Tag: Joel

“Prone to Wander…”: An Ash Wednesday Sermon

Psalm 103:8-11 Abba God is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness. … Abba God has not dealt with us according to our sins…. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so is God’s mercy great …

I recently received a pin from a very nice person in the New Dimensions class I’ve been teaching on Tuesday afternoons. The pin is a green dumpster, top open with a fire burning within it. The dumpster has a face, it’s smiling and there’s some sweat forming at the corner of the dumpster’s “brow.” Right below the smile is a white sign that is, when you look closely, being held by two tiny dumpster hands. The sign reads, “It’s fine. I’m’ fine. Everything is fine.”

I love this pin for two reasons. The first is that it’s my running joke/motto (?) while teaching this New Dimensions class on “Resistance and Love” that “It’s fine, everything’s fine.” It’s my way of inserting laughter into a discussion that often takes a serious posture and tone. The second reason is: it’s flat out lying. If I’m walking around saying “It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine!” then nothing is fine, and I’m trying to convince myself that everything is fine when it positively, absolutely is not fine.

Tonight, on this Ash Wednesday, let’s be completely and painfully honest: things are not fine. People are scared. People are hurting. People are dying. Everything is not fine.

Joel 2:1-2,12-17

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sound the alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for 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.

Through the prophetic words of Joel, God is shedding light on Israel’s past.[1] This may seem like an odd thing to say, considering Joel mentions a day that is coming. But by mentioning this coming day—this coming day of divine judgment—it’s an indictment on what the people in general and the leaders in specific have been doing. God, says Joel, is on God’s way, and when God gets here, it’s not going to be great because the leaders and thus the people have not been oriented towards God’s will on earth as in heaven.

Notice that Joel does not say that a day of gladness is coming. Rather Joel is announcing a day of gloom, requesting that the inhabitants of Israel—everyone within the range of the blowing trumpet and wailing alarm from the holy mountain—come together and tremble because of this coming day of God. Like a thermometer, Joel’s words demonstrate that Israel is not well and judgment draws nigh.

In other words, everything isn’t fine, and God is going to contend with Israel through a plague of locusts that will come like thick darkness and consume everything in its path (this is the “army” referenced by Joel[2]). This event, while common (locust plagues were common), will outperform any other locus plagues that have come and will come; it will even outperform the one form long ago when Israel was still held captive by Pharoah in Egypt. Keep in mind that that plague was the 8th plague to hit Egypt to convince Pharoah to let God’s people go; a plague of locusts indicates a people and leadership stuck and set in their hard-heartedness, refusing to listen.

But, as there is with God and God’s dealing with God’s beloved, there’s a glimmer of relief…maybe.

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?

For Israel, according to Joel, there’s a possible way out, but it will demand a level of faith that Israel hasn’t displayed recently. If Israel not only hears Joel but really listens, like shema type listens (Deut. 6ff), they will turn from their errant ways and return to God. There’s a catch though, according to Joel, It must happen before God comes;[3] thus, why Israel will have to press into their faith. They will have to believe the words of Joel, and that they are fromGod. Thus, it will demand that Israel self-examine and realize they fear humans more than they fear God. They must find their way back to their love of God which results in being unafraid of the rulers and authorities of the kingdom of humanity.[4] Joel continues:

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.

Joel declares that Israel needs to be sanctified: everyone. From the old to the young, even those invested in profound ritualistic events (like marriage). Everyone must stop what they are doing, gather, and fast together, to be sanctified together. But that’s not all. Joel shines the spotlight on the people of Israel first, and then turns that light on the leaders, exposing them, especially the priests…

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?'”

Here the religious leadership of Israel is exposed and called to turn back to God, too. The priests are to “weep” for their own part in straying; they are to pray for the people, and this is a confession that they’ve participated in/helped along the people’s and the leadership’s straying because they, too, have wandered away from God. They, too, have preferred their own power and privilege while the people were sacrificed by the rulers; they, too, have forgotten that they serve God thus serve the people and not their own whims and desires. Thus, they must now pray before it’s too late.

There’s a risk here in Joel’s words: God won’t show up, and Israel will be left to its own devices, left to being lost, left in the shadow of God’s departure. Joel wants his reader to imagine this horror, this gloom, this potential obliteration and feel the impending fear and identify with his voice, thus God’s merciful calling to them. Joel wants his audience to make his words their words, to step in faith, and a commit to making these actions their own so to secure their future with God and with themselves.[5]

Conclusion

Joel is setting us up to enter into this moment of Ash Wednesday with honest self-reflection to see that our tendency is, like Israel, to lie, to stray, to turn our backs, to think we know better than God, to be more afraid of other people (what they think of us, what they may say about us, losing our status and privilege) than considering loving God with our whole heart. We conflate God’s love for us with the thinking that God winks at our complicity with evil, human ideologies and actions that threaten the lives of the least of these among us (our houseless siblings, our queer siblings, our black siblings, our poor siblings, our immigrant siblings, our native siblings, our sisters, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and the flora and non-human fauna of creation). God is merciful says the entire bible,[6] but God does not relish when human beings harm other human beings through war and genocide, through inhumane laws and policies, and through the creation of deeper and wider lines in the sand making the “in-group” smaller and the “out-group” larger, colder, hungrier, thirstier, more naked, less safe.

