The practicality of penitence
Commentary
Object:
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the season of Lent, a season of penitence. What can penitence mean to us today? There have been some who have been so obsessed with human unworthiness, inherited from Adam, that they live with a sort of a perpetual self-hate, even after they have received God's saving grace, so that they can never arrive at the healthy self-love that should be part of human wholeness. There is something wrong with that. And there are some who think penitence is a matter of owning our participation in the corporate guilt that is the source of all of the injustice and human suffering in the world. If that becomes a call to Christian social action, it can have a good effect. But that is only part of the picture -- and it usually comes much later in a person's spiritual pilgrimage.
Our scripture lessons for Ash Wednesday can help us to discover a healthy -- we might say "practical" -- kind of penitence that can lead to wholeness.
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Preachers often abstract the messages of biblical themes from their historical settings in order to apply them to other historical situations. It is apparent that the prophet Joel has done that. He has given us a summary of the message of the prophetic tradition that can be applied to any situation that needs it. He most likely wrote during the Persian period of Israel's history when there was no imminent threat of an armed invasion from the north, as he seems to suggest. In fact, the crisis that provoked his writing was a natural disaster, a plague of locusts followed by a severe drought. We do not have to interpret natural disasters as God's punishment for someone's sinfulness to appreciate Joel's message. Any life crisis that pushes our backs up against a wall can become an occasion for needing to renew our relationship with God.
The message of the prophets is this. When we are suffering the results of our estrangement from God, we should repent of those things that separate us from God. To repent is to quit those things that are causing our trouble and put our trust in the God who is ready to forgive and to save. It is important to remember that in the Hebrew Scriptures repentance is not just a ritual we go through, though some of the Old Testament people seemed to think it was. The prophets tell us that real repentance has to do with changing our way of life. And salvation does not mean just "going to heaven after you die." The salvation that is promised is rescue from real-life troubles and being moved toward the better life God wants for us here and now.
The passage designated for our lectionary reading, Joel 2:1-2, 12-17, is appropriate for Ash Wednesday because it embodies a call for repentance. The prophet makes it clear that it is not enough just to go through religious motions. He says, "Rend your hearts and not your garments" and "Return to the Lord your God" (vv. 2, 13). Reorganize your life around a new center in God because God forgives and God saves.
In the remainder of the book, Joel reminds us of God's promise to save. Some of what he says is a reflection of the promise of vengeance on other nations that is prominent in the older prophetic tradition. But some of it is a promise of a new era of spiritual vitality. Peter and/or Luke remembered that promise and used it in Acts 2:16-21 as an explanation of the things that happened on the day of Pentecost. "Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh: your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions" (Joel 2:28) and "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Joel 2:32).
It would not be right to talk about the call to penitence in the Hebrew Scriptures without remembering the penitential psalm, Psalm 51, which is also recommended for use on Ash Wednesday. The psalm provides a liturgy for a personal act of penance. And it includes the hope that should always be the goal of our repentance: "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain in me a willing spirit" (Psalm 51:10-12).
2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10
The book that we call 2 Corinthians is probably made up of parts of several correspondences between Paul and the church at Corinth. No doubt, Paul saw the church at Corinth as a very important base for the Christian mission in the ancient world. Paul spent eighteen months in Corinth evangelizing and establishing the church. Corinth was a very cosmopolitan city, a center of trade, the capital of the Roman province of Achaia, and a place where people were exposed to many different kinds of pagan religion and sophisticated philosophies. The church at Corinth was different, in that some people of affluence and prominence had been attracted to the Christian faith there. Paul must have had high hopes for the Corinthian Christians. But the people thought for themselves. It seems that some conflict had arisen between Paul and the church. We cannot tell what it was about, but it is obvious that it was there. Paul may have been afraid that the people were drifting away from the faith he had shared with them. He obviously felt an urgent need to defend both his ministry and his message. In the passage we are studying, 2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10, Paul is urging the people to continue to be receptive to the saving grace of God.
In order for us to fully understand this passage, we really need to start a little earlier, in 2 Corinthians 5:14. In the verses just before today's lesson, Paul reminds the people of the message he had preached to them. We will encounter these verses again in the lectionary lesson for the Fourth Sunday in Lent. The repetition can be a helpful reinforcement. Paul is reminding the Corinthians of a message with which they are familiar. We cannot count on that being so for the people to whom we preach. We need to tarry long enough with Paul's summary to help our people visualize just what Paul is saying and what it can mean for their lives. Paul says: "The love of God urges us on because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who died and was raised for them" (2 Corinthians 5:14-15). Paul goes on: "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away, see, everything has become new! All of this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the ministry to reconciliation to us" (2 Corinthians 5:17-20).
