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"Rend your Hearts and Not your Garments":
Change the Paradigm
Ash Wednesday
Joel 2:1-2; 12-17
Generally, Ash Wednesday and Lent make little sense in today’s world. The season is Spring, and Winter is in retreat. The whole Earth will shortly burst into life; why focus on death? Jesus probably did not recommend fasting for his followers. The entire section of Matthew 6 recommended reading for this day is in black print in the Jesus Seminar’s Five Gospels, indicating that Jesus highly probably said none of it.
Christians – at least in the West – visit the local church or Cathedral for a spot of ashes on the forehead, then return to lives that have little to do with 40 days of fasting and prayer. Depriving oneself of chocolate or meat might work for a while. Going off booze and cigarettes could be a good thing if one does not return to the old ways at the end of Holy Week. But Ash Wednesday is on the calendar, and it can take on metaphor, and call for serious reflection. As the prophet Joel preaches, some reckoning from God is coming, so be warned.
“Rend your hearts and not your clothing,” God says. Rebuild New Orleans. End the holocaust in Darfur. “Blow the trumpet in Zion,” the prophet writes, “sanctify a fast: call a solemn assembly; gather the people; sanctify the congregation . . . 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’?”
Where indeed is the God of the people of these United States? In Wal-Mart? At the bank? In the Congressional Budget Office? The better question might be “Who is their God?” Neglect, Retribution, Betrayal, Violence, and Greed? Or Justice, Forgiveness, Love, Non-violence and Generosity?
In a “Jesus Seminar on the Road” presentation at St. Mark’s Church on Capitol Hill, Dr. Arthur J. Dewey of Xavier University suggested a way to win the peace in Iraq. “Keep the trucks rolling,” he said, trucks from Wal-Mart, Home Depot, food and medical suppliers, rolling non-stop across the borders between Iraq and Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, accompanied by engineers, doctors, teachers, and organizers. A few would be lost, Dr. Dewey said, but not nearly as many as have been killed in the conflict so far. It is a model used on a small scale by Mahatmas Ghandi in South Africa in the 1920s, and by Witness for Peace in Central America during the Reagan Contra wars and elsewhere. All that is required is people willing to provide accompaniment and hands-on rebuilding of a devastated society.
This is a different paradigm from the one most of the Planet lives in today. There is no room in this paradigm for military violence, the politics of acquisition, or the power struggles of religious systems. It is a shift from piety, war, victory to covenant, non-violence, justice/compassion.
What better work for the season of Lent?