Ashes to Ashes, Chocolate to Potato Chipa

Yet even now, says the Lord,

return to me with all your heart,

with fasting, with weeping, and with

mourning;

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.

Joel2:12-13

When I was a kid I thought Catholic kids were so cool. They came to school with dark smudges on their foreheads. We ate fish sticks on Friday because the Catholic kids couldn’t eat meat. I was in awe of their holy days of obligation and complex explanations of mortal sins, venial sins and the need to go to confession.  I longed to genuflect. 

But, alas, we were Protestants and Congregationalists at that, and no such holy things happened in our little church. Ash Wednesday slipped by unnoticed and we took little account of Lent and Holy Week.  As the years went by the notion of giving up something for Lent managed to enter our liturgy-less worship.  As a teenager most of my peers did battle with demon chocolate while I faced the evil potato chip.  Together we dutifully denied our desires for favorite foods, but I secretly wondered if my and everyone else’s faithfulness was truly measured by this yearly ritual. Though I tried to take it seriously I didn’t really get it. Lent and ashes all remained a mystery.

I’m not all that sure I get it now either, but the reasons are different.  It’s not that I am unwilling to engage in some Lenten discipline, but I’m pretty clear that not much is going to happen in the world as a result of my not eating potato chips for the next forty days, except a dip in the gross domestic product.  It seems meaningless in the face of the world’s needs. My sins have more to do with how I fail in God’s commands to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.  Of the 613 commandments in the First Testament I’m not aware of one that has to do with potato chips.

So gratefully my search for a more meaningful expression of Lenten discipline found a ground in the words of Joel. This obscure little prophet about whom little is known connects the dots in a simple but profound way.  Like most prophets he sounds the alarm about the world and the mess it is in.  His words are, as Walter Bruegemann notes, a summons to emergency.

There is much we share with people of antiquity. There is a summons to emergency in our time.  We cannot gather for worship and prayer without Ukraine being heavy on our hearts. And this is just the most recent upset caused by power and greed.

 Joel’s main beef is that Israel had forgotten who God is. This lament is not about personal failures, it is about the community of faith’s failure to honor God in its corporate worship and its deeds in the world. And while everyone had a place personally in that failure, this text is not primarily about personal repentance.  It is a corporate lament.  

Jerusalem has forgotten God’s utter fidelity and, as Brueggemann notes, “When God’s fidelity is jettisoned human relations become unfaithful and society disintegrates.”  Thus the purpose of religious discipline is to remember who God really is, what is promised by God, and what is required for God.

That’s way better than a potato chip dilemma.  It suggests that God cares more about the world being a mess and about God’s people being indifferent than about the state of my cholesterol-related confessions.

The Ghanaian Methodist theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye speaks of God being agitated. This agitation – described in kindred words in many biblical texts – is both compassion and distress. Most of all, Oduyoye writes, God is agitated at suffering and injustice.

God is agitated. God is appalled. God weeps. And God the Lover longs for us to return Godward, with tears.

It is here that our personal spiritual practice meets the pain of the world.  It is the cry of the Prophet Joel: “Return to the Lord your God.…” Our meager self-denials are not the fruit of repentance called for in this season. Rather, we are called to take seriously what God asks of us as people of faith.