of the land being invaded by a great army of locusts. Some scholars think Joel was literally speaking of locusts and the image of an invading army is a metaphor; others think he was thinking of a literal army of soldiers invading the land, for which the plague of locusts is a metaphor.
In either case, it’s a disaster. A great invasion the likes of which have never been seen before. The invaders, whether human or insect, are climbing into houses like thieves, helping themselves to whatever they want. The crops in the field are destroyed, and the people are facing hunger and perhaps starvation. The sun and the moon have gone dark, the stars have stopped shining. Catastrophe.
Every year at the beginning of Lent we read this text from the prophet Joel. But in some years, the fear and uncertainty Joel describes seem closer to us than at other times. For even in our modern age, we are still human, we are still dust and ashes and vulnerable, and sometimes it’s a thing we feel more intensely. A new virus travels around the world in a matter of months, disrupting lives and economies, causing fear and panic. An unusually warm winter – a thunderstorm coming tonight, in February! – signaling greater climate change to come, rising seas and more severe storms, the extinction of species and disruptions of crops and eventually millions of migrants and refugees, if not in our lifetimes then in our childrens’ and grandchildrens’. Our politics descending into tribalism, always looking for someone to blame. Some of us feel fear and loss and death very personally these days, in our families, at our jobs, in our bodies. For me, at least, the confusion and dread of which Joel speaks feels quite present this year. Perhaps it does for you as well.
In a time of chaos and uncertainty and vulnerability, Joel gives us the word of the Lord: Even now, says the Lord, even now, it’s not too late. It’s never to late. Even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning. With fasting – in this time of scarcity don’t hoard, don’t think of yourself first, instead focus your mind and body on others. With weeping – in this time of chaos don’t look for someone to blame, someone to be angry at, but accept your responsibility, weep at how we all, all of us, including me, have failed to love God and to love our neighbor. With mourning – not clinging to denial about what we have lost, but accepting our need for God if ever we are to be made right again.
Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart. Return to the Lord your God, who is gracious and merciful, who is slow to anger and abounds in steadfast love, who relents from punishing. This is who God is: not a God who is hostile to us but who can perhaps be appeased by our sacrifices, but a God who is always ready to help us return. So, Joel says, don’t be afraid. Stop tearing your garments and saying “Oh, woe is us!”
Instead, start tearing your heart. Change your heart, have confidence and trust that God is gracious and merciful, that God is slow to anger and abounding in love and compassion, that God has no desire to punish us but to lift us up. So everybody, Joel says, everybody, let’s stop cowering in fear, let’s stop pointing fingers and finding people to blame, let’s come together and with one heart let us return to our loving and compassionate God. Everybody – the aged and the infant at the breast, no one is to be left out. Nobody is too busy or to too important or too insignificant – bride and bridegroom, stop the wedding and come join us in returning to God.
For all of us are but dust and ashes, and one day to dust and ashes we will all return. But we are dust and ashes that have been formed by the living God who breathed life into each one of us, a God who gives each one of us the gift of life and the promise of mercy and compassion. And so, Joel says, if we return to God, as a community, together, all of us, we will not simply discover that God has saved us from whatever happens to threaten us today. No, Joel says, God has so much more than that in store for us. At the end of the Joel’s prophecy, in the part Peter quotes on Pentecost to explain the strange phenomena that mark the beginning of God’s new creation, Joel says that God will fill the world with God’s own spirit: “Then I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, the old will dream dreams and the young will see visions, and even upon those who are enslaved I will pour out my spirit.”
Tonight we begin Lent – our preparation for Easter, which ends with Pentecost – the outpouring of God’s Spirit on all people, the renewal of all creation. We begin that journey tonight – as Joel recommended, by acknowledging how far away from that new creation we still are. Even as we have already received God’s Spirit in our baptisms, how much we still need our hearts to be changed. How much we are still afraid, angry, in denial.
So now we are invited, all of us, together, to come before God with prayer, with fasting, and with almsgiving. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus commends each of these practices to us, but not to earn points with others or with God. No, we engage in prayer and fasting and almsgiving for ourselves and for our neighbors, with faith that the Spirit is coming upon us and all people, burning away our fears and our hatreds and our shame, freeing us to be the people God made us to be. And at every step of the way, as we are changed and transformed from mere dust and ashes into the living presence of the Spirit of God, we are invited to keep reminding one another that our God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishing. Come, let us together return to the Lord our God. That together we might become the dwelling place of God’s renewing Spirit and a new creation in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.