Rend Your Hearts - 14 February 2018 - Ash Wednesday

Welcome! At midnight tonight begins the Season of Lent, a time of forty days leading up to Easter. It is a time of prayer and reflection on the meaning of Jesus’ presence in our lives and in the world; a time to look within ourselves to see what needs changing and healing as we seek to follow Jesus more willingly and more completely.

In Bible times when people sinned and were sorry they would sometimes put ashes on their heads as a symbol for their sin, and as a way of saying they were sorry for doing wrong. Sin is when people act and think as if they don’t care about God or about themselves or other people or about God’s world.

Tonight, we too will use the symbol of ashes to express our sadness about sin. The ashes come from the palms we used last Palm Sunday as we welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem. They remind us that Jesus is King and that we are God’s creation of the earth. They also remind us of new life, from which new plants grow and abundant life comes. The ashes are mixed with oil, which in Bible times was a sign of God’s favor and God’s healing. –– Sara Webb Phillips

Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

There’s no evading the odd fact that Matthew 6:1–6 and 16–(18)21 seems to be an anti-Ash Wednesday text assigned for Ash Wednesday. The passage apparently warns us away from every kind of visible piety. In order to live out Jesus’ injunctions everyone should stop at a restroom on the way out of Ash Wednesday services and wash off those ashes. Matthew’s gospel more than any other is a manual for discipleship—piety is done secretly; charity is done openly. How do we relate the appropriate concern with liturgical faithfulness to the warnings against showiness and hypocrisy? –– David Bartlett

Joel 2:1-2,12-17

In the Hebrew Bible, fasting and repentance are often prescribed in times of suffering and danger or under threat of such concerns. Here the threat is not attack by a human army, but the “day of the LORD” and the destruction and terror it brings.

. . . Joel calls for fasting, but in a redefined form. He calls upon the people to return to God with fasting and repentance, but rather than rending their clothes as a sign of that repentance, they are asked to “rend your hearts and not your clothing.” –– Jonathan Lawrence

2 Corinthians 5:20b––6:10

Just as the psalmist pledged to “teach transgressors your ways,” Paul seeks to reconcile the Corinthians to God, serving as an ‘‘ambassador for Christ.’’ In many of the readings for today, it is not the act but the motivation that counts, the way we respond to God’s gifts. So too here, he urges them “not to accept the grace of God in vain.” He cites Isaiah 49:8 in its reference to an acceptable time, a day of salvation, which Paul says has arrived. –– Jonathan Lawrence

David Bartlett, an ordained American Baptist minister, is Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, and Lantz Professor Emeritus of Christian Communication at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut.

Jonathan D. Lawrence, an American Baptist Church ordained minister, teaches Religious Studies and Theology at Canisius College, Buffalo, New York.

Sara Webb Phillips is a United Methodist minister serving North Springs UMC in Sandy Springs, Georgia.

Homily Service 39, no. 4 (2006): 2-12.

Answering Flood Waters with Public Prayer

Pastors and congregations dealing with weather disasters may be inspired by the public prayer healing and listening work of churches in rural Appalachia to help people heal. This comes from Roman Catholic priest, John S. Rausch, in the latest issue of Liturgy which offers the full essay (including more examples of public prayer) at tandfonline.com with a subscription.

Let this serve as a window into what might be done in your neighborhood.

Public prayer is the salve for society’s wounds. After mass shootings, airplane crashes, and natural disasters, communities gather with lighted candles or tolling bells to comfort one another and probe the deeper significance of the tragedy. While Appalachia has its share of these human and natural disasters, certain structural patterns in the region, especially associated with its physical resources, set an additional context for prayer to hear the cries of the poor and respond to the silent screams of vulnerable creation. .  

 Flooding in Appalachia differs from floods of the Mississippi or Missouri Rivers that put thousands of acres of farmland under water. Typically, the steep mountains of central Appalachia collect the downpour from several inches of rain in a few hours, gush flash floods in the hollows, and swell creeks in the valleys. The aftermath of flooding everywhere, however, remains the same: possible loss of life and destruction of property. Spiritually, people experience grief, depression, and despair that beg a response. 

 In spring 2003, after a devastating flood in the tiny coal camp of McRoberts, Kentucky, a group of twenty-five church leaders and parishioners listened to people’s stories and planted flowers. We bought flats of begonias, petunias, and marigolds from a sheltered workshop to transplant throughout the town. 

