No pretensions
Commentary
The common theme in the lessons for this day is an explication of what we might call "religion of the heart." What it means is, no disguises. It means being the people who we truly are, without pretension or illusion. God has little patience with fakery, or with what is done for show. There are many areas of application, but the Gospel lesson specifies matters related to worship, especially private worship.
A Pentecostal pastor once told me a story about worship. You might think it's about something else, but he said it was about worship:
I grew up in a small town, he said. One day, when I was about ten years old, we were having company for dinner and my mother made me walk to the florist shop and buy some flowers to put on the table. I was so embarrassed! I had to carry the flowers through town to my house. I thought that if anybody saw me carrying flowers they would think I was a sissy and make fun of me. I hurried, looking this way and that, ready to hide or turn down another street if any of my friends saw me. Six years later, he went on, I was in love. I went to that same florist shop and I bought flowers for my sweetheart. I walked through town to take them to her. I walked the same streets as before and I didn't care whether anybody saw me or not. I didn't even think about it. I just thought about how happy I hoped she would be to get flowers, and how happy I was to bring them to her.
How is that story about worship? Worship that comes from the heart is an experience that takes us beyond ourselves. It directs us, focuses us on something greater. When we worship from the heart, we are not concerned with what others may think of us. We are not concerned with ourselves at all. Because, fundamentally we know that it is not about us. We are no longer the center of our own attention.
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
The text begins with a cry to sound the war alarm, signaling the approach of an enemy's army. Such passages occur elsewhere in the Bible (Hosea 5:8; 8:1; Jeremiah 4:5; 6:1), often in contexts that summon the people to call upon God for deliverance. This time, however, God is the enemy. The approaching troops, vividly described in verses 2-11, are the supernatural troops of the Lord's own army.
The prophet means to inculcate despair. If God be against us, who is there to save? The situation is hopeless. Unless ... in verse twelve, we discover finally that there is an "unless" (the lectionary committee deigned to spare our parishioners the suspense, through abbreviation). Even now, the prophet says, the Lord may relent. Repentance, marked by fasting, weeping, and mourning, may just have an effect.
To be effectual, such repentance must be genuine and universal. The aged, infants, clergy, laity -- all must join in. Even brides and bridegrooms should recognize the urgency of the situation and postpone their festivities. And no play-acting, no window-dressing will do. "Rend your hearts and not your clothing" (v. 13).
Compare verse fifteen to verse one. The call to sound the alarm is repeated, but now it is followed by a solution to the crisis. The words "let all the people tremble" change to "sanctify the congregation." The prophet means to bring us to despair but will not leave us there. Despair gives way to hope as law turns to gospel. For one reason, and one reason only: God is "gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love" (v. 13).
2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10
This text begins where the first lesson ended, with a call to "be reconciled to God." How? Paul does not say. On the one hand, he indicates that we become the righteousness of God as a result of what God did in Christ (5:21). From this, we might conclude that we need do nothing -- God has done it all and it comes to us by grace (see 5:18-19). On the other hand, Paul urges his readers "not to accept the grace of God in vain" (6:1), implying that it is possible to accept God's grace in vain. Scary thought. What does it mean?
Here is a paradox: Paul exhorts us to do ("be reconciled") what God has already done ("reconciled us"). Such paradoxes must usually be understood eschatologically, and I think that is the case here. Salvation is not only a matter of eternal destiny for Paul, but also of being "a new creation" here and now (see 5:17). To "accept God's grace in vain" may mean to embrace God's gift of eternal life without realizing its contemporary implications. Paul exhorts us, then, to be what we are. Regardless of lectionary parameters, 5:20b cannot be understood apart from 5:19. "Be reconciled with God" means "be the reconciled-with-God people that you are."
In the latter portion of this text, Paul provides us with his own resume, a list of what marks him as a servant of God. Immediately, we see his theology of the cross at work, for he begins by listing traumas and hardships. Modern Christians may consider a preacher who boasts of all that he or she has suffered for God to be a bit pretentious, but in Paul's world troubles in life were usually a source of shame. He defies social convention by boasting not of his accomplishments, but of his hardships (see 11:30).