Joel advocates for the mercy of God in our passage, but between being caught in the death of our sins and the life that is promised in God there is a call to repentance, a call to penitence, a call to take a deep, hard, long look at ourselves in the mirror and for once…FOR ONCE… be completely and brutally honest with ourselves before turning that judgmental eye on anyone else. Ash Wednesday prepares us to come face to face with our mortality, with our own death so that as we can prepare ourselves to enter this moment and this season with the  fertile ground and nourished soil of a heart eager to see God.[7],[8]

We must come to terms with how prone we are to wander and leave the God we love who is the source of our love, our life, and our liberation.

Welcome to Lent.

[1] Zvi, “Joel,” 1166. “The lack of references to specific events in Israel’s past (locust plagues were not uncommon) and the overall imagery of the book encourage its readers to understand it against the background of Israel’s past in general.”

[2] Zvi, “Joel,” 1169. “Military imagery is pervasive in this section; in this context, the army is a personification of the locusts…”

[3] Zvi, “Joel,” 1169. “On the need to turn back to the LORD, and for a communal lamentation. This must be done before the arrival of the Day of the Lord, which is near or close…otherwise Israel too will be the victim of God’s power. “

[4] Abraham K. Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: JPS, 1962), 209. “To fear God is to be unafraid of man. For God alone is king, power, and promise.”

[5] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Joel,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 1166. “The readers of the book of Joel are asked to imagine a terrifying plague of locusts and its horrifying impact on society and the natural environment created by the human society. Then the locusts become a mighty army sent by the Lord against Judah. As the text leads the readers to sense that human society and culture in Judah are at the brink of obliteration, it asks them to identify with a prophetic voice that calls on them to return to the Lord, to fast and lament. Then the book moves to Judah’s salvation and to a range of passages dealing with the ideal future, in which the fate of the nations figures prominently.”

[6] Heschel, Prophets, 290. “Merciful and gracious…are qualities which are never separable in the Bible from the thought of God.”

[7] LW 18:96 v. 13 “Return to the Lord. It is as if he were saying: ‘This will be the means—where you have come with your whole heart, with a true heart, then you are returning to the Lord. Otherwise, it will not happen.’”

[8] LW 18:98 “The righteous…use them correctly, for they are bruised and cast down by the angry threats of God; they bear divine judgment; they recognize their sin and their damnation So, when they hear these promises, they turn to the mercy of God. In this way their conscience again are lifted up and become peaceful.”

Posted on by laurenlarkin 0

“Buried in the Past, Captive to What Was”: Ash Wednesday

Psalm 103:20-22 Bless God, you angels, you mighty ones who do God’s bidding, and hearken to the voice of God’s word. Bless Abba God, all you his hosts, you ministers of God who do God’s will. Bless God, all you works of God, in all places of God’s dominion; bless Abba God, O my soul.

Introduction

We are about a month away from hitting the fourth anniversary of Covid_19 shutting down the world and turning it completely upside down. I can simultaneously believe and not believe that it’s been that long and only that long. It feels like yesterday and so long ago. Time feels thin right now, caught in a paradox of fast and slow, so close and yet so far away, here and not here.

But it’s not only time that feels caught in such a paradox. The atmosphere surrounding our bodies feels caught in its own paradox of familiar and strange. I don’t think I feel all that different than I did on March 12, 2020, but then I feel completely different, like maybe I don’t share one genetic similarity with that woman. But I do! She and I are one, and we did go through and are still going through that massive event that plunged the world into chaos.

And it’s more than just a personal sensation, something unique and private to me. It’s impacting all of us. And not only those of us here in this room, but in our community, in our state, in our nation, and in our world. This entire ball of matter orbiting its sun feels submerged in tumult. One global event after another arises, reminding us viscerally that our lives are short and our bodies fragile and vulnerable. We are not in control, are we? War and violence, genocide and extermination, hate and rage are the fuel motivating bloated egos consumed with power toward global extinction. Our own country grows continually divided over who has liberty and who doesn’t, xenophobia is (re)peaking (if you are not just like us then you are against us), our neighbors are becoming our supposed enemies to our own private freedom and liberty blinding us to the fact that we might be the enemy to ourselves; in short, everything and everyone is a threat. Our many places of worship, those once deemed sacred and safe places, are now battle-ground-zeros for so many people who are sure they know exactly what God thinks and wants, drawing lines thick and dark in the sand, meanwhile fighting terribly to keep their institutional heads above the waters of financial ruin and destitution, afraid to let death come and claim its victims and houses.

Almost four years ago we were thrown into a rupture in time and space, and—I don’t know about you—but it doesn’t feel like we’ve been rescued from it just yet. In fact, I’ll say it boldly, we have not been rescued; we’re still in the rupture. We are further in and further down, but not up and not out.

So, what do we do? Well, the tendency for human nature is to go backward, return to the shore of familiarity and comfortable, swim back to what was, and to ignore that our memory of the past silences malicious secrets and covers over terrible deeds. Humans are convinced that what we know is easier to battle than what we don’t know. We love to look backward with rose colored glasses and reminisce with fondness about things that, frankly, never truly existed as remembered. Our minds lie to us, lure us backward toward images of yesterday that are (actually) images of never-where and never-when. We are easily seduced by thoughts that somehow the past was better, more vibrant, simpler, without difficulty; wasn’t it easier back then…

Human beings have a hard time fighting against this lure and seduction of the romanticized past; the more we fight the more stuck we become. We are buried in the past, captive to what was.

