Joel 2:1,2, 12-17
Rend your hearts

Nowadays, it is very fashionable to talk about a search for a highly personalized spirituality. The market is saturated with books on honing in on our spiritual instincts, and the finding of and celebration of the so called place of inner peace within you. I have been on a spiritual journey with God for as long as I can remember, often not out of choice but because God just seemed to loom so large within the culture I grew up in. For reasons I have long given up on trying to understand, God somehow was always a part of the conversation within my life’s narrative. And if there is that certain sacred place of inner peace that we read and hear about so much nowadays somewhere inside of me, I have yet to find it. I live in a world of turmoil, a world with so much suffering, amongst people who would rather fight to death in defending their personal space, amongst people with incredible wealth, knowledge, and freedom but devastatingly broken and fragmented lives. I walk through the stench of homelessness every day and the debilitation of diseases everywhere, how can I indulge myself in talking about an inner peace at such a time in such a world?

As we enter into yet another Lent, we come with a very visible backdrop of thousands having lost jobs and homes, businesses shutting down, our world getting warmer and dirtier, our soldiers dying and insurmountable problems of poverty and disease spreading in developing counties. Suffering and gloom that sound rather large and a little too hard to incorporate into our very personal journey of repentance and confession. But it is in the midst of such brokenness that the voice of the prophet always comes to shake us out of our complacency. It is a call given by God to His children, to reach out to each other, to come together to bear each others’ burdens, to be able to weep together, to repent and confess together, to find and lay down our roots in community. The prophet comes proclaiming, “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.” Every Lent is an opportunity to become a part of that gathering, the great gathering when the people of God cry out in one repentant voice for forgiveness and cleansing. In the gathering we have the opportunity to acknowledge our responsibility toward each other, and we acknowledge our accountability to God for every brokenness we encounter on our way toward Him.

We don’t know much about the prophet Joel, but his prophesies of impending doom and natural disasters followed by his vivid call to repentance and the achingly beautiful picture of God’s restoration and justice not only for His people but for all of his creation have really taken hold of our Christian imagination and belief of God’s Kingdom on Earth. The book of Joel has only three chapters, but in this tiny book, we have one of the most profound and glorious visions of God’s restorative justice on earth. But, that vision of God’s restoration comes only after the prophets’ urgent appeal to the people of Israel to repent and return to God.

“Rend your hearts and not your clothing” says the Lord. I love the prophets in the OT, because they always manage to bring out the message of collective accountability for the mess that we create and find ourselves in. Their message is always very clear, which is that we are all collectively responsible for creating a pervasive environment of injustice and suffering, of brokenness and selfishness. In the New Testament, Apostle Paul says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” This nature of collective accountability is the same reason why the call for repentance is for the people of God as a whole, and this is also the reason why that place of peace and justice can never be realized just within the inner sanctum of an individual. Lent is not about finding our inner peace, rather it is about entering and engaging in the struggle of being called to be holy with the undeniable human tendency to be self-serving and self-sufficient, which Jesus himself struggled with for forty days in the wilderness.

My challenge for us this Lent is to enter into an attitude of repentance and mourning for our part in perpetuation suffering and injustice, for being accomplices in the destruction of God’s created world, and for being indifferent to the deep and profound brokenness of individuals left to fend for themselves. I also want to draw your attention to the fact that even our decision to fast from food, from entertainment, materialism, education, or festive company are all marks of the luxury we live in. There are many in the world for whom fasting is not the choice but the norm. Let your fasting be more than just denying yourselves something essential, let the essentials you give up bring for someone else the much needed nourishment they need to survive. May your repentance lead you to God’s restless Spirit that moves in our world, the comforting Spirit that longs to take us to the other side of the grave. May you suffer with God this Lent for your own soul and for the soul of our broken world. “Rend your hearts,” my friends, “ not your cloths.” Amen.