Emphasis Preaching Journal

The Lord in the book of the prophets sometimes seems to give evidence of ambiguity and uncertainty. Here in Joel comes the word to "call a solemn assembly." A couple of pages later the prophet reports on the nostrils of God: "I despise the noise of your solemn assemblies." They smell to high heaven.

The Lord in the book of the prophets also gets in trouble with our contemporaries when they busy themselves correcting biblical pictures of the divine Thou. That Lord is seen as capricious, eager to clobber the wayward, vengeful.

And the same Lord's people receive ambiguous advice. They are to repent. Repenting usually demanded certain postures and acts, such as sitting in ashes, wearing burlap bags, and "rending" them. But this time around forget the rending of cloth: only hearts are to undergo the process.

The Lord in the book of prophets also does not match the portrait philosophers made up when they needed a neat idea of God to pass on through theologians. They reasoned: God, to be God, has to be perfect. Change in God would have to be from perfection then to imperfection. So they invented divine changelessness.

The prophets do not allow for changelessness. Oh, yes, the divine constancy and steadfast love remain. But all the rest is up for grabs. God, having "pity" on the people, being a gracious and merciful One, has to change. Instead of making the people a mockery, this God sends this God sends them good things, rich things to mess up our pictures of lean and mean Ash Wednesday. Another surprise of God.

2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10

It's a good thing that the people who keep time and revise calendars are so arbitrary, relativistic, and messy. Oh, they don't think they are. They are always working on ways to have sand in hourglasses, springs and wheels, and impulses in quartz
move so reliably that only a fraction of a second per century is lost from their absolute perfection. But they miss. Different civilizations have different lengths for weeks and months and years. The calendar people get so confused that Christ is believed to have been born four or six years "before Christ." We Americans tamper with time, calling it standard" or "daylight saving." Good, all to the good.

The advantage of playing around with seconds, hours, days, years, and times, is this: you can pick any moment and call it the pregnant hour. The sprinter or dasher getting ready for the 100-yard dash spends years learning how to respond in a split of a split second to the starting gun. Yet that gun could have gone off an hour or a minute sooner or later than it did. What mattered is that it signaled the special, extremely special minute.

So we invest a day with special meanings. We could choose to have an Ash Tuesday or an Ash Thursday, and to let Lent be 41 or 39 days and its key features would remain as valid. The prime element is the word: "Now." Once Jesus has made it possible for us to "become the righteousness of God," the acceptable time for response has come. Grace is there, dammed up when we ignore it, pressing the wall when we postpone response to it, but ready to gush when we "accept" it.

"The day of salvation" could and can be any old day. But we choose to invest certain days and times with meaning so that we set time aside to hear the stories of how this day comes and what it means. What would be anybody's job is now someone's job: ours, to accept. Now.

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

In the text that has come to us as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is revealed as being preoccupied with posture and cosmetics. The posture of prayer has little to do with kneeling, standing, sitting, or dancing. Instead it deals with fitting in to a small, enclosed space: a private room where no one can observe the one who prays. The cosmetics have little to do with painted lines on faces, tragic masks, or piles of ashes. One is allowed some oil, however, as long as it is atop a head where only God will see it. Something more is going on here than measuring for closets and closet doors or selling Ash Wednesday top-of-the-head oil.

What is going on also is not a command to make all expressions of faith private. If that were the case, we would have to say that here is one of the better instances of Christians following a divine command. Most of those who claim to have faith or be faithful do not practice piety at street corners or in the mall, if they practice it at all. Most of them would run if the trumpet blew. They might like their names in print as sponsors of Little League or the symphony, but otherwise they may give so little "alms" that they would just as soon not have their giving hand observed. And who sees dismally painted faces except at masked balls and costume parties?

