Lenten Reflection for Ash Wednesday, Feb 17, 2021
You can listen to the reading and reflection by clicking here.
Joel 2.12-18
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?’”
Then the Lord became jealous for his land, and had pity on his people.
The first chapter of Joel describes a massive plague of locusts and a terrible drought upon the land. The people are suffering. Hopeless and despairing, they fear they are being punished by an angry and unforgiving God.
Here, in the second chapter, however, the prophet Joel offers a different possibility – not divine punishment but the possibility of grace and mercy. “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,” writes the prophet. And the Lord says “Even now, return to me with all your heart.”
Like the Israelites plagued by locusts and drought, we know only too well that difficult times make it easier to doubt that God is always with us. Faith is tested. Hope is elusive.
But no - just as in this passage from Joel, we are offered an open hand: “Return to me with all your heart.” But how? “With fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing… sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people…assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast.”
We are called first to confront our fears and failures head on. To pay attention to the pain of our heart. And then, and only then, to gather and sanctify.
This is what Lent means to me – an intentional time to lament and atone all the brokenness in the world as well as the ways that my own fears and failures have turned my face and heart away from God’s presence.
A wise priest once observed that the word “atone” consists of the words “at one.” And that atonement is actually a process of realigning ourselves with the divine in and around us. Call it weeping and wailing, call it rending the heart. The deep reflection of Lent is a gift and prerequisite to deepening our connection to God’s love, grace, and hope…steadfast and abiding. To becoming “at one.”
