Joel 2.12-18 ‘Rend your hearts and not your garments’
2 Corinthians 5.20-6.2 ‘Be reconciled
to God. Behold, now is the favourable time.’
Matthew 6.1-6,
16-18
‘Your Father who sees in secret will reward you’.
“Yet even now,” declares the Lord,
“return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
and rend your hearts and
not your garments.”
(Joel 2.12,13)
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The
human heart is the source of all that is good and beautiful and true in our
lives.
The
human heart is the source of all evil, vice and malice in our lives.
I
wonder, is either of those statements true? Are both true at the same time?
The
Collect of Ash Wednesday, echoing Psalm 51, asks of the Lord that he would ‘create and make in us new and contrite hearts’.
The
heart is a motif of the scriptures.
In
the prophet Ezekiel God declares:
‘And I will give
you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the
heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.’ (Ezekiel 36.26)
The
human heart becomes the place of transformation and restoration.
A
stony, cold heart is a feature of death and hell.
A
warm, beating heart of flesh is a feature of life and of heaven.
Ash
Wednesday presupposes that our hearts of flesh have cooled, and perhaps even
become icy, towards God and towards our neighbour.
‘Create
and make in us new and contrite hearts’ is not just a phrase in a prayer, but a
heartfelt plea: a plea felt in the heart.
Our
hearts ache and yearn to be warmed and loved by God.
When
we speak of the heart we are speaking of the most interior part of who we are,
the place where ultimately only we can be, and only God can penetrate.
So,
the deepest place of our inner core is the heart.
The
heart is also the seat of passion and power and the intensity of love.
The
word ‘courage’ derives from the French word, ‘coeur’ the heart, so a courageous
person is a person of heart and power, expressed in love that will give its all
to the other.
The
quest for holiness of life is to align what the heart believes and knows and
feels with what our lives and lips show.
As
the prayer for choristers puts it very simply and beautifully:
Grant that what
we sing with our lips,
we
may believe in our hearts,
and what we
believe in our hearts
we
may show forth in our lives.
On
Sunday in our Gospel we heard Jesus’ words that it is ‘out of the abundance of
the heart that the mouth speaks’ (Luke 6.45) for good or ill.
So,
Ash Wednesday, and the season of Lent, is a time of spiritual heart surgery;
the church is the spiritual cardiac ward.
This
is what is being said through the prophet Joel:
“Yet even now,” declares the Lord,
“return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
and rend your hearts and
not your garments.” (Joel 2.12,13a)
‘Rend your hearts’ means tear your hearts.
Don’t just do the outward performance
of showing your sorrow for sin and falling short in an outward action – like tearing
your clothes - but go in deep, to the core of your being, to your very heart to
begin to repent and return to the Lord.
Joel continues:
Return to the Lord your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love;
and he relents over disaster.
(Joel 2.13b)
This
Lent let us invite the Lord to be lord of our hearts, let us invite him ‘to
search us out and know us’ as Psalm 139 puts it – there’s a good psalm to begin
to know off by heart.
The
phrase ‘off by heart’ doesn’t just mean rattling off the words, it means that a
text goes deep into our very heart, to the heart of who I am.
This
Lent why not take a prayer or verse and commit it to heart: you could do worse
than the collect for Ash Wednesday, or another text on the Oremus sheet today.
So
Joel says we need broken hearts before we can return to the Lord.
When
we come to the seat of truthfulness our hearts will, and should, be broken by our
sin, our distance from God, the schemes and shenanigans we play deluding
others, and probably deluding ourselves.
‘A
broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise’ says tonight’s psalm.
(Psalm 51.18b).
The
good news is that God does not leave us in dust and ashes; he does not will us
to be brokenhearted forever.
Indeed,
he came, as Isaiah tells us, ‘to bind up the brokenhearted’ (Isaiah 61.1)
Repeatedly
in the psalms the message is that God’s favour rests on the broken hearted (Psalms
34.18; 109.16): ‘He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds’ (Psalm
147.3)
‘Create
and make in us new and contrite hearts’ our collect prays.
Where
do we go with that tonight and this Lent?
First,
the interior life of the heart is perhaps the first secret place we go to, as
Jesus commends, to be with our heavenly Father.
We
know the phrase about ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’, well, when it comes to
the spiritual life, pray in the inner chambers of the heart not as a show but an earnest encounter with your
heavenly Father.
This
Lent make your heart the arena of prayer: and pray!
Secondly,
the heart is always to be exalted, lifted up as ‘a holy and living sacrifice to
God’.
We
offer our ‘new and contrite hearts’ back to the Lord.
In
the Eucharistic Prayer the words ‘lift up your hearts’ is sung.
In
Latin it is ‘sursum corda’.
Of
this, the late Pope Benedict XVI said:
Prayer is the
response to the imperative at the beginning of the Canon in the Eucharistic
celebration: Sursum corda – lift up your hearts! It is raising my life towards
God’s height. (From: Homily, 5 February 2011)
Let
us this Lent go deep into our hearts and find our desire for God and let us
approach the glorious Eastertide raising our life to God’s height, with hearts
on fire in knowledge and love of him.
My heart is ready, O God, my heart is
ready;
I will sing and give you praise.
Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,
and your glory over all the earth.
(Psalm 37.8,12)
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