Ash Wednesday-The Rev Melanie Lemburg

 Ash Wednesday 2022

        Every year, Lent holds the same temptation for me—that is to try to use the 40-day period as a sort of “holiness bootcamp.”  I do love a good self-help program, and embedded in the heart of this temptation for me is the secret belief that I can make myself righteous before God.  Every year, I need to feel the grit of the dust on my forehead; to hear those solemn and holy and sobering words: “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Every year, I need Ash Wednesday to check my expectations for Lent; I need the reminder that God has already done all that is needful and that the gift of Lent is the invitation to open our hearts more fully to God. 

        This year, the reading from Isaiah also has served as that holy reminder for me, that check to my temptation to dwell too much on the fasting aspect of Lent.  In Isaiah, God speaks to God’s people who are dispirited and scattered, taken out of their homeland into the land of foreign invaders.  God’s people ask:  "Why do we fast, but you do not see?  Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?"

        And God responds: “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers.  Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.  Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.  Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself?  Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?  Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?”

        And then God says, “Here is what I mean by a fast!”  “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them,

and not to hide yourself from your own kin?  Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.  Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.”

        God is telling God’s people that their true relationship with God is revealed in how they treat others.  God is reminding God’s people that God’s justice goes hand in hand with God’s mercy, and they are called to do likewise.  Only then, God tells them, will the Lord guide them and give them strength; their ancient ruins will be rebuilt and they will be called “the repairer of the breach.” 

        What might a fasting for Lent look like that is oriented to “repairing the breach”?  How might Lent be a time when we are called to look fully into the face of the world’s injustices and examine our part in them?  What does it mean, even in Lent, to put our hope in the promise of the resurrection—that through God all things in this world can be made new and that nothing in this world is beyond the healing power of God?  Through our fasting, how might we be called to be agents of that healing?  How might what each of us does for Lent have implications far beyond our own spiritual lives and our relationship with God, far beyond the bounds of our own self-discipline to impact the whole world?  How are we, all together and each one of us, being called to repair the breach this Lent?