With this reminder as background, Paul gets to the heart of his message: "... we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God" (2 Corinthians 5:20). "See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!" (6:1-2). Paul urges the Corinthians to remember the message he has taught them and to let it shape their lives right now. (We can well pay attention to the exclamation marks in the translation.)
Paul addresses the message of urgency to us as well as to the Corinthians. God has done a saving work in Jesus Christ. God is doing a saving work in his daily interactions with us. But God's saving work requires our participation. It is necessary for us to intentionally put away everything that is contrary to that life made new by a relationship with God. It is necessary for us to intentionally open ourselves to the saving work that God is doing. It is necessary for us to intentionally enter into new life in a new relationship with God. This is the message Paul delivers urgently to the Corinthians and to us.
In the verses that follow, Paul gives a personal witness to his experience of new life in Christ. Even though when seen from "a human point of view" (5:16) his life might appear to be full of trials, he experiences it as a triumphant life. He invites us to enter into that kind of triumphant life (remember Romans 8:31-39).
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
When Matthew composed his witness to the good news in Jesus Christ, he included several collections of the teachings of Jesus as the early church remembered them. The Sermon on the Mount is the first and longest of these. These teachings are intended to help us understand how to live as citizens of the kingdom of God, that is, as people who have chosen to allow their lives to be shaped by their relationship with God, even though they continue to live in this world.
Today's text consists of the second of three sections of the sermon, only with the Lord's Prayer deleted for separate attention. The topic of this section is the practice of piety. Jesus expects that his followers will continue to observe the traditional Jewish customs of piety, just as they continue to be obedient to the Ten Commandments. But he makes it clear that, in the observance of these customs just as in their obedience to the commandments, it is the inner disposition of the heart that counts rather than the outer motions through which we may go.
One commentator, M. Eugene Boring, observed, "You can tell what a person believes, not so much by what he says in church, as by the assumptions on which he habitually acts" (New Interpreters Bible, Vol. VIII [Nashville: Abingdon, 2001], p. 206). Jesus is trying to teach us to let our practices of piety express a genuine love for God and love for all others. Just so, the prophet Joel urged us to let our penitence be a matter of rending our hearts and not our garments, a genuine intention to return to the Lord our God, trusting him to be gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to forgive (Joel 2:13).
This section of the Sermon on the Mount addresses the issues of giving alms (6:2-4), prayer (6:5-15), fasting (6:16-18), and stewardship (6:19-21). A fruitful study of these passages might ask concerning each of them, "What am I trying to do in each of these disciplines?" and "Into what kind of a relationship with God and with life do each of these practices intend to lead me?"
Application
The passages from Joel and 2 Corinthians provide an occasion for talking about the urgency of the need for repentance. The prophet tells us that God is at work in life and in history to save his people. But in order to participate in that salvation, it is necessary to put away anything that is contrary to the covenant. Similarly, Paul urges us to be reconciled to God. A simple and practical understanding of penitence is a readiness to put away anything that is contrary to life in a right relationship with God.
A sermon might start by analyzing the shape of the new life to which God wants to save us. That life will be a life shaped by a relationship with God. That life must certainly be a life in which we live trusting God to love, to forgive, and to save. Jesus makes it clear that new life in Christ is a life of love, love that is a joyful commitment to life at its best for self, for all others, and for the whole creation. The new life in Christ must be, as Paul said, a life committed to the purpose of God, a life lived "not for self but for him who died and was raised for them" (2 Corinthians 5:15).
Next we can think seriously about the things in our lives and in the lifestyle that our culture teaches that are contrary to those characteristics of fullness of life. What are those things? Our inability to love ourselves? Our inability to accept and forgive others? Our materialistic value systems? Our bent to organizing our lives around our own selfish ambitions? The simmering hatred that still exists between races and groups and nations? Let the list include the things that people will recognize in themselves and in their communities.
Then help the people see the destructiveness of the things on the list. If you can lead them inward in a time of thinking about what is going on in their own lives that would be good. It would also be good to find happenings in the news of the community and of the world that demonstrate the destructiveness of those things of which we need to repent. It will be important to lead the people into a decision to make needed changes in their lives. But it will also be important to help them find spiritual resources that will enable them to make difficult changes and also to claim the promise that there will be something better for them beyond repentance.