Joel 2:1-2,12-17

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sound the alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for 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.

It seems Joel’s ancient, prophetic words ring true today. There is trembling among the people, darkness and gloom feel real while clouds and thick darkness taunt us from above. The day of God comes, and we’re yet to be saved from it. There is fear here, in Joel’s words. The people should be afraid of God, says Joel, but not of humanity.[1] But this fear is not because God’s principle characteristic is anger or wrath because God’s character is foremost longsuffering and patient, forgiving and merciful. [2],[3]

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?

The people should fear this day of God’s arrival because God will come and expose that what the people have created as a sham: mere phantoms of good; things built in the image of humanity and not by the divine inspiration of God’s loving and gracious Spirit. Joel’s pronouncement of God’s coming judgment and anger summons the people out of themselves—their egos, their power, their pleasure, their comfort—and redirects them to a proper relationship to God (one of dependence and trust, one of reverence and forgiveness). Joel makes it clear, the people have gone astray, they must return to God because in this return God’s displeasure is (potentially) fleeting; it is a moment in time that happens, it will not last forever. [4]

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.

God loves God’s people; however, according to all the prophets of Israel and including Joel, God does not love it when the people forfeit their relationship with God for a relationship with power and privilege thus obstructing the wellbeing and livelihood of their neighbors. God does not deal kindly with such mischief. Thus, with their society on ethe edge of judgment and being engulfed by the divine pathos for the Beloved, according to Joel, God’s people can do something to mitigate this coming moment of wrath: they can turn to God because God is merciful and gracious[5] and this turning to God will turn away God’s displeasure,[6] especially if they return in time before God’s day of judgment arrives.[7]

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?'”

The Spiritual Leaders of God’s people, according to Joel, are to weep and pray. This is the beginning of a restored orientation toward God. The Spiritual Leaders petition God for God to spare the people and to honor God’s “heritage” thus establishing God’s people among the nations from this time forward. Therein God’s presence among the people will be sustained, letting the world know that God has not abandoned God’s people. Thus, Joel’s question posed by the mouths of priests, “Where is their God?” is moot because God is with them. However, if there is no return to God, then the bitter question remains on the mouths of Israel’s adversaries: where is the Lord your God?[8]

Conclusion

What direction should God’s people turn to return to a right relationship and orientation toward God? Not backward. Israel must not turn backwards to seek God because God is not located in the past, like a relic, stuck in the time and place of yesterday. By going backward, Israel would be betray just how deep is their alliance with their own image. To return to what is known and familiar is always to return to what is human, comprehended with the eyes and ears, to that which is known. To return to what is familiar to deprive God of faith and honor, trust and glory. Thus, it is the way of stagnancy and the status-quo, the way of fearing humans and not God. Going backward, for Israel, will seal their death sentence, hammer in the last nail in their coffin.

To return to God is to move forward into the unknown, to jump into the void, to dive into the rupture. It is all about facing the chaos and discomfort of that which is unseen and yet held by faith and hope. To hear the summons of God from the void, to sense the prophetic summons of God beckoning from the rupture, is to trust and to account to God that which is God’s: worthy of trust and faith; it is to proclaim that God is the truth and the way, thus God is the life. To move forward by faith and trust is to declare to the people and the world that God has not abandoned God’s people; to dive into the void is to affirm that even in this chaos God is present and able to bring order; to jump into the rupture is to render trustworthy God’s promises that all things are possible with God and that God can and will create out of nothing, once again.

So, today we stand at the edge of the void, on the precipice of the rupture, daring to hear the divine summons to enter this darkest of dark nights, and to hold on, by faith, to the presence of God as we tumble into what appears as death and nothingness. All the while we are beckoned to keep looking forward, holding God’s hand as God brings us to God and God’s new thing in the world—not an old thing, not a familiar thing, but a new thing. Tonight, we are brought deep into the divine womb to be born again of God by faith (trust) with thanksgiving into the divine light, life, and liberation. Born again as God’s people resurrected from the past and liberated from what was…

[1] Abraham K. Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: JPS, 1962), 209. “To fear God is to be unafraid of man. For God alone is king, power, and promise.”

[2] Heschel, Prophets, 285. “It is impossible to understand the meaning of divine anger without pondering the meaning of divine patience or forbearance. Explicitly and implicitly, the prophets stress that God is patient, long-suffering, or slow to anger…”

[3] Heschel, Prophets, 285. “Patience is one of the thirteen attributes of God,’ yet never in the sense of apathy, of being indifferent. Contrary to their thinking was the idea of a God who submits to the caprice of man, smiling at the hideousness of evil The patience of God means his restraint of justifiable anger.”

[4] Heschel, Prophets, 290. “Anger is always described as a moment, something that happens rather than something that abides. The feeling expressed by the rabbis that even divine anger must not last beyond a minute seems to be implied in the words of the prophets.”

