Ah, spring! The days are getting longer, and hopefully warmer. There are so many things to anticipate: the first robin, snowdrop flowers, and that garden perennial — asparagus. People are looking forward to their first chance to bring pictures from their well-worn seed catalogs to life.
There is one thing we don't look forward to — the appearance of the first grasshopper. Descending on us like an army, they are ready to eat the best of what we planted, just when our gardens are starting to show promise! They are voracious and relentless.
When the prophet Joel spoke to God's people, the memory of a plague of insects was still fresh; precious crops had been destroyed and hunger reigned. But God promised the people joy beyond disaster, and full gardens despite devastation. God's Word brings hope. In our own struggles, despite heartbreaking setbacks, there is the promise of hope, as well. And it all begins on this day, Ash Wednesday, that some of us will just plain forget about.
Ash Wednesday comes in the middle of nowhere. Our worship cycle is built around Sundays. The four Sundays of Advent, the Sundays in Lent, and the Sundays of Easter — the big holiday, Easter Sunday itself — all are on Sundays!
But Ash Wednesday sneaks up on you. People ask: Is that today? Oops, I forgot. It's not very convenient. It is an interruption. It doesn't even fall on the same date every year. At least Christmas, which falls on every day of the week at one time or another, at least has the good sense to fall on the same date — December 25. You can't say to yourself, "Ah, it is February 19, or March 5," or whatever, and know by the date that it is Ash Wednesday.
And there's another good reason to try to forget. Ash Wednesday is an unwelcome reminder. A memento mori, the Latin phrase that means, "reminder of my death." You are dust and to dust you will return. Or rather, I am dust, and to dust I must return. I, too, will die.
One of the scripture passages we examine on this day is the one from the prophet Joel that tells us terrible things have been happening in the land. There were environmental ravages — a plague of locusts has devastated the crops, bad weather, bad luck, bad politics. In the midst of all this, the people found they couldn't bring their offerings to the temple. If only, they cry, the Day of the Lord would come. Then everything would be all right.
It's hard to figure out exactly when, and to whom, Joel was preaching. The circumstances he described could have fit a couple different periods. But it doesn't matter, because economic and political disasters strike all ages, and his words speak to all people.
Joel reminds the people that there's a better offering than the one they brought to the temple.
Fasting, lamentation, mourning — repentance. Especially the latter.
The problems of the people are real. Insects bring economic ruin. Try to stop them.
Sometimes you simply can't. The people see them like an army of the Lord bringing judgment for past sins. Farming is tough enough in the best of times, but when something like this happens, all of society might fall apart.
Joel makes things worse by describing what these implacable foes are like. "They have the appearance of horses, and like war-horses they charge. As with the rumbling of chariots, they leap on the tops of the mountains, like the crackling of a flame of fire devouring the stubble, like a powerful army drawn up for battle" (2:4-5). Thanks, Joel. Like the people couldn't see that already!
Then he suggests that something worse is coming. The Day of the Lord! A day of judgment, darkness and not light.
Now that must have caught the people off guard. They assumed that since they are God's people, the Day of the Lord is good news! The Day of the Lord is supposed to be glorious. Like the oldies song: "My boyfriend's back and you're gonna be in trouble...." or the chant we might hear at football games: "We're number one! We're number one!"
But Joel describes it as a day of judgment. One in which we may be found wanting, even though we consider ourselves one of God's own.
That's the way we Americans tend to consider ourselves — automatically God's people. As a matter of fact, we tend to assume God is leaning on our side just because we're Americans. We never think about the fact that we buy more, consume more, waste more, sin more, and ignore God more than others. Christian sociologists have been saying for decades if you want to find the cutting edge of Christianity, it's not in the Western world any more — it's in Africa and Latin America.
The prophet Joel isn't just speaking to his time. He's talking to us, too. The Day of the Lord is more than automobiles crashing out of control or airliners falling out of the sky, but is it a call to ask ourselves if we are ready? It is a day of harrowing gloom. Who can stand in the face of such a day?
The poet, John Donne, thought about the end of the world and what it might mean to us personally in one of his Holy Sonnets (1633), when he wrote:
At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space
For, if above all these my sins abound
'Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace
When we are there; here on this lowly ground
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if thou hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood.
The poet recognized that the Day of the Lord is not good news if you are not ready. He asks for just a little more time to repent. That time is now.
And that's Joel's message to his time and to our time: Rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord. Joel wrote in a time when people did not have large wardrobes. Rending your clothes as a sign of repentance and grief is not just a dramatic thing to do, it is a true sacrifice. And Joel wants us to go even farther. He wants us to rend our hearts, change our ways — repent!
While there's still time.
If we do, God will have pity. Things will change. Joel orders that the trumpet be blown again, to summon everyone to repentance. He wants us to know that our God may even now turn back, turn away, if we turn back, and turn away. Joel says later in his book, "I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent against you" (Joel 2:25).
Now that is a promise that stretches the imagination. How can we get lost time back? We live in difficult times. Even though years have gone by, many people are still reeling, not only from the terrible events of September 11, but the evil we have brought upon ourselves, through domestic terrorism such as the Oklahoma City bombing, or the economic terrorism when corporate executives gut pension plans or destroy the lives of workers while fashioning themselves million-dollar parachutes. This is the kind of thing that draws God's wrath, that reminds us that the Day of the Lord is at hand.
How do we deal with such an overwhelming evil? We begin by repenting — trusting, as Joel said, that "... the Lord became jealous for his land, and had pity on his people" (Joel 2:18).
We take matters into our own hands as well. Joel's prophecy also reminds me that the food we plant is desired not only by the insects who share our creation, but by humankind as well. As you make plans for a garden, whether it's a flower box in a city window or a truck patch on half an acre, picture ways you can bless others in your community, perhaps through a local food bank or by giving produce to people you know.
Now what do ashes have to do with all this? It's not magic. There is nothing special about the ashes themselves. Ashes are a symbol of the repentance Job expressed after calling out God and God calling back. Take Job. He repents from dust and ashes, he accepts a new life, he lives like there's no tomorrow, because he now knows there really is a God and it really matters!
It is never too late for us to repent as individuals, as the church, as a nation, as a world. In their name we rend our hearts and not our clothing. We return to the Lord, our God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.
God hasn't given up on us. That's why this day is about more than just ashes and bugs. God is sending Jesus to die for us, to live for us. Will we accept the blessing that is coming our way?
Will we show to others the same grace God has shown to us?
When the biblical prophets talk about the coming end, they're not only reminding God's people that the Day of the Lord is bad news for sinners, they also talk about a delay — a delay just long enough for us to repent, and to go forward in God's mission.
That's certainly what the prophet Joel is telling us. While God's people look forward to the end as a day when their enemies will get what's coming to them, Joel challenges them to look within their own hearts, to repent, and restore justice and righteousness in the land.
This is the heart of Ash Wednesday. What matters is that today you begin a journey for Jesus and with Jesus, through death and beyond to resurrection.
While there's still time. Amen.