There is an architectural witness in the town of Landsberg, Germany, to the urgency of the need for repentance. Landsberg has two dubious distinctions that are part of the heritage of World War II. It was in Landsberg that a young Adolf Hitler was imprisoned for some of his early political activities. While he was imprisoned there, he wrote his credo, Mein Kampf. Later, one of the terrible death camps of the Nazi era was located there. That war is a dreadful memory for the whole world.
After the war, a wave of earnest repentance swept the German nation. A period of religious renewal helped to enable the rebuilding of the nation. It must have been during this time that the German military base chapel was built in Landsberg. The first thing that will attract a visitor's attention is the cross on top of the steeple. It is a Coventry cross, the cross of nails that became a symbol of the ministries of reconciliation undertaken by the congregation of Coventry Cathedral after the building was destroyed by German firebombs. Visitors enter the church through a foyer in the base of the steeple. There they find themselves standing under a massive metallic sculpture representing the crown of thorns suspended over their heads. They stand under a symbol of the redemptive suffering of Christ. And they find themselves surrounded by heavy wooden places on which the same words are repeated in all of the languages of the world, including Hebrew. They all say: "Be Reconciled To God." There are other symbols that call out to any who can recognize them as they walk toward the sanctuary. Finally, in the sanctuary they find themselves looking at a tapestry hanging over the altar with an abstract depiction of Christ on the cross and hands of all colors reaching out to him. The wording on the tapestry says in German: "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself" (John 12:32).
Pray that the congregation and the world will repent and claim the better possibility so that more tragedies can be avoided.
An Alternative Application
It is ironic that the congregation will hear the words "beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them" (Matthew 6:1) on the very day that they will walk out of the church wearing a visible symbol of their having been to church. In fact, in this era when the dominant religious preference is "none" people are more likely to keep their religion secret. It would be time well spent to help people think through the difference between a prideful display of religion that will certainly "turn people off" and an honest living out of a witness to the faith. In fact, out there among the people who have no professed religious faith, there are many cynical and even hostile people who will regard any practice of piety as hypocrisy. But there are also many who have a silent hunger in their hearts that wishes they could find some faith that could be meaningful to them. The world needs people who are living out the inward faith that is described in the Sermon on the Mount. It also needs for those people to be able to share their faith in a winsome way that will evoke the best in others. First Peter 3:15 has good advice for us: "Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands of you an accounting of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence." It might be good to help the worshipers prepare to give an answer to anyone who asks about the ashes on their foreheads. The answer should be simple and without pride. A good explanation might be: "The ashes are supposed to remind me that God loves us all and that God wants us to love one another." It could be helpful to invite the worshipers to repeat that statement in unison so that they will be prepared to make a winsome witness if they have an opportunity.
Our scripture lessons for Ash Wednesday can help us to discover a healthy -- we might say "practical" -- kind of penitence that can lead to wholeness.
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Preachers often abstract the messages of biblical themes from their historical settings in order to apply them to other historical situations. It is apparent that the prophet Joel has done that. He has given us a summary of the message of the prophetic tradition that can be applied to any situation that needs it. He most likely wrote during the Persian period of Israel's history when there was no imminent threat of an armed invasion from the north, as he seems to suggest. In fact, the crisis that provoked his writing was a natural disaster, a plague of locusts followed by a severe drought. We do not have to interpret natural disasters as God's punishment for someone's sinfulness to appreciate Joel's message. Any life crisis that pushes our backs up against a wall can become an occasion for needing to renew our relationship with God.
The message of the prophets is this. When we are suffering the results of our estrangement from God, we should repent of those things that separate us from God. To repent is to quit those things that are causing our trouble and put our trust in the God who is ready to forgive and to save. It is important to remember that in the Hebrew Scriptures repentance is not just a ritual we go through, though some of the Old Testament people seemed to think it was. The prophets tell us that real repentance has to do with changing our way of life. And salvation does not mean just "going to heaven after you die." The salvation that is promised is rescue from real-life troubles and being moved toward the better life God wants for us here and now.
The passage designated for our lectionary reading, Joel 2:1-2, 12-17, is appropriate for Ash Wednesday because it embodies a call for repentance. The prophet makes it clear that it is not enough just to go through religious motions. He says, "Rend your hearts and not your garments" and "Return to the Lord your God" (vv. 2, 13). Reorganize your life around a new center in God because God forgives and God saves.
In the remainder of the book, Joel reminds us of God's promise to save. Some of what he says is a reflection of the promise of vengeance on other nations that is prominent in the older prophetic tradition. But some of it is a promise of a new era of spiritual vitality. Peter and/or Luke remembered that promise and used it in Acts 2:16-21 as an explanation of the things that happened on the day of Pentecost. "Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh: your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions" (Joel 2:28) and "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Joel 2:32).