[5] Heschel, Prophets, 290. “Merciful and gracious, rahum ve-hannun…are qualities which are never separable in the Bible from the thought of God.”

[6] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Joel,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 1166. “As the text leads the readers to sense that human society and culture in Judah are at the brink of obliteration, it asks them to identify with a prophetic voice that calls on them to return to the Lord, to fast and lament. Then the book moves to Judah’s salvation and the rangement of passages dealing with the ideal future, in which the fate of the nations figures prominently.”

[7] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Joel,” 1170. 2.12-17, “On the need to turn back to the Lord, and for a communal lamentation. This must be done before the arrival of the Day of the Lord, which is near or close…otherwise Israel too will be the victim of God’s power.”

[8] Heschel, Prophets, 292fn17. “Anguished by the blows of enemies, Israel was the butt of stinging sneer: ‘Where is the Lord your God?’”

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“Nothing Seems to Satisfy”: Existential Hunger

Psalm 103: 1-5 Bless God, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless God’s holy Name. Bless God, O my soul, and forget not all God’s benefits. God forgives all your sins and heals all your infirmities; God redeems your life from the grave and crowns you with mercy and loving-kindness; God satisfies you with good things, and your youth is renewed like an eagle’s.

Joel 2:1-2

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sound the alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for the day of God is coming, it is near–
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and thick darkness!
Like [darkness] 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 begins his prophecy speaking of doom. The ever-present feeling of a storm cloud hovering somewhere over and above, out of sight, unable to be touched, deep in uncertainty, it floats just beyond the periphery of awareness and intuition. It’s there…I think… Our world seems thrust into a void of ground-opened-up-beneath-our-feet; nothing is certain so nothing is certain. How did we get to the peripheral of doom? I might be able to point to a myriad of ideologies and concepts that have rent asunder our communion and community; but I’m not sure those are the only things to blame. There’s no monolithic like the ones promoted by pundits and political candidates. Going backwards won’t stave off that doom cloud; ignoring it is never the answer; rolling over and just acquiescing…this is the way it’s always been, *shrug… Is this what freedom and bravery look like?

I think part of that doom cloud is our own doing. We’ve spent too long in the realm of suspicion and skepticism;[1] stripping back everything leaves us with nothing. Don’t get me wrong, the post-modern gift of suspicion and skepticism gave us liberation to question everything and the audacity to refuse blind trust. We’ve stripped back stories and myths, tradition and ritual, authority and expertise, normativity and expectation in the pursuit of authenticity, truth, love, and liberation. We’ve transcended prohibitions that controlled us; we’ve gone as far as to imagine existence without the threat and promises of God and God’s judgment relegating human beings to this or that afterlife. We’ve even attempted to live in the absurdity of life without the justification of divine purpose and predetermination.

Suspicion allowed us to strip back and question many things that needed and need to be questioned, but it hasn’t replaced what it took. Finding out everything is a lie is not the same as being given truth. Realizing the ground under your feet is an illusion, doesn’t mean you are now standing on firm ground. Humanity can’t live sola suspicio (on suspicion alone); it’s a great location for a vacation, but no one can live there forever.[2] If we only have skepticism then we only have destruction, and if only destruction then we have despair and death. In desperation to sooth, we cling to whatever we can touch and feel, see and taste, convinced it’s the only thing we can grab on to in order to locate stability in a world seeming like a freefall into an endless void.

Joel 2:15-16

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.

Joel declares a summons. Sound the trumpet! Do something to alert the people to the doom cloud rollin’ in. Get the attention of the people! They’ve grown numb; they’ve grown desperate in their hunger, the aftermath of sola suspicio. I know it may sound odd to make this claim, but I think we’re hungry. Hunger takes many forms. I think on an existential level—a level that incorporates our entire being, spirit and body—we’re famished, desperately hungry.

As people, as Christians, as a society, as a nation, we’re so hungry that any sustenance will do, no matter how malnourishing it is. The rate at which we consume is mind blowing. And we consume in the technical definition of the word: until there’s nothing left. Our planet is falling apart under our feet and above our heads because we can’t control how much and how fast we consume. We consume people and relationships; only staying with them while they serve us and our obscure pursuit of happiness and comfort. We consume to numb the pain and discomfort of the doom cloud beginning to obscure our peripheral vision. Whether it’s full seasons on Netflix, substances altering our minds, purchasing clothes, phones, cars, houses—whatever—we’re trapped in a cycle of take and eat, never slowing down enough to see and know that what we have in our hands is precious, of the earth, of labor, of goodness. The modern dictum of Rene Descartes has run its course; no longer is it, “I think therefore I am”. Rather it’s, “‘I consume, therefore I am.’” [3]

Tool’s “Stinkfist”

But it’s not enough, I need more
Nothing seems to satisfy
I said I don’t want it, I just need it
To breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive

There’s something kinda sad about
The way that things have come to be
Desensitized to everything
What became of subtlety?

