This season of Lent – the special
penitential season of preparation – calls out to us today. We ourselves are “called to be Holy” during
this holy season. We are called to be
holy on this day that we have ashes placed on our foreheads as a public sign of
repentance. We are called to be holy
during the season of Lent as we recall and trace Jesus’ path of ministry, as we
follow the footsteps of his passion, death, and resurrection, footsteps that
bring to us salvation as the holy people of God.
In today's first reading, the prophet Joel
calls the people of Israel to a communal rite of anguish and repentance as a
path toward hope in God. Joel calls the
people to repent with sackcloth and ashes, with prayer and fasting. The priests and the leaders of the community,
the elders and the infants – everybody joins in this ritual of repentance.
Joel tells us to rend our hearts, not our garments,
to return to the Lord. Perhaps this message
gets to the heart of what we mean by signifying Lent as a season in which we
are called to be holy. We are not to focus on the externals, but on how our hearts
are being changed and converted on the inside.
There is a tension between our call to repent publically and Jesus’
admonition of being aware of practicing our piety before others in order to be
seen by them, in perhaps taking pride in the way we express our remorse and
repentance publically. If we focus on
the surface of the externals and the rituals, there is a danger that we will
just go through the motions of repentance.
If we just go through the motions, this holy season will not be
life-changing or transformative for us this year.
We are
called to holiness during this holy season of Lent not just individually, but
also as a community. During Lent, we will all have daily devotional books in we
can all pray together as a community. We
will have our traditional Wednesday evening soup suppers each week during Lent
in which we will gather and journey together during this holy season. We also will receive different symbols during
our Lenten journey that will bond us together as a faith community.
As we start our Lenten journey with Ash
Wednesday, may we rend our hearts for personal reflection that will lead us to
a season of confession, change, and renewal.
The trumpet is to be sounded in Zion, but not as a call that celebrates
victory, not as a call that signals the advance to war, but rather a call that
warns those who are penitent that the day of the Lord is coming. Let us see beyond the smudge of ash that is
placed on our foreheads to the smudge that exists in our hearts. May this journey that we start on Ash
Wednesday through this holy season bring our repentance from the shadows into
substance, from ritual into reality, from a facade into faith. May we journey together as a community during
Lent in our call to greater holiness.
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