14 February 2024

Rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.
~ Joel 2:12-14

Beloved:

A solemn and repeated claim woven in the scriptures is that we have all wandered away from God. Yet the relenting nature of God reclaims and calls us to return to love and mercy. The season of Lent, and especially this day, Ash Wednesday, that invites us to embody the need to return to God holds two ideas in tension — turning and returning. That is, God’s persistent turning to bless us and our continual need to return home to God’s steadfast love.

Lent is about our returning; a repentance to practice the virtues of love and turn from hate. It is about God’s turning; God’s promise to forgive our wanderings from love and our restraint and oppression of others. Lent is an opportunity to let go of what keeps us from returning to God and hold on to what heals and restores us to God and each other. The work of Love is to restore and make whole.

Lent is also about giving to God that which we cannot walk away from, ourselves. The invitation from the Prophet Joel to ‘rend our hearts and not our garments and return to the Lord our God’ is an encouragement to look within as we return to God. The Scriptures suggest that the detachment from materialism may not be enough to make us return. We seem to be possessed by our possessions whether those are physical or internal. When we are too invested in what we own or have accomplished, our hearts and minds may find it difficult to stay focused on God. When we take an inward stock of ourselves, we can freely give our hearts — our very selves — back to God. God will then do God’s work of blessing and forgiving, healing and restoring. We will find ourselves back at home with God.

This Lent, may all that we are and are becoming be blessed and restored in God.

With Ash Wednesday blessings, I am,

+John Harmon
Bishop of Arkansas

Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024