Ash Wednesday, February 18 2015
Joel 2:2, 12-17; 2 Cor 5:20-6:2; Matt 6:1-6, 16-18
Brookdale

I’m always moved by this line from the first reading: “Rend your hearts, not your garments.”  It may sound weird to tear up your clothes as a form of penance, but one way in which people of the ancient middle east used to express anguish or grief was to tear at their clothing.  Over time such symbolic expressions of emotion can come to substitute for the emotions themselves.  We tear our garments or beat our breasts, but our hearts don’t feel the pain that we’re expressing.  Our expressions become perfunctory.  Joel warns us against that.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus makes much the same point about the traditional religious works: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  We might wonder what the point is to these traditional practices in our modern affluent world.  But the fact is that God is always demanding three things of us, and they are represented by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  And if we’re not doing them in a heartfelt way, then we’re just doing them for show.  Take away the show, and we can discover our true motivations.

Take prayer.  We all know that prayer is more than just asking God for stuff.  In prayer, we open up to God in silence.  We thank God for all his gifts and pay attention to what God is asking from us.  We become more oriented to God’s will.  It’s hard to have any kind of religious life without that.  But if prayer becomes perfunctory or just a list of requests, we don’t get close to God.  Rend your hearts, not your garments.  May our prayer be simple, honest, and heartfelt.

God’s will for us tends to take two forms.  Sometimes he wants us to do something for other people, and sometimes he demands some sacrifice from us.  Almsgiving is a prime example of what God wants us to do for others.  But “alms” doesn’t refer just to money; God may be asking for our time, our attention, or extra kindness and compassion for someone who needs it.  What God may be asking us to give another person is that thing we least want to give.  He may be asking us to listen patiently to a bore or bless the driver who cuts us off in traffic.  Rend your hearts, not your garments.  May we be willing to stretch to help others.

If almsgiving is a general concept for how God wants us to help others, fasting is a general concept for what God wants us to give up.  All my life, I’ve “given up” stuff for Lent, like sweets or alcohol.  This may have some value, but I have to confess it tends to the perfunctory.  Real fasting is when I give up something that I really care about, like being right. Rend your hearts, not your garments.

So anyway, this Lent I will try to rend my heart, not my garments, in prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  Say a prayer for me.