Turning Around
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 6, 2008--Ash Wednesday
Psalm 51:1-17; Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Joel 2:1 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.
12 Yet even now, says the LORD,
return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
13 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.
14 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?
15 Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sanctify a fast;
call a solemn assembly;
16 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.
17 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?’”
2 Corinthians 5:20 We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
6:1 As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. 2 For he says, “At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.”
See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! 3 We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, 4 but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, 5 beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; 6 by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, 7 truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; 8 in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; 9 as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; 10 as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.Matthew 6:1 “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
2 “So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
5 “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
16 “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 18 so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Before I went to seminary, as many of you know, I had a previous career--I was an attorney in private practice in Washington. I get a lot of jokes about having "switched sides" a lot, and I suppose that I could have gone with that message and the beginning of Lent: Satan in the wilderness and all that. But instead, I was thinking back to a class that I took when I was in law school. Back then I had great dreams of being a wealthy international lawyer, jet-setting around the world, writing constitutions for new countries and engaging in all kinds of international trade. So I took a class called "International Business Transactions."
It was a strange class, in that the whole thing was really about how you got widgets that had been manufactured in Germany to your company in the United States. The whole thing was bout all the paperwork you had to fill out. All the steps you had to go through in order to make sure that the widgets didn't just arrive in the boat, or were just delivered to the docks, but that they were loaded onto trucks, and so on. And there was all kinds of law that went behind this. It was a very transactional understanding of the world: if you want the widgets, this is what you have to do. These are the steps you have to go through.
It occurred to me, as I was thinking back on this, that we think a lot about God in the same way. We think of God in almost mechanistic terms. If I want forgiveness...I have to do X. If I want to be loved by God, I have to go to church, be nice to people, say my prayers, read my Bible. I have to do all these things if I ever expect God to be gracious to me. We live in a society that is built around the idea of mutual transaction: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. The art of the deal. The contract. The negotiation. Even in baseball you try to make sure that you're getting equal worth for the player you are trading away.
So, I suppose that as we enter into a time of Lent, where we focus on repentance--after all, the ashes that we will put on our foreheads are a sign of repentance--that we might think about it in the same way. We might be tempted to think about repentance as something we do in order to get God to forgive us. "I'm sorry." "I forgive you." That's the transaction isn't it? We come to God, crawling on our knees, begging for forgiveness in our wretchedness, and God says, "Okay, I forgive you."
But there's something about the word "repentance" in our Bible that we need to pay attention to. The Hebrew word that means "repentance" is ????? Teshuvah. And it comes from a root "shuv" that means "to turn around" and literally means "to return, to go back." That's an interesting idea. And what I think we need to understand is that repentance from a Biblical understanding is not us throwing ourselves on the ground and saying "God forgive me" and God saying, "Okay, you have demonstrated a sufficient amount of wretchedness and groveling that I'll forgive you". Rather, it happens the other way around.
Imagine this situation: someone you care about very, very much--a family member, a friend, a boyfriend, girlfriend--someone you care about has hurt you, wronged you, sinned against you. And you sit there and you're having an argument. You're yelling at this person and saying, "I can't believe what you have done to me! I can't believe how you have wronged me!" And the person is so alienated and so unable to cope with the magnitude of the offense, that they walk away down the road. And as they get a certain distance away you shout, "Wait! I forgive you! Come back!"
That's what repentance is.
Repentance is not us groveling before a God who acts like a king doling out mercy. Repentance is us turning around into the arms of a God who has already forgiven us. Our repentance is our amendment of life in light of the fact that God has already forgiven us. That's what we talk about when we talk of the cross and the empty tomb. This is God reconciling God's self to the world. If it needs something from us, some groveling, then that wasn't sufficient. What Christ did was not enough. We understand that our salvation is not something that we do. It is something God freely extends to us and our response, our only response, is to turn around and go back.
That's what repentance is. That's what we do in Lent. Lent is considered a penitential season, a season of repentance. And Jesus identifies for us what repentant behavior looks like. These are the traditional behaviors of Lent: giving of alms, prayer, fasting. We understand the giving of alms to be a reflection of the fact that just as God cares about the weakest most defenseless members of society, as we seek to turn around and give our lives to God, we care about the weakest and the poorest among us. Tonight, as a reflection of this, the offering that we collect will be donated to the Heifer Fund, to raise money for animals that we can send to poor families around the globe. We understand that part of our lives in Lent is prayer. Jesus tells us how to pray, to pray not so that we may impress others with our piety, humility, and repentance. But rather that prayer that turns us back to God. That seeks to be in communion with this loving, and awesome God. And the fasting is more than looking dismal--it is meant to remind us of our dependence on God for the very sustenance of life. When you get that little hunger in your stomach, we are reminded of our need for God to fill us physically and spiritually.
And so we are called to turn around.
The ashes that we will put upon our heads in a few moments, are signs of our mortality. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Creatures made out of the dust of the earth, who will one day return to it. Connected to one another in our mortality.
We stand at the beginning of our Lenten journey. It's an opportunity for repentance. Not out of fear that God will be angry with us. But out of recognition that this God, who loves us so deeply, wants nothing more than for God to simply turn around.
So, if in your life, you have some brokenness. If you have a broken relationship where you have caused someone pain, now is the chance to turn around. If you have in your own life a fractured relationship with God, and you feel like you haven't been able to spend enough time, almost like one of those relationships where you haven't called someone in so long you feel embarrassed to finally pick up the phone. God is saying: turn around and come back. If you haven't worked on your relationship with yourself, if you haven't taken care of yourself the way God would have you do--getting enough rest, spending enough time with friends and family, taking care of yourself physically and spiritually--God invites you to turn around. Here God stands waiting for you.
Lent is an awesome and mysterious time. A time of preparation for even greater mystery. But the mystery that we wrestle with is not the mystery of a God whom we fear, who is capricious, angry, and seeks our downfall, but of a God who stands there, like a friend along the road, with arms wide open, calling out for us, "I forgive you. I love you. Return to me. Repent."
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Copyright © 2008. Mark A. Schaefer.
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