Joel 2:1-2,12-13; Matthew 1-6,16-21
Ash Wednesday: March 9, 2011
“Rend your hearts, not your clothing,” says God to the Hebrew people. Rend your hearts. Tear open your hearts. It’s a powerful image even for those of us who don’t regularly “rend our clothing.” In Joel’s day, people would tear their clothing when mourning, or when feeling remorseful. It was a symbol of coming before God humble and bare.
Joel believed they were in a clothes-rending time. Things were bad all over. They had been for a long time. But Joel said this was nothing compared to what they were about to experience. “Sound the alarm,” he yells, because God is coming to judge, and Joel was sure it was not going to go well for people. The prophet thought it was time for the people to humble themselves before God and be contrite and await the judgment they deserved.
This text is used every Ash Wednesday, and often it is interpreted as a call for us to admit how awful we have been, and to await the judgment we deserve. But I think in this passage, in spite of what Joel believed, what God is asking is far more comprehensive than that – and far more intimate than that. “Yet even now,” God says, even now when so much has gone wrong, and you have ignored what I have asked of you, even now, God says, “return to me with all your heart, and rend your heart.”
Rending one’s heart is not an act of masochism. It is not punishment. In another part of the Hebrew bible, Isaiah, we hear the people asking a similar thing of God. “O God,” they beg, “rend open the heavens and come down.” In the bible, “rending”, or tearing open, is something you do to allow the divine and human to meet. It is as if the divine light shines, but there is a barrier between that light and us. When the fabric is rent, when the barrier is torn apart, the light comes flooding in. The divine and the human meet.
Of course, the catch is, even though we often think of light as good, there’s a reason we don’t always want to rend our hearts. We have secrets, and shadows. We keep things about ourselves hidden because we don’t like them. We don’t want them to be seen. For most of us, it’s our biggest fear… we’re afraid that people will find out who we “really” are. We think that if people really knew what we were like, really knew the thoughts that run through our mind, the things we have done in our past, they wouldn’t like us, accept us, respect us, love us.
We yearn to be loved, so we spend considerable amounts of energy constructing masks, screens, shields, anything that might hide those parts of ourselves we are sure will make others reject us. The thought of exposing those things to the light so all can see is not necessarily a comforting thought.
But the more energy we spend hiding our shadows from others, the more we live in denial of who we really are. We might keep others from seeing those parts we don’t want them to see, but in doing so, we become estranged from ourselves. Our lives become about trying to live up to the image we have projected to others, rather than being authentically who we are – who God created us to be. And we become estranged from God and the divine light, and so we don’t know what it’s like to be authentically loved.
Letting light in does expose those hidden things. And Ash Wednesday is, in part, about choosing to do this – admitting our sins, our brokenness, bringing to light those things we keep hidden; we lay our whole selves before God. We rend our hearts. But Ash Wednesday is not only about exposing those hidden things and then feeling bad about it. Ash Wednesday is about shining light on the shadows while trusting what God says next – after telling the people to rend their hearts: “Return to your God, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.”
In our worship service tonight, we didn’t stop at the ashes. We heard the words of assurance, we heard the grace-filled word of God in scripture, and we will have communion – which always reminds us that our brokenness becomes whole when we commune with the divine. We expose ourselves, admit to the shadows, in order to learn about God’s boundless love – in order to learn what it’s like to be authentically loved.
Matthew knows about hiding parts of ourselves, and knows that there are consequences when we do. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew. If we seek love by hiding the shadows in us, the treasure will only ever be a shallow love – a treasure that is easily stolen or eroded. If we think the treasure is to be liked by others, we will shape our lives around other people’s expectations. Then our heart, our true selves, will remain covered.
The consequence of keeping our hearts closed – of hiding the parts we don’t like or think others won’t like, is that we begin to believe we are the false self we project to others, and that only our false self is lovable. More than that, once we deny those human frailties in ourselves, when we see those frailties in others, instead of having compassion, we judge them. We have to believe they are different from us – other. Maintaining the denial means refusing to see ourselves in others. Judging them proves that we are not like them. Being separated from our true selves, denying parts we don’t like, keeps us from knowing God’s love for us and keeps us from loving others.
The choir is about to sing an anthem called, “Take Root In My Heart.” It’s a song that asks God to enter our hearts. To be able to ask this of God our hearts must already be rent – torn open, exposed to the divine light. Listen to the words as they sing: “My soul awaits your holy presence,” the song declares. God can only take root in our hearts – become a holy presence – if they are rent open. That’s the ashes part – we have a mark on our forehead that indicates we have torn open our hearts.
But that’s just the beginning. Once we have come to terms with who we are and laid it all bare before God…shadows and all…God can take root in our hearts. God can take up holy residence there, and we can learn that God is merciful, and loves us as we are. When our hearts are open and filled with holy presence, we are fed and healed and loved into wholeness, even in the most hidden, hurting, shame-filled parts of ourselves. Then, and only then, we can be a part of God’s feeding, healing, loving work in the world.
Lent is about allowing God to take root in our hearts. In order for this to happen, we have to come before God as our authentic selves. We have to come humble and bare. But not to hear a pronouncement of judgment, not to get the punishment we think we deserve, but to open ourselves to the light we know is at the end of Lent – the resurrection – and when we let that light in, we will learn that we are loved completely, wholly. That is the treasure that never fails. Amen.
