Ash Wednesday 2021

Lectionary: 219

Then the LORD was stirred to concern for his land and took pity on his people.

 

In today’s first reading, Isaiah concluded his invitation to “Return to me with your whole heart” with the good news that “the LORD was stirred to concern for his land and took pity on his people.” In the following verses, which we have not heard this morning, we learn:

In response the LORD said to his people:

I am sending you

grain, new wine, and oil,

and you will be satisfied by them;

Never again will I make you

a disgrace among the nations.

God’s blessing, we should notice, was on “his land and… his people.” There are no people without land, and no land without people. If you have heard the theme song of the movie Exodus, you’ll remember Pat Boone’s, “This land is mine; God gave this land to me.”

European settlers, coming to North American, brought the religious conviction that God had given them the wide-open spaces of the continent, regardless of its aboriginal occupants. But the inept farmers, transplanted city dwellers with little experience of farming, often wasted its potential. Irreplaceable topsoil was blown away by ferocious winds or washed away by heavy rains. Never mind! They just went west. The settlers learned to regard land as a fungible commodity; it could be wasted and replaced by the apparently unlimited resources of a vast frontier. But eventually the frontier closed and the Dust Bowl (1930-36) destroyed those illusions. American farmers learned to practice soil conservation and stewardship.

We have yet to appreciate the limits of other vast resources: atmosphere, rivers, and oceans. Unarable land is used for toxic wastes, plastics, and garbage with scant attention to the damage while precious arable land is exploited by developers for suburban sprawl. 

Pope Francis, in his second encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, has shown the close connection between wasting natural resources and wasting people. They are essentially the same thing. Justice demands that we change our habits or face catastrophic consequences. As we finally recognize the full impact of climate change and our part in it, the current pandemic will seem like nothing at all. Or rather, we’ll recognize the pandemic as a sign of something terribly wrong and of terrible things to come.

The Hebrew prophets described the consequences of sin. Neglecting poor widows and orphans and the shabby treatment of aliens causes cosmic disasters. They knew nothing of a god called Luck and would have scoffed at karma. The idea that God doesn’t manage the world is utter nonsense to the prophets. The Lord, they said, intentionally punished the sinful behavior of his elect with plagues, drought, infestations, floods, and war. We might dismiss their harangues today but it's hard to dismiss the facts in front of us. 

As we set out into the depths of Lent, we cannot take refuge in the old Jesus-and-me spirit of the past. My sins are our sins, and our sins are mine. Everyone is complicit in the waste of human and natural resources. 

Rather, we should heed Pope Francis invitation to See, Decide, and Act, which he spells out in his recent reflections on the pandemic, Let Us Dream. Lent is a season to see what is happening in the world we have created, to discern how God's spirit is leading us, and to act in obedience to that Spirit. 

If we act under that beautiful impulse now we might hear the Lord's reassuring word: 

"Never again will I make you a disgrace among the nations."