In verse 6, the list shifts from a catalogue of traumas to a roster of virtues. This is necessary, lest we attribute undue respect to suffering as such. Jesus did not bless those who are persecuted for any reason, but those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake (Matthew 5:10).
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
These verses are chosen for Ash Wednesday because they appear to assume the regular practice of such disciplines as almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. Many Christian traditions encourage their members to adopt or intensify such disciplines during the Lenten season.
Jesus assumes we will do these things and advises us to do them in ways that enhance our personal relationship with God. We are not to make a show of personal piety, allowing it to become a means to score points with others. The meaning of the text is crystal clear, but a caveat may be needed for application today.
Our society is no longer one in which a display of piety is guaranteed to bring one honor. In many contexts, it brings ridicule. Modern Christians who view their faith as "a private matter" may seem very different from the bombastic trumpet-
blowers in our text but, ironically, they might both be overly concerned with the impression they are making on others.
If your church practices an "imposition of ashes" at an early morning service, how many members will wash their foreheads before going to work or school? Are they enacting Jesus' advice in verses 16-18? Maybe. No one can or should judge the personal motives of others, but we may at least admit that there is a large middle ground between seeking glory and avoiding humiliation.
The best advice is simply to be who we are. Jesus does not think we should be ashamed to have our private piety be a matter of public record, but he does not think we should go out of our way to make it such either.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Karl Barth once remarked that the greatest tragedy in human life would be to come to the end of our days and to realize that we have been totally worthless in the purpose of God. Or in the thought of our epistle lesson, at the end to realize that God has poured out his grace on us through all our years, and yet we have done nothing with it (2 Corinthians 6:1).
It is that "end" that the prophet Joel is preaching about in our Old Testament lesson -- the end of our lives, and in fact, the end of human history. Joel 2:1-2 concern the Day of the Lord, the dies irae as it is called in so much music and liturgy. That is the final day, when God comes to earth to destroy all of his enemies and to establish his reign over all things and persons. Thus verses 1-2 of our text picture the blowing of the war trumpet, and God's army of heavenly hosts poised to do the final battle against the Lord's foes (cf. 2:11).
Joel has been reminded of that final Day by the devastating locust plague and drought that have devoured Judah's life in the last quarter of the fifth century B.C. (chapter 1). But those were only God's provisional warnings about sin, in the thought of the prophet, and Judah may recover from those. That from which no one can recover, however, and that which no one can escape is God's final judgment on his day of "darkness and gloom" (v. 2). Some Ash Wednesday liturgies of the church remind us of those facts by the ritual of marking our foreheads with ashes, while the minister says the words, "Remember that you are mortal."
"Remember that you are mortal," that is, remember that you are going to die. Death comes to all of us, and the question is, "What then?" We Americans glibly think, of course, that after our deaths, we shall all automatically have eternal life. Of course there is life after death, we believe, and of course we shall all enjoy it. We like automatic things, you see -- automatic coffee, automatic shifts on our automobiles, automatic office doors, automatic happiness in marriage, and so too automatic life after death. Few of us stop to tremble before the specter of death, as our text pictures people trembling (2:1). In our day, some even seek out death with the help of physician-assisted suicide.
But have we stopped to consider the fact that at the end we shall meet God? And that his will be the final judgment as to whether we live or die eternally? Indeed, has the world considered that fact? -- that when God comes to set up his kingdom on earth, his will be the judgment of all the peoples? Jesus pictures that judgment on the Day of the Lord very vividly in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. All nations are assembled before Christ, in that portrayal, and to some he says, "Come ... inherit the kingdom prepared for you" (v. 34), but to others he commands, "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire ..." (v. 41). And the judgment is made on the basis of whether or not people have served Christ by serving the least among their neighbors -- the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the imprisoned.
We all face a final judgment by God. On this Ash Wednesday, on the basis of our text and innumerable other scripture passages, let's take that as a fact.
But the message to us from the prophet Joel is not all darkness and gloom, for through his prophet God utters that, "Yet even now." "Yet even now ... return to me ... return to the Lord," we are urged twice in our passage (vv. 12, 13). Even now, in the midst of our sinful ways, when we have been so busy with our own affairs that we have repeatedly neglected others; even now when we have forgotten to rely on God and have counted on our own self-sufficiency; even now when we have burdened our souls with pride and angers and guilt; even now when we think we do not have a prayer with which to stand before the Lord our God -- even now, in your situation and mine, God spreads wide his arms of mercy on a cross and bids us return to him.