It would not be right to talk about the call to penitence in the Hebrew Scriptures without remembering the penitential psalm, Psalm 51, which is also recommended for use on Ash Wednesday. The psalm provides a liturgy for a personal act of penance. And it includes the hope that should always be the goal of our repentance: "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain in me a willing spirit" (Psalm 51:10-12).
2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10
The book that we call 2 Corinthians is probably made up of parts of several correspondences between Paul and the church at Corinth. No doubt, Paul saw the church at Corinth as a very important base for the Christian mission in the ancient world. Paul spent eighteen months in Corinth evangelizing and establishing the church. Corinth was a very cosmopolitan city, a center of trade, the capital of the Roman province of Achaia, and a place where people were exposed to many different kinds of pagan religion and sophisticated philosophies. The church at Corinth was different, in that some people of affluence and prominence had been attracted to the Christian faith there. Paul must have had high hopes for the Corinthian Christians. But the people thought for themselves. It seems that some conflict had arisen between Paul and the church. We cannot tell what it was about, but it is obvious that it was there. Paul may have been afraid that the people were drifting away from the faith he had shared with them. He obviously felt an urgent need to defend both his ministry and his message. In the passage we are studying, 2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10, Paul is urging the people to continue to be receptive to the saving grace of God.
In order for us to fully understand this passage, we really need to start a little earlier, in 2 Corinthians 5:14. In the verses just before today's lesson, Paul reminds the people of the message he had preached to them. We will encounter these verses again in the lectionary lesson for the Fourth Sunday in Lent. The repetition can be a helpful reinforcement. Paul is reminding the Corinthians of a message with which they are familiar. We cannot count on that being so for the people to whom we preach. We need to tarry long enough with Paul's summary to help our people visualize just what Paul is saying and what it can mean for their lives. Paul says: "The love of God urges us on because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who died and was raised for them" (2 Corinthians 5:14-15). Paul goes on: "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away, see, everything has become new! All of this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the ministry to reconciliation to us" (2 Corinthians 5:17-20).
With this reminder as background, Paul gets to the heart of his message: "... we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God" (2 Corinthians 5:20). "See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!" (6:1-2). Paul urges the Corinthians to remember the message he has taught them and to let it shape their lives right now. (We can well pay attention to the exclamation marks in the translation.)
Paul addresses the message of urgency to us as well as to the Corinthians. God has done a saving work in Jesus Christ. God is doing a saving work in his daily interactions with us. But God's saving work requires our participation. It is necessary for us to intentionally put away everything that is contrary to that life made new by a relationship with God. It is necessary for us to intentionally open ourselves to the saving work that God is doing. It is necessary for us to intentionally enter into new life in a new relationship with God. This is the message Paul delivers urgently to the Corinthians and to us.
In the verses that follow, Paul gives a personal witness to his experience of new life in Christ. Even though when seen from "a human point of view" (5:16) his life might appear to be full of trials, he experiences it as a triumphant life. He invites us to enter into that kind of triumphant life (remember Romans 8:31-39).
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
When Matthew composed his witness to the good news in Jesus Christ, he included several collections of the teachings of Jesus as the early church remembered them. The Sermon on the Mount is the first and longest of these. These teachings are intended to help us understand how to live as citizens of the kingdom of God, that is, as people who have chosen to allow their lives to be shaped by their relationship with God, even though they continue to live in this world.
Today's text consists of the second of three sections of the sermon, only with the Lord's Prayer deleted for separate attention. The topic of this section is the practice of piety. Jesus expects that his followers will continue to observe the traditional Jewish customs of piety, just as they continue to be obedient to the Ten Commandments. But he makes it clear that, in the observance of these customs just as in their obedience to the commandments, it is the inner disposition of the heart that counts rather than the outer motions through which we may go.
One commentator, M. Eugene Boring, observed, "You can tell what a person believes, not so much by what he says in church, as by the assumptions on which he habitually acts" (New Interpreters Bible, Vol. VIII [Nashville: Abingdon, 2001], p. 206). Jesus is trying to teach us to let our practices of piety express a genuine love for God and love for all others. Just so, the prophet Joel urged us to let our penitence be a matter of rending our hearts and not our garments, a genuine intention to return to the Lord our God, trusting him to be gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to forgive (Joel 2:13).
This section of the Sermon on the Mount addresses the issues of giving alms (6:2-4), prayer (6:5-15), fasting (6:16-18), and stewardship (6:19-21). A fruitful study of these passages might ask concerning each of them, "What am I trying to do in each of these disciplines?" and "Into what kind of a relationship with God and with life do each of these practices intend to lead me?"
