Broken Hearts [Ash Wednesday 2021}
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Broken Hearts
The first words of the
book of the prophet Joel feel eerily appropriate this year, as if the ghosts of
our ancient past understand our pandemic present: “Hear this, O elders,” he
shouts across the centuries, “give ear, all inhabitants of the land! Has such a thing happened in your days, or in
the days of your ancestors? Tell your children of it, and let your children tell
their children, and their children another generation.” His people were dying of pestilence; ours die
of plague.
Our lives changed in
Lent last year. And here we are
again. Walking this austere season in
what we hope are the waning days of a time of imposed austerity. Lent beckons us to renewed spiritual
discipline, even as we are wearied by a year of sacrifice. Lent calls us to take up the cross, even
though our spirits are buckling under the weight of a year of heavy lifting.
Some churches and Christian leaders have questioned whether
we should observe Lent this year. But
liturgical scholar James Farwell responds, “In what year…could the keeping of Lent be MORE appropriate? Our mortality is in front of us daily. Our
sins are everywhere in evidence. This year, hard as it has been, is
different in degree but not in kind from the human condition we
ever inhabit. Our sins kill us. Our mortality will end us, no matter what
our state of spiritual maturity or depth…. [I]f hard things are not also
acknowledged, if death is not faced and sin is not named, we are dealt
another death – a spiritual death. A paralyzing fear. A flight from
reality that only redoubles the harm we do to ourselves and others,
and inevitably ends in numbness. Facing our mortality, naming our sins
and turning again from them, brings LIFE. We could use some LIFE right now.”[1]
Because we have lived under
the shadow of too much death this year. To
be honest, our black ashes are superfluous today. We have been wearing signs of our mortality
on our faces for months. These masks
remind us constantly that we are swimming in a sea of mortality.
That can be a painful thing,
like an embarrassing admission, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. It is just a thing – a thing that mortals
inherit. We live with death from the moment
we are born. It is what we carry through
this life, in our broken hearts and our decaying bodies. But we do not carry it alone. That is what this day is about. Because of the incarnation, even God wears death’s
stain; even God knows the suffocating weight of approaching mortality; even God
knows what it feels like to have life flow from a pierced body.
The lingering scent of
death, the pestering presence of mortality, has the potential to give us
life. The death that haunts us also
helps us focus our spiritual sight; it drives us into the arms of the creator
and giver of life; its shadowy presence makes us just desperate enough to give
ourselves completely to the one who promises to cradle us in the midst of the existential
tumult that awaits us. Death reminds us
that we need our Easter God. This
pandemic can be both a travesty and the trumpet blast that rouses our anesthetized
souls. It can be both. I hope it has been both.
I hope this pandemic has
taught us to cherish the precious beauty and frailty of this mortal life, to
learn to love that which is dying. I
hope we have learned to shed those things that enslave our hearts and destroy
our spirits. I hope we have come to treasure
love and how it negates physical distancing and the ways in which connects us
to each other and to the divine. I hope
we have been reminded that God does not live in stone temples, but in our
hearts and on the air that moves in and through and around us. And I hope you have found your voice.
What I mean is, I hope this
painful year, with its mounting death toll and social restrictions and
innumerable losses, has caused your prayers to become less polite and more
honest. I hope you have come to
understand that God is strong and tender enough to hold your anger and your
frustration, your broken petitions and your unruly tears.
I hope this time has taught
you that the Lenten journey is not a just a few purple weeks in the long Church
year, not just a drag we tolerate, but it is a way of life in the midst of
impending death. It is a season that
teaches us how to live with a broken heart in a dying world. It is the season that gives us a language for
the hardest moments we will face: the prayer language of lament.
I think Christians are
generally not good at lament. We have
traded the raw honesty of lament for saccharine platitudes and its shattered vulnerability
for entitled self-righteous complaint.
But the people of ancient Israel, the writers of the Hebrew scriptures, the
prophet Joel, they understood the deep need for lament.
At its most elemental
level, lament is simply an act of trust; it is the trust we place in the unseen
God who lives with us in this confusing world.
Lament is what happens when a soul admits that the answers to its
deepest and most profound struggles are elusive. Lament walks our brokenness, our mortality,
and our limitations into the presence of God and expects God to make them, make
us, into something beautiful. Lament dares
to believe that God can handle the messy truth – about our lives and about
life.
Lament runs deep; it is the
perfume that flows from our broken places.
And so, in this season of lament, it is appropriate that the prophet directs
us to rend our hearts. That sounds dangerous,
painful, kind of like death – death by broken heart. But if you dare to do that, dare to lay your
heart open, to allow God to behold the shattered pieces of your soul, to trust
God with your messy mortality and your honest prayers, I think you will find that
God sees your broken heart as an open door.
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