 Rev. Steve Peake, pastor of the Corinth Baptist Church in the nearby town of Fleming-Neon and part of our public prayer leadership team, allowed his presence to lift spirits and remind residents to renew their hope in God’s providence. Standing by a row of framed houses on Highway 343, he said, “Every time I drive by, I think of people pushing brooms and shoveling mud out of their homes.” 

 Like pilgrims, we visited private dwellings, churches, and public buildings, and heard about the flood from traumatized residents. We said a prayer, then planted a flower to express compassion and to replace ugliness with beauty, death with resurrection. In the midst of a small garden by one house, a plaque read: “The earth laughs in flowers.” Standing by that sign, Sister Rosalyn said a prayer, and then Spencer, age seven, planted a begonia.  

 Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, encourages a deeper respect for “our common home,” and the conviction that everything in the world is connected (LS #138). Referring to St. Francis of Assisi, the pope stresses how relationally the saint dealt with all reality: “He shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace” (LS #10). The interdependence of all these aspects underlying the social order exemplifies the richness of public prayer because it calls forth authentic community, confronts the structures of social sin, and reminds participants they form part of the body of Christ.
 

John S. Rausch, a Catholic priest and member of the Glenmary Home Missioners of America, lives in Stanton, Kentucky. He has ministered in social justice for over forty years in Appalachia.

John S. Rausch, “The Earth Laughs in Flowers: Public Prayer in Appalachia,” Liturgy 32, no. 4 (2017): 11-19.

Prayer that Transforms – 23 October 2016 – 23rd Sunday after Pentecost/ Lectionary 30/ Proper 25

We might well pray every day: Lord, teach us to pray. The practices are many. We learn about prayer as silence, movement, art, and words, as contrition and thanksgiving, as praise and begging. And Luke’s Gospel story of the Pharisee and the tax collector sets the goal as the same whichever mode of prayer we engage. It is humility.  

Luke 18:9-14

The Pharisee and tax collector of this parable represent two stereotypical polar opposites of character-types familiar to a first-century Jewish-Christian audience. The Pharisee is described as prayerful, faithful, generous, devout, and ascetic. . . in short, a religious person held in high esteem. The tax collector, on the other hand, represents the worst kind of person, the most hated to a first-century audience. The stereotypical tax collector collaborated with foreigners to extort from his own people. To Jesus' listeners, the tax collector would be the one to be ignored by God. . .

To the surprise of Jesus' listeners, however, it is the tax collector, not the goody-goody religious hero, whom Jesus says is “made right” before God, simply because of the taxman's heartfelt contrition. In contrast, the pious yet smug religious person leaves his prayer without having been right in God's eyes at all (v 14, dedikaiōmenos). His religious practices, for all their praiseworthiness, only end in isolating him from his neighbor.

There is a warning here: if we isolate ourselves from our neighbor, we isolate ourselves from God as well. Hence, Jesus insists that prayer, if it is to be genuine, must bring about a transformation of our hearts. It is much more than pious practice or religious duty. On the contrary, without genuine conversion, even the most admirable pious practice and prayer risk becoming empty and meaningless. – Lisa Marie Belz

Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22

Taken in its larger context of Jeremiah's condemnations of his people's arrogance (13:9,17) and rampant injustice on the eve of the Babylonian invasion (13:17), the drought described in this passage is symbolic of something equally as grave as a lack of adequate rainfall. Although the people of Jeremiah's time are deeply religious, engaging in various religious practices (13:10), their religiosity nonetheless leaves something to be desired. It is based on a lie (13:25, sheqer, “deception,” “lie,” “falsehood”). They do not worship as God intends, and so their society is rife with violence and injustice (v 7). God is in their midst—they even bear the name of God (v 9)—but God “does not accept them” (v 10) and will not do for them what they will not do for themselves (v 19). Only authentic worship, that which combines religious observance with the construction of a truly just society, can remedy the spiritual drought and dryness which afflicts them. – Lisa Marie Belz

2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18

Here Paul is, facing certain death, yet he knows himself to be delivered from “every work of evil” (v 18). No one can harm him now, not even death, since he lives in Christ and for Christ. In so giving himself repeatedly over the years, he has become like Christ: reduced to nothing (v 6/Philippians 2:7), forgiving his enemies (v 16/Luke 23:34), yet all the while encouraging, exhorting, consoling. The life of the Risen Christ has long been at work in him; now all that remains is its fullest consummation. – Lisa Marie Belz

Lisa Marie Belz, an Ursuline Sister from Cleveland, Ohio, is assistant professor of religious studies and graduate ministry at Ursuline College, Pepper Pike, Ohio.  

Homily Service 40, no. 11 (2007): 43-52.