Surely that cross manifests the description of God that Joel gives us. The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, says our prophet, and he is always willing to turn aside his judgment (v. 13). Joel tells his fellow Judeans that God will even give them the means to make their daily sacrifices in the temple, so they can restore their communion with God (v. 14). But it is through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that God offers a return to us. The way is open to the Father. The deed has been done. Christ has cleared the stumbling blocks of our sins that would keep us from walking the path back to God.
Joel even gives directions in how to return to the Father. "Rend your hearts and not your garments," he preaches. His reference to the tearing of garments is to the Israelite practice of repentance, when grief over one's sin was expressed by rending one's garments, by fasting, by covering the head with ashes (thus, Ash Wednesday), by weeping, and by prayers like that of the priest in verses 15-17. But those were all external rituals which could be done apart from the engagement of the heart, just as are so many of our Lenten practices of giving up some sort of food or of attending special worship services or of performing special acts. God, the prophet is proclaiming, does not want externals, however. God wants our hearts. God wants sincere, heartfelt repentance which leads to the amendment of our total lives. In fact, that is what repentance means. To "repent" is to "turn around," to go in the opposite direction, to lead a different, God-directed life from the self-directed life we have led before. True repentance is strenuous exercise of the will, taking ourselves in hand, determining every morning to walk in God's way and not in our own. True repentance involves a new heart, a new love for our heavenly Father.
The last part of our text therefore calls for a fast of repentance on the part of all the Judeans (vv. 15-17). No one is excepted, any more than any one of us here this morning is excepted. The whole congregation, including infants and newly-married, are called to the temple, to repent and pray before God, to let their lives be so transformed by the Lord that they practice a new way of life.
Is that an invitation that all of us gathered here in this sanctuary will accept? Will we all replace our little Lenten practices with true amendment of our lives? Will we truly be God's people, loving him with all our hearts, studying his Word, worshiping his name, praying to him daily, and showing mercy and justice to our neighbors? The way is open to that amendment. Christ will give you his Spirit to walk in it. We simply have to open our hearts to him and let him have our committed lives.
A Pentecostal pastor once told me a story about worship. You might think it's about something else, but he said it was about worship:
I grew up in a small town, he said. One day, when I was about ten years old, we were having company for dinner and my mother made me walk to the florist shop and buy some flowers to put on the table. I was so embarrassed! I had to carry the flowers through town to my house. I thought that if anybody saw me carrying flowers they would think I was a sissy and make fun of me. I hurried, looking this way and that, ready to hide or turn down another street if any of my friends saw me. Six years later, he went on, I was in love. I went to that same florist shop and I bought flowers for my sweetheart. I walked through town to take them to her. I walked the same streets as before and I didn't care whether anybody saw me or not. I didn't even think about it. I just thought about how happy I hoped she would be to get flowers, and how happy I was to bring them to her.
How is that story about worship? Worship that comes from the heart is an experience that takes us beyond ourselves. It directs us, focuses us on something greater. When we worship from the heart, we are not concerned with what others may think of us. We are not concerned with ourselves at all. Because, fundamentally we know that it is not about us. We are no longer the center of our own attention.
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
The text begins with a cry to sound the war alarm, signaling the approach of an enemy's army. Such passages occur elsewhere in the Bible (Hosea 5:8; 8:1; Jeremiah 4:5; 6:1), often in contexts that summon the people to call upon God for deliverance. This time, however, God is the enemy. The approaching troops, vividly described in verses 2-11, are the supernatural troops of the Lord's own army.
The prophet means to inculcate despair. If God be against us, who is there to save? The situation is hopeless. Unless ... in verse twelve, we discover finally that there is an "unless" (the lectionary committee deigned to spare our parishioners the suspense, through abbreviation). Even now, the prophet says, the Lord may relent. Repentance, marked by fasting, weeping, and mourning, may just have an effect.
To be effectual, such repentance must be genuine and universal. The aged, infants, clergy, laity -- all must join in. Even brides and bridegrooms should recognize the urgency of the situation and postpone their festivities. And no play-acting, no window-dressing will do. "Rend your hearts and not your clothing" (v. 13).