How can this mean anything to me
If I really don’t feel anything at all?
I’ll keep digging
‘Til I feel something[4]

As a means to stave of the despair and dread of doom, we consume people and things. Everyone and everything have a function and purpose as a means to my end. Consumption is a new hallmark characteristic of our post-modern/post-enlightenment existence. The irony? It’s all been in the name of the liberation of the self from the tyranny of mythology, angry divinity, and religious captivity, but the self is now found imprisoned to new despots and tyrants: fear, anxiety, loss, sola suspicio. We’ve not gained ourselves; we’ve lost ourselves.[5] The self can’t exist in the vacuum created by suspicion’s consummation with consumption. Nothing is the only end goal here. Needing more and more, digging deeper and deeper, there is less and less ground to stand on, fewer and fewer people and things with which to be in living and true relationship.Skeptical until there is nothing to lean back on; consuming until there is nothing left, we end up isolated and alienated from ourselves and from others. And we find ourselves inching closer and closer to destruction.

Joel 2:17

Let the priests who minister before God
weep between the portico and the altar,
saying, “Spare Your people, Abba God,
and do not make Your heritage a reproach,
an object of scorn among the nations.
Why should they say among the peoples,
‘Where is their God?’”

Joel returns to summoning, this time calling on the priests of God. Pray for your people! Pray for God’s beloved! This one is inching precariously close to the precipice of death! Joel is aware that of their own power the people cannot disentangle themselves from the threatening doom cloud rollin’ in. They’re desperate, they do not feel the firm ground under their feet, they are not secure, they are not assured; tumult and chaos rule the day, anger and fear the emotions du jour. Skepticism and suspicion have brought them so far but have dropped them off on the side of the road, cold and wet, thirsty and hungry. Whither is God!? the prophets cry out. Is this all? Have we been abandoned to the pit and the void of skepticism and consumption? Where is God? Where is life? Where is love? Where is comfort? Where is hope? Where is liberation?

It is time to put a boundary around how far skepticism and suspicion take us. It is time to realize and feel our hunger. We must stop and take a moment and feel the discomfort of our hunger pangs, we must feel the loss, grieve the pain, suffer the injustices, and grow alert, becoming more and more aware…

…we are hungry for stability
…we are hungry for identity
…we are hungry for relationality
…we are hungry for community
…we are hungry for solidarity

We must become aware that we are hungry for unconditional love, resurrected life, and present liberation; we must become aware that we are hungering after God…[6]

Joel 2:12-14

Yet even now, says God,
return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
rend your hearts and not your clothing.
Return to God, your God,
for God is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
and relents from punishing.
Who knows whether God will not turn and relent,
and leave a blessing behind God,
a grain offering and a drink offering
for  God, your God.

[1] “Hermeneutics of Suspicion” ala Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Heidegger etc.

[2] I’m in fluenced here by the work and life of Dorothee Sölle in her memoire Against the Wind, specifically the chapter “Suspended in Nothingness” p.13.

[3] “The motto of the postmodern world and life therein may well be, ‘I consume, therefore I am.’ The artificial of creation of needs is an essential component of economic life; the countermodel of ‘live simply so that others may simply live’ is denigrated as sheer romanticism. We are further removed than ever before from an economy that sustains subsistence and is not hounded by progress. To be ‘over-choiced’ with thirty different kinds of bread does indeed develop the shopper’s awareness of differentiation and sense of taste. However, from the ego that is becoming dependent on such a surplus of choice, it also takes away the time and energy for other life pursuits. The ego is diverted and, with the help of the world of consumer goods, ‘turned in on itself’ (homo incurvatus in se ipsum), as the tradition used to depict the sinner.” Dorothee Sölle, The Silent Cry, 212-213.

[4] Tool “Stinkfist” written by: Paul D’amour, Daniel Carey, Maynard Keenan, Adam Jones. Ænima. 1996.

[5] “He who makes use of another person as a means of achieving his own ends not only humiliates that person but also degrades himself. To treat another person as if she were a thing is to become a thing oneself, a servant to the functioning of the very ‘thing’ being manipulated. By demanding sacrifice, such a person destroys his own freedom. As the one in control he becomes the one controlled. In alienating others from that which they wish to be and can become, he alienates himself. Because he concentrates on domination, on employing others as means to his own ends, he loses all the other possibilities open to him. For example, he no attention to anything that does not fit his purpose. He loses the ability to enjoy living because he must constantly reinforce his life by accomplishments relationship between people is so interdependent that it is impossible for one person to prosper at the expense of another. In the long run such exploitation proves detrimental to both.” Dorothee Sölle, Beyond Mere Obedience, 34-35.

[6] “I need to ground heaven on earth. (Den Himmel erden!) The best ally in this crazy enterprise that we sometimes call “faith” I find in the Bible. The book tells me the story of God’s covenant with us under realistic conditions.” (p. x) and, “In order to dialogue with the Word of God, the praxis of the prophets and Jesus, we need the clearest understanding of our own praxis. When we delve deep enough into our own situation, we will reach a point where theological reflection becomes necessary. We then have to “theologize the given situation. We read the context (steps 1 and 2) until it cries out tor theology. The only way to reach this point at which we become aware of our need for prayer, for hope, for stories of people who have been liberated, is to go deeply enough into our own sociohistorical context. The theologian will discover the inner necessity of theology in a I C given situation and its potential for unfolding theological meaning. We have to reach this point of no return where we will know new that we do need God. This is the basis of doing theology, but the only way to come to this point is worldly analysis of our situation.” p. xi Dorothee Sölle, On Earth as in Heaven.

