February 18, 2021
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on Ash Wednesday on February 17, 2021, at St. Austin Catholic Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Joel 2:12-18; Psalm 51; 2 Corinthians 5:20 – 6:2; and Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18.
We gather on a most extraordinary evening. It is unsafe to travel – even to walk – because of the ice. Many of those who want to join us in-person or online have been without heat, power, or water for several days. There is a 3-hour waiting line to get into the one grocery store that’s open in our neighborhood, and its shelves have been cleared of many staples. It has been more than 330 days since we began restricting our movements and gatherings because of the pandemic, and only God knows how more days of restrictions lie ahead.
Our first reading comes from a great crisis more than 2400 years ago. Israel had experienced a drought during the winter season, followed by a locust infestation in the spring. The prophet Joel feared that another act of God might bring final devastation to a nation already brought to its knees by crisis after crisis. Joel called all the people to gather in an extraordinary expression of their dependence on God.
This Ash Wednesday, more than ever before in my lifetime, I recognize the hard truths of this day. Youth is fleeting. Health is tenuous. Material possessions are impermanent. Many things – essential things – are beyond our control.
We have suffered greatly in the past year. This Lent, perhaps we are not called to voluntary deprivations. But surely we are called to return to God with our whole hearts.
We have reflected on our shortcomings and our mortality, but Ash Wednesday does not leave us there. St. Paul now invites us to begin again the process of growing in our relationship with God. After all, the word “Lent” comes from an old German word meaning “springtime.” Within a few weeks, the flowers will bloom, reminding us that as long as we are alive, we have the opportunity to reconcile once again with God.
Today’s reading from Joel, as poetic as it may be, has always disturbed me. It links a drought and a locust invasion to the sins of the people. It bothers me that we’re told that once the people repented, “then the LORD was stirred to concern for his land and took pity on his people.”
This year, we’ve been asking: why is God allowing all these terrible things to happen? A lot of people think that the pandemic and the power outage are part of God’s plan. I don’t think so.
Yes, pandemics happen. Yes, weather extremes occur. But in recent decades, scientists have predicted that these kinds of events would start to occur more frequently, due to human activity and human choices. The world’s relentless pace of habitat fragmentation, deforestation, industrial agriculture, colonization, and increased travel have caught up with us. All these phenomena bring humans and wild animals into closer proximity, leading to more diseases crossing from animals to humans: AIDS. SARS. MERS. Swine flu. Bird flu. Dengue. Ebola. Zika. Covid-19.
There’s a possibility that the polar vortex reaching us here is due to the loss of polar ice. And the extent of the Texas power crisis, in my very limited understanding, is due to a complexity of human factors, including choosing profit over safety.
Lots of people – including good and holy people – have asked what the point of Lent is this year. Haven’t we given up enough already? Many brides and bridegrooms have postponed their weddings. The few gatherings many have attended have been for funerals. We long to hug our grandchildren, to travel for vacation, and to just hang out. We want our kids to get back to having normal childhoods.
Lent was made for us, not us for Lent. The point of “giving up” something for Lent is never the point of Lent. The giving up is supposed to remind us of our dependence on God, no matter how profound or how trivial the sacrifice may be. Maybe this isn’t the year to give up anything. This year at the St. Austin rectory, we ate a lot of vegetables for Mardi Gras, because they were going to go bad otherwise. On Friday, we’ll probably be eating a lot of meat, because it’s what we have on hand… and that’s OK. We’re definitely doing it in the spirit that we are utterly dependent on God. Lent was made for us, not us for Lent.
The goal of Lent is to grow, to have a springtime in our relationship with God.
As we enter Lent 2021 is the middle of a slow-moving tragedy, there are two things that I think we all need to do, individually and collectively.
First, instead of just complaining and stewing in our miseries as many of us have done for the past 330+ days, we need to “offer them up” to God. That is, let’s use these sufferings as a springboard for frank, brutally honest conversations with God. Let’s recognize, once and for all, that we need God to sustain us at every moment of our lives. These fictions that we or our nation are self-sufficient are just that: fictions. As Paul has told us: now is a very acceptable time.
Second, let’s focus our feelings of sadness and anger in productive ways. Let’s prayerfully and humbly ask the hard questions about what role human activities have contributed to these disasters. The focus here must not be on blaming others, but on searching the collective soul of the developed world, asking if there are better ways to measure success than through dollars, pounds, francs, marks, and yen. As Paul said, now is the day of salvation.
The LORD God formed us out of the dust by breathing into our nostrils to give us life. To dust we shall surely return, but in the time between, God has charged us to be stewards, co-creators in this wondrous creation.
This Lent, we are not called to give up things. This Lent, we are called not to give up. Not to give up on ourselves. Not to give up on God. Not to give up on God’s creation.