Homily for Ash Wednesday 2026 – St. Mark’s, Charleston
The prophet Joel has a word for us today…two words, really
Rend your heart not your clothing and Return to the Lord your God..
Rend and Return…
In many ancient cultures and still in some places today, rending – that is, ripping apart your clothes is an act of extreme grief and sometimes anger ..symbolizingh that the grief or anger had ripped one wide open...
Act it out…
You can feel it, can’t you… even just miming it…
Joel was sounding the alarm for God’s people – they had become far too comfortable. Greed had crept in. The poor and vulnerable were being trampled everywhere and people were just going through the motions - their relationship with God had grown lukewarm.
Wake up, Joel insists.. Judgement is about to fall on us…rend your hearts not your garments and return to the Lord –maybe the Judgement will be lifted..
In ancient and modern Judaism, there were days set aside for fasting and repentance which Jesus would have observed.. the ten days leading up to Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement in particular.. as well as times when individuals who had fallen into sin – fasted, repented, and made sacrifices – to try to regain right relationship with God. To regain the heart of relationship with God. Now, the word “heart” here means more than just a muscle pumping blood to the rest of the body.
Fr. Daniel Groody, theologian and Notre Dame professor, puts it like this, “The word ‘heart’ is mentioned more than one thousand times in the Christian scriptures. It is not only a place of emotions; it is the center of one’s interior life, encompassing the mind, emotions, will and conscience.”
But back to Joel….I am imagining times of repentance for some folks was heartfelt but for others it was just going through the motions. He’s seeing this.
I can hear an inner dialog – OK, I’ve got to rend my clothes -so I’m not going to take my best tunic but that old one.. and maybe I’ll just tear it a little bit so it can be mended…you know, to meet the requirement.
Joel says the outward appearance doesn’t get it… God wants us to rend our hearts not just our clothes…
What would rending a heart look like? Do you remember the story in Mark of Jesus healing the man with a withered hand. He was healing on the Sabbath and the super religious crowd took offense (How dare he work on the sabbath?) .. Jesus, Mark tells us, was grieved at their hardness of heart.
Sometimes, as we go through life, our hearts become hard – stonelike, cynical and unresponsive . This can start out quite innocently as a defense against unbearably painful situations where we know there is a need to protect our heart…the problem is that this becomes habitual and, before long, a kind of numbness sets in. And, in the place of a heart that feels joy and grief, we find ourselves with a heart of stone. Here’s the difficulty – what may have worked to protect us becomes the very things that robs us – not only in relationships with others but also with God.
And, as we become numb to others and God, we become numb to ourselves – our conscience gets tamped down and we can justify whatever we want – Thomas Cranmer, our reformer, put it this way - “What the Heart desires, the Will chooses and the Mind justifies.”
To rend our hearts then, is to stand before God with every shred of honesty we can summon.. to plead for his mercy to open, heal, and transform our hearts.. it is to be honest about where we have fallen short.. where we have injured others and to grieve these things… It is deeply fearful to open ourselves like this – to rend our hearts – and to be vulnerable - but it is possible because of what we know about the character and nature of our God. Joel tells us that God is full of grace and mercy, slow to anger and overflowing with unchanging love…and we see the same thing in Jesus.. love that feeds our fiercest hungers and heals our deepest wounds.
And we are called to stand before God to grieve the pain and stony hard-heartedness of the world.. of corporate structures that injure God’s people and his creation.
So, dear ones of St. Mark’s, we begin today with Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent – “… is a time to tend to our hearts and to seek healing so that divine love can flow through them…Only God can heal our hearts, soften them with grace, and make them tender and loving once more. … This Lent, this Ash Wednesday may our God show us where our hearts need healing and restoration.” so that we might rend and return.
Let us keep silence for a moment then I will offer a prayer…
O Lord, who has mercy upon all humankind,
Take away from us our sins
And mercifully kindle in us
The fire of thy Holy Spirit.
Take away from us the heart of stone,
And give us a heart of flesh,
A heart to love and adore You,
So that we might behold you with the eyes of faith and pour out your divine love. Amen.
(St. Ambrose of Milan adpt JTCO)
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