At stake here is a series of "in orders," "so thats," and "so as to's." As with all the texts of the season, appearances not only deceive but they show that we misconceive easily. What matters is the intention of the heart, the purity of the motives, and, most of all, the direction of the activity. That direction is intimate, for prayers are directed directly at "our Father." He is easy to spot: not among the trumpets or near the advertisements but off, quietly, "in secret," knowing what is in the heart, hoping for change in it, and enabling such change.

Ash Wednesday: An Apparent Confusion of Directives

A child who looks in puzzlement at parents who have attended a church where Ash Wednesday ashes are put upon the brow in the form of a hastily thumbed drawing of a cross might grow more befuddled as she listens to the readings for the day. Believers are told not to disfigure their faces, and here the same people who read that do the disfiguring. They are told to pray in private, in secret; and here they are in chapels or great sanctuaries. Is that not a direct act of disobedience?

Sebastian de Grazia once wrote that young people get anomie, a sense of meaningless drift and pointless lawlessness if they have a confusion of directives. Things "gotta be this or that" in the child's world. Even if one is going to disobey, it is good to get an unambiguous signal. Thus the American adults tell children to learn to "compete, compete, compete," to keep the system going and to help capitalism and themselves to prosper. Yet at the same time they are told to "cooperate, cooperate, cooperate," to humanize the system, help the less fortunate, and build up the Chamber of Commerce and commerce. How does one make sense of that?

Somehow some do if they see that the confusion of directives is partial, or has to be seen in the light of its situation. So it is with Ash Wednesday. Joel, Paul, and the Jesus of the Gospels are all three heard in the act of re-forming the heart and reforming worship. It has been said that for Jesus liturgical reform was always restricted to prayer. Sacrifices and ceremonies could be manipulated by priests or officials; they could cost the poor. But prayer was uncluttered, direct conversation with God. The Ash Wednesday texts show interest in reforms that promote such conversation. At their heart and core is the production of a new person, one attuned to the walk toward the cross during Lent, one who is receptive to grace's gifts.


FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

Two necessities for repentance come together in Joel's prophecy, a sense of impending crisis and the promise of the gospel.

Among sinners, repentance is generally the last alternative. There is a whole range of previous defenses -- explanations, justifications, resolutions, distractions, insensitivities -- to protect us from the possibility. Even the church offers its help, trivializing sin, minimizing guilt, offering condolences. Behind such an array, it's no wonder that there is hardly anything left of this word.

A crisis can break through such walls in a hurry, however. Whether it's personal -- a decaying marriage, a lost job, the death of a parent, a troubled child -- or as public as a recession or international conflict, an eruption of trouble can drive a person to some re-examination. "What have I done? What could I have done? How am I going to get through this? I'll never try that again." Trouble has a way of dislodging, of penetrating through the usual swabbing.

This is the beginning of repentance. There may be times when the crisis is brought on by a preacher. It may even be induced by Lenten ritual. But genuine regret, a real sorrow concerning our implication in sin, doesn't generally start until there's trouble big enough to bring it on -- in Joel's case, the appearance of the northern army.

The second necessity for repentance is the gospel itself. This has often been misunderstood among Lutherans, content to repeat cliches about the law and repentance, but Luther insisted on it. Cast into a crisis, people don't automatically turn to the gospel -- they, we, seek cover wherever it's available, in the meantime becoming more and more convinced that there isn't any and the end is upon us. Without the gospel, we literally don't know where to turn.

But when the gospel word is sounded, as in verses 18 and 19 of Joel's prophecy, the heart can come to rest. Rejecting that within us which has led us into unbelief, the very self-preoccupation of the sinner in us; taken under the grip of the Spirit through the gospel; we are led to a new resolve, to cling to God in Christ, counting on him for good, expecting help and favor. This is faith.

Lent is a season of repentance, Joel's witness being put in place to initiate the process. When it is recognized for what it is, however, repentance becomes more than spring cleaning: it is the joy of letting go of bad or mis-investments because the Lord of forgiveness has invested himself in us.