Compare verse fifteen to verse one. The call to sound the alarm is repeated, but now it is followed by a solution to the crisis. The words "let all the people tremble" change to "sanctify the congregation." The prophet means to bring us to despair but will not leave us there. Despair gives way to hope as law turns to gospel. For one reason, and one reason only: God is "gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love" (v. 13).
2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10
This text begins where the first lesson ended, with a call to "be reconciled to God." How? Paul does not say. On the one hand, he indicates that we become the righteousness of God as a result of what God did in Christ (5:21). From this, we might conclude that we need do nothing -- God has done it all and it comes to us by grace (see 5:18-19). On the other hand, Paul urges his readers "not to accept the grace of God in vain" (6:1), implying that it is possible to accept God's grace in vain. Scary thought. What does it mean?
Here is a paradox: Paul exhorts us to do ("be reconciled") what God has already done ("reconciled us"). Such paradoxes must usually be understood eschatologically, and I think that is the case here. Salvation is not only a matter of eternal destiny for Paul, but also of being "a new creation" here and now (see 5:17). To "accept God's grace in vain" may mean to embrace God's gift of eternal life without realizing its contemporary implications. Paul exhorts us, then, to be what we are. Regardless of lectionary parameters, 5:20b cannot be understood apart from 5:19. "Be reconciled with God" means "be the reconciled-with-God people that you are."
In the latter portion of this text, Paul provides us with his own resume, a list of what marks him as a servant of God. Immediately, we see his theology of the cross at work, for he begins by listing traumas and hardships. Modern Christians may consider a preacher who boasts of all that he or she has suffered for God to be a bit pretentious, but in Paul's world troubles in life were usually a source of shame. He defies social convention by boasting not of his accomplishments, but of his hardships (see 11:30).
In verse 6, the list shifts from a catalogue of traumas to a roster of virtues. This is necessary, lest we attribute undue respect to suffering as such. Jesus did not bless those who are persecuted for any reason, but those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake (Matthew 5:10).
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
These verses are chosen for Ash Wednesday because they appear to assume the regular practice of such disciplines as almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. Many Christian traditions encourage their members to adopt or intensify such disciplines during the Lenten season.
Jesus assumes we will do these things and advises us to do them in ways that enhance our personal relationship with God. We are not to make a show of personal piety, allowing it to become a means to score points with others. The meaning of the text is crystal clear, but a caveat may be needed for application today.
Our society is no longer one in which a display of piety is guaranteed to bring one honor. In many contexts, it brings ridicule. Modern Christians who view their faith as "a private matter" may seem very different from the bombastic trumpet-
blowers in our text but, ironically, they might both be overly concerned with the impression they are making on others.
If your church practices an "imposition of ashes" at an early morning service, how many members will wash their foreheads before going to work or school? Are they enacting Jesus' advice in verses 16-18? Maybe. No one can or should judge the personal motives of others, but we may at least admit that there is a large middle ground between seeking glory and avoiding humiliation.
The best advice is simply to be who we are. Jesus does not think we should be ashamed to have our private piety be a matter of public record, but he does not think we should go out of our way to make it such either.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Karl Barth once remarked that the greatest tragedy in human life would be to come to the end of our days and to realize that we have been totally worthless in the purpose of God. Or in the thought of our epistle lesson, at the end to realize that God has poured out his grace on us through all our years, and yet we have done nothing with it (2 Corinthians 6:1).
It is that "end" that the prophet Joel is preaching about in our Old Testament lesson -- the end of our lives, and in fact, the end of human history. Joel 2:1-2 concern the Day of the Lord, the dies irae as it is called in so much music and liturgy. That is the final day, when God comes to earth to destroy all of his enemies and to establish his reign over all things and persons. Thus verses 1-2 of our text picture the blowing of the war trumpet, and God's army of heavenly hosts poised to do the final battle against the Lord's foes (cf. 2:11).
