Today is Ash Wednesday. In some communities the lines will be out the door and around the block as if people were in line for a Springsteen concert. I suspect the mood is a bit different in these two lines. And it is right and just that it is so. While I’m not encouraging the line at The Holy One of Mercy within Mercy within Mercy Catholic Church to exude the same giddiness as the line to the Boss’ concert, I do want to emphasize that the point of Ash Wednesday, no less than the point of Lent, is not our badness but the knows-no-bounds goodness of God.

I always like every year to draw people’s attention to the first reading on Ash Wednesday. This is the reading that sets the tone for the season of Lent. Unfortunately, too many homilists opt to preach only on the Gospel of the day and leave the reading from Joel 2:12-18 unaddressed.

Chapter 2 in Joel begins with a trumpet blast and an alarm bell that ring in the peoples’ ears longer than the ringing from Clarence Clemons sax announcing that the Holy One from whom all blessings flow is coming, from whom the blessing of our lives comes is coming. And so we might want to consider—of course not duplicitously but—sincerely getting our act together before we hear the doorbell. Why? Because God is going to kick our not-so-sorry asses? NO. Because the One who is coming—lest it has slipped our minds—is the One “in whom we live and move and have our being.” That breath and that breath you just breathed are not due to your action but rather to the generous action of the Holy Breath of the Divine.

If Pope Francis or the Dalai Lama or Queen Elizabeth were coming to visit, or if Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pete Maravich 🙂 (wink) were coming to visit us from the other side, wouldn’t we make ourselves presentable? And wouldn’t we be doing it with deference, out of respect, to show the high regard in which we hold them? If yes, then wouldn’t the Source and Giver of Life deserve as much? We present ourselves in an honorable and reverent manner because it is right and just to give God thanks and praise. And because it is a way of honoring our truest selves as well, a way of being faithful to the truth that we are each the image of God.

So, yes, we might want to take stock of our lives, and as suggested in verse 12 confess our unfaithfulness, weep for our arrogant presumption and our ungrateful ho-humness, and then decide to fast and abstain from whatever dishonors the Life-Giver and desecrates ourselves, other humans, or the greater earth community.

The most important point, and why I said above this passage from Joel 2:12-18 sets the tone for the entire season of Lent, is that the author and sustainer of our lives is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, rich in kindness, more interested in forgiving and reconciling than in punishment. We return to God with all our heart, as we return to our sacred selves, and as we reconcile with those we have hurt because ours is a God of extravagant love who is wildly gracious, forever welcoming, and who—as Jesus shows us—is madly, deeply, passionately in love with us.

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