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Even From Dust

Ash Wednesday (Sermon)

I have a confession: I don’t like Ash Wednesday. Now, some of you may be shocked to hear this. Some of you may not be shocked. And some of you may even (secretly) agree with me. But, nonetheless, I don’t like Ash Wednesday. So, when I was told I was preaching Ash Wednesday, I smiled and said “yayyy.” But on the inside, I cried just a little bit.

You see, Ash Wednesday puts a hard stop to the festivities that culminated in yesterday and last night (the final night of) Mardi Gras. Ash Wednesday throws open the door to a season of some sort of self-denial and fasting that is the season of Lent. None of us really like days that end our celebration and start us about our task of taking life seriously. Ash Wednesday, in some respect, is the Monday of all Mondays in the liturgical calendar. And who really likes a Monday?

But it’s not only the Monday-esque vibe that Ash Wednesday brings to our liturgical life and calendar that I don’t like. It’s not the inauguration into season of self-denial and fasting of Lent that I don’t like. It’s the part that constitutes and substantiates the inauguration of Lent that I don’t like. And it’s that very part that we love to forget to talk about as we transition from celebration to fasting. Dialogue surrounding Ash Wednesday moves swiftly and deftly from what I did last night and all the fun I had to, “Yes, I’m giving up _____” for Lent. But something else needs to happen before I so smoothly move from Mardi Gras to Lent and that is the form and substance of Ash Wednesday; I must be forced to reckon with myself as I am and not as I portray myself to be.

Ash Wednesday is less like an average Monday and more like that one Monday where it was already bad and then you got pulled over and instead of the Police Officer handing you a ticket, she handed you a stack, a ticket for every infraction you’ve ever committed known and unknown to you.

Ash Wednesday is not a day of celebration; Ash Wednesday is the 4th step of the 12 Step Program for Sinners.[1] It is a day for us to take a fearless and ruthless moral inventory of ourselves that results in our throwing ourselves prostrate on the ground crying out, “Lord, Have Mercy! Have Mercy on us!” And knowing that our lives, our very lives are fully and completely dependent on that divine word of “Mercy.” It’s a day to wake up to the dire reality that apart from God’s mercy, we are only dust.

I don’t like Ash Wednesday because I’m the one that has to bring you to that place with my words. Rather than using my priestly office to bring you hope and comfort and to bless you and bring you life, I have to use it in a way that reminds you of the curse of sin, and that the wage therein is death. I have to anoint you not with oil, but with ash. I have to remind you that you are dust and that, as it stands now, to dust you will return.

We are dust because we have failed. And this failure is nothing to gloss-over as we are wont to do. This failure surely pulverizes us to dust because this failure encompasses our activities and the orientations of our heart and mind. We are fully incriminated: body, mind, and soul. We have not acted the way we ought to act, we have not spoken the way we ought to have spoken, we have not thought the way we ought to have thought, and we have not loved as we ought to have loved. We have failed to uphold God’s good and righteous law. What I mean by failure to uphold God’s law is our failure to live according to this:

4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

And, failure to uphold this:

“…you shall love your neighbor as yourself…” (Leviticus 19:18b)

There’s no escaping what feels like (and is) the crushing weight of condemnation of Ash Wednesday and it’s demand to self-reflection and fearless and ruthless moral inventory. You can’t side-step this event. Today you will be bombarded by the words of the liturgy and of the prayers. Today the voices of the prophets of Israel ring in our ears anew:

“The faithful have disappeared from the land,
and there is no one left who is upright;
they all lie in wait for blood,
and they hunt each other with nets.
3 Their hands are skilled to do evil;
the official and the judge ask for a bribe,
and the powerful dictate what they desire;
thus they pervert justice.” (Micah 7:2-3)

“Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sound the alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near—
2 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 2:1-2)

“Gather together, gather,
O shameless nation,
2 before you are driven away
like the drifting chaff,
before there comes upon you
the fierce anger of the Lord,
before there comes upon you
the day of the Lord’s wrath.
3 Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land,
who do his commands;
seek righteousness, seek humility;
perhaps you may be hidden
on the day of the Lord’s wrath.” (Zephaniah 2:1-3)

“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” (Isaiah 58:6-7)

You have failed. You have failed God and you have failed your neighbor; you have failed God because you have failed your neighbor. The homeless go unsheltered. The hungry go unfed. The marginalized and oppressed continue in their bondage and slavery. Let this active word of God spoken through the prophets present itself to you not as mere historical fiction spoken to others of long ago, but as a very present reality in its veracity. Let this word of God touch you: let it break your heart, let it trouble your conscience, let it be the encounter with the divine that strips you of “…all agreeable self-deceptions…” and causes you to face the truth of your failure: you are people of unclean lips in the midst of people of unclean lips (Is. 6ff).[2]

And not only are you incriminated in this verdict of guilty, but I, too, am convicted and condemned. I’ve remained silent when a voice was needed; I’ve intentionally stepped back and hidden from the call to step up and act. I have professed love of God and then turned a blind eye to the turmoil, oppression, and suffering of my neighbor. I have not fed the hungry, housed the homeless, or clothed the naked. For this I am guilty and judgment comes; judgment comes from God and I am guilty. The encounter with God in the words of the prophets burns and I am rent to dust.