Joel has been reminded of that final Day by the devastating locust plague and drought that have devoured Judah's life in the last quarter of the fifth century B.C. (chapter 1). But those were only God's provisional warnings about sin, in the thought of the prophet, and Judah may recover from those. That from which no one can recover, however, and that which no one can escape is God's final judgment on his day of "darkness and gloom" (v. 2). Some Ash Wednesday liturgies of the church remind us of those facts by the ritual of marking our foreheads with ashes, while the minister says the words, "Remember that you are mortal."
"Remember that you are mortal," that is, remember that you are going to die. Death comes to all of us, and the question is, "What then?" We Americans glibly think, of course, that after our deaths, we shall all automatically have eternal life. Of course there is life after death, we believe, and of course we shall all enjoy it. We like automatic things, you see -- automatic coffee, automatic shifts on our automobiles, automatic office doors, automatic happiness in marriage, and so too automatic life after death. Few of us stop to tremble before the specter of death, as our text pictures people trembling (2:1). In our day, some even seek out death with the help of physician-assisted suicide.
But have we stopped to consider the fact that at the end we shall meet God? And that his will be the final judgment as to whether we live or die eternally? Indeed, has the world considered that fact? -- that when God comes to set up his kingdom on earth, his will be the judgment of all the peoples? Jesus pictures that judgment on the Day of the Lord very vividly in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. All nations are assembled before Christ, in that portrayal, and to some he says, "Come ... inherit the kingdom prepared for you" (v. 34), but to others he commands, "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire ..." (v. 41). And the judgment is made on the basis of whether or not people have served Christ by serving the least among their neighbors -- the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the imprisoned.
We all face a final judgment by God. On this Ash Wednesday, on the basis of our text and innumerable other scripture passages, let's take that as a fact.
But the message to us from the prophet Joel is not all darkness and gloom, for through his prophet God utters that, "Yet even now." "Yet even now ... return to me ... return to the Lord," we are urged twice in our passage (vv. 12, 13). Even now, in the midst of our sinful ways, when we have been so busy with our own affairs that we have repeatedly neglected others; even now when we have forgotten to rely on God and have counted on our own self-sufficiency; even now when we have burdened our souls with pride and angers and guilt; even now when we think we do not have a prayer with which to stand before the Lord our God -- even now, in your situation and mine, God spreads wide his arms of mercy on a cross and bids us return to him.
Surely that cross manifests the description of God that Joel gives us. The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, says our prophet, and he is always willing to turn aside his judgment (v. 13). Joel tells his fellow Judeans that God will even give them the means to make their daily sacrifices in the temple, so they can restore their communion with God (v. 14). But it is through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that God offers a return to us. The way is open to the Father. The deed has been done. Christ has cleared the stumbling blocks of our sins that would keep us from walking the path back to God.
Joel even gives directions in how to return to the Father. "Rend your hearts and not your garments," he preaches. His reference to the tearing of garments is to the Israelite practice of repentance, when grief over one's sin was expressed by rending one's garments, by fasting, by covering the head with ashes (thus, Ash Wednesday), by weeping, and by prayers like that of the priest in verses 15-17. But those were all external rituals which could be done apart from the engagement of the heart, just as are so many of our Lenten practices of giving up some sort of food or of attending special worship services or of performing special acts. God, the prophet is proclaiming, does not want externals, however. God wants our hearts. God wants sincere, heartfelt repentance which leads to the amendment of our total lives. In fact, that is what repentance means. To "repent" is to "turn around," to go in the opposite direction, to lead a different, God-directed life from the self-directed life we have led before. True repentance is strenuous exercise of the will, taking ourselves in hand, determining every morning to walk in God's way and not in our own. True repentance involves a new heart, a new love for our heavenly Father.
The last part of our text therefore calls for a fast of repentance on the part of all the Judeans (vv. 15-17). No one is excepted, any more than any one of us here this morning is excepted. The whole congregation, including infants and newly-married, are called to the temple, to repent and pray before God, to let their lives be so transformed by the Lord that they practice a new way of life.
Is that an invitation that all of us gathered here in this sanctuary will accept? Will we all replace our little Lenten practices with true amendment of our lives? Will we truly be God's people, loving him with all our hearts, studying his Word, worshiping his name, praying to him daily, and showing mercy and justice to our neighbors? The way is open to that amendment. Christ will give you his Spirit to walk in it. We simply have to open our hearts to him and let him have our committed lives.
