SERMON PREACHED BY
THE REVEREND NATHAN A. RUGH, CURATE
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH,
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
ON ASH WEDNESDAY
21 FEBRUARY 2007

 

 

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. (Joel 2:1b-2)

 

In the Name of God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

 

The Book of the prophet Joel is an allusive book. In many ways it cultivates a sense of disorientation. What is happening? Is it locusts that are have descended on the land? Is it an invading army that is coming? The images blur, the author leaves the nature of the event up in the air. What is metaphor and what is real?

 

Other questions arise too, like - When is this happening? Unlike many of the other prophetic works in the Bible, the author does not place the book in the context of kings or a political situation. Is it in the past? Is this the present or the future? The events seem to describe something that has already happened but the day of the Lord seems to be happening right now.

 

What's more Joel's voice and God's voice seem to blur. It is not at all clear when Joel is speaking and when God is speaking. And all of this uncertainty seems to cultivate a rhetoric-of-terror.

 

Time is blurred. Voice is blurred. Events are blurred.

 

We do not know what's happening; all we know is that it is bad.

 

Furthermore, Joel has turned the original notion of the "Day of the Lord" on its head. In its traditional usage, the Day of the Lord would have been associated with the triumph of God over the enemies of the people of Israel.

 

It was an event where God would finally put right the injustices of the world that held Israel down and elevated her rivals over her. But, here in Joel, the Day of the Lord is being directed at the people of God. Calamity is about to befall them. This event is certain.

 

But even though or even despite of the coming disaster there is this call to repentance. The God who is leading the charge is also calling the people to repent. This is not just a call for individuals. Instead the whole of the city, the whole society, is called to overt signs of repentance. This call goes out to children and infants and even young lovers.

 

The call is to return with one's whole heart with "fasting, with weeping and with mourning". These outward and visible signs are a call to an inward repentance - a rending of the heart and not one's clothes.

 

It might seem that the cataclysmic nature disaster of Joel is distant and obscure to us here this sleepy morning. Many of us have come here to this quiet place to begin walking the path of the Lord during Lent. We have come receive the mark of ashes on our forehead as a sign of our repentance and to remind us that we are constantly being created and sustained by God. But the urgency that greets us in today's reading from Joel probably seems distant and obscure. But perhaps we live with the illusion of safety.

 

Tragic calamities are everywhere we look. Look to Iraq where all of our options seem like only shades of uncertain and risky gray. Or look to the environment degradation. Practical responses seem like drops in a bucket. Or look to the fact that a million children will die this year because of conditions related to poverty. Few problem fills us with more of a sense of being powerless than this.

 

Too often in the church we tend to talk about sin in rather facile terms. But we fail to capture the full extent to which sin and the brokenness of humanity has corrupted the very core of our lives.

 

Rather than looking at paltry examples, let's look at the intractable physical, structural, and environmental violence in which our lives are trapped. This is the calamity and reality that we face every day and from which we tend to hide.

 

When Jesus and the prophets talked about sin they talk about the ingrained injustices of our lives. They point to the violence that is so ingrained in our common lives that we cannot get rid of it by turning a new leaf or by adopting a new set of resolutions. If you add to this sense of structural violence the personal and individual struggles of each of us to love and to trust and to make sense of who we are and what we are doing, then we are truly met with the immensity that captures Joel's apocalyptic vision.

 

It is in this context and it is from a vantage point of hopeless brokenness that we can begin to see how the Day of the Lord can be so terrible and so dark. It is also from this perspective that we can begin to see that true repentance has to be something that bores deep into our very beings and pulls us apart and inside out.

 

And while repentance means turning around in both the Hebrew and the Greek, the problem of our brokenness is such, the calamity of our situation is such, that it is not as simple as doing X as opposed to not-X.

 

Repentance has to be something that is a way of life and not something that we check off on our day, treating it like an item on a grocery list. Rather, it comes out of an encounter with the living God.

 

It comes from asking ourselves what we truly mean when we say that Jesus Christ is Lord.

 

And as such it comes out of a way of life. It emerges from immersing our selves in the story and practices and worship of the church. It comes out of a way of life that is actively engaged in a community where we can be challenged and stretched to grow. And ultimately, repentance comes from being open to God and from being open to those in need.

 

No doubt, some of you are taking things on or giving up stuff for Lent. I myself will spend some time today assessing what practices I might take on and what I might forego. This is important, but not because we have a duty to uphold, but rather because whatever we do we should use it to open us up to see our own brokenness and to see the need in our lives for restoration and healing.

 

What we do or don't do should be done out of the desire to be open to God and open to our neighbor.

 

Its one thing to give up sweets because I like them and they taste good and someone told me that I should give up something for Lent. And it is another thing all together to give up sweets so that I might know hunger and want and from that realize my need and realize how I try to fill that need with all variety of useless and worthless things that cut me off from myself and from God and from all of you.

 

It is out of this place of openness that transformation happens. It is in the place where one hand does not know what the other hand gives that we can learn to give without first seeing how it profits us. It is out of this place that we can know the hollow space at our core that only God can fill. And it is only in fasting in cheer that we can begin to see the hunger of so many in our world.

 

Even now God invites us to the slow process of change and transformation. Even now God calls us to a repentance that comes from openness and not from guilt.

 

In this Lenten season resolve to be open.

 

Amen