From dust we were taken and to dust we shall return.

“The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
9 He will not always accuse,
nor will he keep his anger forever.
10 He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as the heavens are high above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far he removes our transgressions from us.
13 As a father has compassion for his children,
so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him.
14 For he knows how we were made;
he remembers that we are dust.” (Psalm 103:8-14).

There is hope yet still and this I must proclaim alongside judgment lest our hearts grow too weary to beat and our mind too burdened to conceive of hope and our bodies too feeble to make it to our feet. “For he knows how we were made,” writes the Psalmist. “[H]e remembers that we are dust.” Our God is a God “whose property is always have mercy,”[3] to have mercy especially when and where all hope seems lost.

“Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you;
therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
blessed are all those who wait for him.” (Isaiah 30:18).

Paul exhorts us in the place of Christ and with an urgent entreaty in the 2nd Letter to the Corinthians, “…on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God!” [4] God’s justice is not retributive; it is merciful and reconciliatory and thus restorative. Being rent to dust by the heat of judgment of the divine words of the oracles of the prophets and the law may seem like the final nail in the coffin, but with our God it’s just the beginning.

In the beginning God created out of nothing, and out of nothing God will create a new beginning. There is hope in the creative and long-suffering mercy of God.

We throw ourselves in our manifold convictions and guilt and failure at the feet of a God who is merciful—not “maybe will be,” “might be,” or “could be,” but is merciful. We throw ourselves down at the feet of a God who has reconciled and restored us to himself in his mercy through the sending of his son out of self-sacrificial love for us.[5] This is the God we come into contact with in Christ, the God by whom we are touched in the words of proclamation of Christ and yet we live because of God’s mercy and reconciling us to himself.[6] This is the God we encounter in Ash Wednesday.

We live in this encounter because there’s an exchange[7] occurring between Christ, and us as Paul writes, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). We live because Christ willingly and voluntarily and lovingly resolves to head to Jerusalem to die and to be raised up (Mark 8:31).[8] We live because God is so merciful that God will bear in God’s own self (freely intervening by his own being from both sides)[9] on the cross our sin and become so indistinguishable from that sin.[10] We live because the sin bearing sinless Christ—who knew no sin in any way, shape, or form–dies and in his death so to goes the death of our death, so to goes the dust of our dust. And from the dust of death: life.[11] Our lives are given back to us because God is merciful to take our affairs in this world so personally that he makes himself responsible and burdens himself with our failure and guilt and evil ways;[12] That is the extent and power of God’s love for us; that is mercy and this is our merciful God: the God who in “[Christ] is the [one] who entered that evil way, with the result that we are forced from it; it can be ours no longer.” [13]

Speaking about Isaiah’s encounter with the divine in Isaiah chapter 6, which applies here to our situation in Ash Wednesday, Helmut Gollwitzer writes,

“A miracle happens, the miracle of all miracles, that this impure being, impure in the midst of the pure creation, that this intolerable being is permitted to live. The annihilating encounter with God becomes for him a life-giving encounter. Without his co-operation, entirely on the initiative of this other power that ought to have meant his death, that which must be death for him is turned into new life; the miracle of forgiveness. He who can no longer purify himself is purified…Death is taken away, the death which I bear in myself because of my contradiction, my impurity is covered by the encircling life-giving love to him who was the prey of death.”[14]

From dust we were taken and to dust we should return; but our God is a merciful God and there is life even out of dust and ash.

[1] “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

[2] Helmut Gollwitzer The Way to Life: Sermons in a Time of World Crisis Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981. “The bible in fact believes that things would be just the same with everyone one of us, as it was with this man Isaiah, confronted with the final truth, with the divine life which fills the creation, everyone of us is stripped of and must acknowledge himself as the dark blot in the creation, that must be removed in order for the creation to join with clear and pure voice in the great joyful hymn of praise of the angles. That is for us the intolerable truth, which we try to disguise from ourselves with all kinds of inventions, a truth which we face when the word of God touches us.” 41. (cf Is. 6)

[3] BCP Prayer of Humble Access

[4] Murray J. Harris The Second Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text. The New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. 447. “But here neither verb denotes a dispassionate and detached request but rather an impassioned and urgent entreaty. The second us of υπερ Χριστου links the δεησις with the ambassadorship: whether performing the general role of envoys (πρεσβευομεν) or issuing a specific entreaty (δεομεθα), Paul and his colleagues were acting υπερ Χριστου, “for Christ,” on his behalf and in his stead. Moreover, this repeated prepositional phrase suggest that the principal role of Christ’s ambassadors is issuing the evangelistic treaty to be reconciled to God.”

[5] Ibid, 447. “The aorist imperative passive form καταλλαγητε is unlikely to be a reflexive passive, ‘reconcile yourselves (to God),’ whatever allowance be made for synergism (Cf. 6:1-2), because whenever this verb is applied to the atonement, God, and only God is the reconciler (see above v. 18). While it is possible that this passive is permissive, ‘let yourselves be reconciled (to God),’ it is more probably a true passive, ‘be reconciled,’ or, to bring out the ingressive sense of this aorist, ‘get reconciled,’ with God as the implied agent.”