Application
The passages from Joel and 2 Corinthians provide an occasion for talking about the urgency of the need for repentance. The prophet tells us that God is at work in life and in history to save his people. But in order to participate in that salvation, it is necessary to put away anything that is contrary to the covenant. Similarly, Paul urges us to be reconciled to God. A simple and practical understanding of penitence is a readiness to put away anything that is contrary to life in a right relationship with God.
A sermon might start by analyzing the shape of the new life to which God wants to save us. That life will be a life shaped by a relationship with God. That life must certainly be a life in which we live trusting God to love, to forgive, and to save. Jesus makes it clear that new life in Christ is a life of love, love that is a joyful commitment to life at its best for self, for all others, and for the whole creation. The new life in Christ must be, as Paul said, a life committed to the purpose of God, a life lived "not for self but for him who died and was raised for them" (2 Corinthians 5:15).
Next we can think seriously about the things in our lives and in the lifestyle that our culture teaches that are contrary to those characteristics of fullness of life. What are those things? Our inability to love ourselves? Our inability to accept and forgive others? Our materialistic value systems? Our bent to organizing our lives around our own selfish ambitions? The simmering hatred that still exists between races and groups and nations? Let the list include the things that people will recognize in themselves and in their communities.
Then help the people see the destructiveness of the things on the list. If you can lead them inward in a time of thinking about what is going on in their own lives that would be good. It would also be good to find happenings in the news of the community and of the world that demonstrate the destructiveness of those things of which we need to repent. It will be important to lead the people into a decision to make needed changes in their lives. But it will also be important to help them find spiritual resources that will enable them to make difficult changes and also to claim the promise that there will be something better for them beyond repentance.
There is an architectural witness in the town of Landsberg, Germany, to the urgency of the need for repentance. Landsberg has two dubious distinctions that are part of the heritage of World War II. It was in Landsberg that a young Adolf Hitler was imprisoned for some of his early political activities. While he was imprisoned there, he wrote his credo, Mein Kampf. Later, one of the terrible death camps of the Nazi era was located there. That war is a dreadful memory for the whole world.
After the war, a wave of earnest repentance swept the German nation. A period of religious renewal helped to enable the rebuilding of the nation. It must have been during this time that the German military base chapel was built in Landsberg. The first thing that will attract a visitor's attention is the cross on top of the steeple. It is a Coventry cross, the cross of nails that became a symbol of the ministries of reconciliation undertaken by the congregation of Coventry Cathedral after the building was destroyed by German firebombs. Visitors enter the church through a foyer in the base of the steeple. There they find themselves standing under a massive metallic sculpture representing the crown of thorns suspended over their heads. They stand under a symbol of the redemptive suffering of Christ. And they find themselves surrounded by heavy wooden places on which the same words are repeated in all of the languages of the world, including Hebrew. They all say: "Be Reconciled To God." There are other symbols that call out to any who can recognize them as they walk toward the sanctuary. Finally, in the sanctuary they find themselves looking at a tapestry hanging over the altar with an abstract depiction of Christ on the cross and hands of all colors reaching out to him. The wording on the tapestry says in German: "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself" (John 12:32).
Pray that the congregation and the world will repent and claim the better possibility so that more tragedies can be avoided.
An Alternative Application
It is ironic that the congregation will hear the words "beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them" (Matthew 6:1) on the very day that they will walk out of the church wearing a visible symbol of their having been to church. In fact, in this era when the dominant religious preference is "none" people are more likely to keep their religion secret. It would be time well spent to help people think through the difference between a prideful display of religion that will certainly "turn people off" and an honest living out of a witness to the faith. In fact, out there among the people who have no professed religious faith, there are many cynical and even hostile people who will regard any practice of piety as hypocrisy. But there are also many who have a silent hunger in their hearts that wishes they could find some faith that could be meaningful to them. The world needs people who are living out the inward faith that is described in the Sermon on the Mount. It also needs for those people to be able to share their faith in a winsome way that will evoke the best in others. First Peter 3:15 has good advice for us: "Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands of you an accounting of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence." It might be good to help the worshipers prepare to give an answer to anyone who asks about the ashes on their foreheads. The answer should be simple and without pride. A good explanation might be: "The ashes are supposed to remind me that God loves us all and that God wants us to love one another." It could be helpful to invite the worshipers to repeat that statement in unison so that they will be prepared to make a winsome witness if they have an opportunity.