[6] Ibid, 449. “In the divine economy, the declaration of ‘the message of reconciliation’ (v.19), or, in other words, the preaching of the cross of Christ (1 Cor. 1:18, 23) with the attendant entreaty to be reconciled to God, is the link between the objective work of reconciliation accomplished by Christ and the subjective appropriation of its benefits by the sinner. Paul saw himself and everyone who proclaimed reconciliation in Christ as trustees of a message (v. 19), ambassadors for Christ, and mouthpieces for God (v.20).”

[7] Karl Barth CD I.2.156. “…in the likeness of flesh (unholy flesh, marked by sin), there happens the unlike, the new and helpful thing, that sin is condemned by not being committed, by being omitted, by full obedience now being found in the very place where otherwise sin necessarily and irresistibly takes place. The meaning of the incarnation is that now in the flesh that is not done which all flesh does…[(5.21)]…does not mean that He made Him a man who also sins again—what could that signify ‘for us’?—but that He put Him in the position of a sinner by way of exchange (καταλλασσων, in the sense of the Old Testament sin-offering).”

[8] Harris, 2 Corinthians, 451. “Although ποιειν can mean ‘make something into something (else),’ the meaning here is not ‘God made the sinless one into sin’ … but ‘God caused the sinless one to be sin,’ where ποιειν denotes causation or appointment and points to the divien intiiative. But we should not forget that matching the Father’s set purpose to deliver Christ up to deal with sin (Acts 2:23; Rom. 8:32) was Christ’s own firm reolsition to go to Jerusualem to suffer (Mark 8:31; Luke 9:51). Jesus was not an unwillling or surprised participant in God’s action.»

[9] Karl Barth CD II.1.397. “This sending means a self-offering grounded in the free will of the Father and the Son in fulfillment of the divine love turned towards the cosmos and the world of man. But it is the case that God in this offering or sending of His Son, and the Son Himself in accepting this mission and allowing Himself to be sacrificed, has exposed Himself to an imposition. In His love God has been hard upon Himself, exacting a supreme and final demand…in a self-emptying, in a complete resignation not of the essence but of the form of His Godhead, He took upon Himself our own human form—the form of a servant, in complete likeness to other men…allowing himself to be found in fashion as a man…Like all men He was born of a woman (Gal. 4:4). But what does it mean to take the place of man, to be Himself a man, to be born of a woman? It means from Him, too, God’s Son, God Himself, that He came under the Law…that He stepped into the heart of the inevitable conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of man. He took this conflict into is own being. He bore it in Himself to the bitter end. He took part in it from both sides. He endured it from both sides. He was not only the God who is offended by man. He was also the man whom God threatens with death, who falls a victim to death in face of God’s judgment. If he really entered into solidarity with us—and that is just what He did do!—it meant necessarily that He took upon Himself, in likeness to us…the ‘flesh of sin’ (Rom. 8:3). He shared in the status, constitution and situation of man in which man resists God and cannot stand before Him but must die.”

[10] Harris, Second Corinthians, 454. “We conclude that in v.21a Paul is not saying that at the crucifixion the sinless Christ became in some sense a sinner, yet he is affirming more than that Christ became a sin offering or even a sin bearer. In a sense beyond human comprehension, God treated Christ as ‘sin,’ aligning him so totally with sin and its dire consequences that from God’s viewpoint he became indistinguishable from sin itself.”

[11] Ibid, 455. “So γινομαι may be given its most common meaning (‘become,’ ‘be’) and points to the change of status that accrues to believers who are ‘in Christ’ and that is the ground of the ‘new creation’ (v.17). ‘To become the righteousness of God’ is to gain a right standing before God that God himself bestows (cf. Rom. 5:17; Phil. 3:9). It is to be ‘constituted righteous’ in the divine court…As a result of God’s imputing to Christ something that was extrinsic to him, namely sin, believers have something imputed to them that was extrinsic to them, namely righteousness.”

[12] Karl Barth CD IV.1.236. “But the great and inconceivable thing is that He acts as Judge in our place by taking upon Himself, by accepting responsibility for that which we do in this place. He ‘who knew no sin’ (2 or. 5:21)…gives Himself…to the fellowship of those who are guilty of all these things, and not only that, but He makes their evil case His own. He is above this fellowship and confronts it and judges it and condemns it in that He takes it upon Himself to be the bearer and Representative, to be responsible for this case, to expose Himself to the accusation and sentence which must inevitably come upon us in this case. He as One can represent all and make Himself responsible for the sis of all because He is very man in our midst, one of us, but as one of us He is also very God and therefore He exercises and reveals amongst us the almighty righteousness of God. He can conduct the case of God against us in such a way that He takes from us our own evil case, taking our place and compromising and burdening Himself with it.”

[13] Karl Barth CD IV.1.236. “It is no longer our affair to prosecute and represent this case. The right and possibility of doing so has been denied and taken away from us. What He in divine omnipotence did amongst us as one of us prevents us from being our own judges, from even wanting to be, from making that senseless attempt on the divine prerogative, from sinning in that way and making ourselves guilty. TIN that He was and is for us that end is closed, and so is the evil way to that end. He is the man who entered that evil way, with the result that we are forced from it; it can be ours no longer.”

[14] Gollwitzer Way to Life 41.

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