We began the Lenten season on Ash Wednesday, many of us making plans to “give up” something for the six weeks between Ash Wednesday and Easter – maybe a bad habit, maybe shopping. Many decide to fast from eating certain kinds of foods. We make a commitment to improve our own living. And yet, the words for Ash Wednesday from Isaiah 58 call us to something less personal and more communal, something more about “us” rather than all about “me,” something about the common good rather than our own. Lent calls us to see, really see, those around us living life in a kind of wilderness, devoid of hope. Isaiah speaks for God: Is not this the fast I choose: to loosen the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
These words stand as a potent reminder to us that our priorities for the six weeks leading up to Easter should not be our fasting, or giving up of luxuries pretending that we are making great sacrifices for the coming of the kingdom. The call of Lent is more gritty than that, more demanding, Lent is less about performing “right ritual” and more about “right relationships” – we’re called to the streets rather than to sanctuaries.
The prophet speaks….
Look. You fast, but on the very same day you oppress your workers; they cannot support their families on their salaries. They work one job or two or three. Employers withhold their salaries. They struggle to survive and…
workers’ lives matter.
There is violence; you spill blood on the streets – Michael Smith, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner are reminders that some, simply because of their skin color, must walk the sidewalks in fear. Those who don’t hold the right papers to be here, don’t “belong,” wonder when they will be snatched from their homes, their family divided, yet
black lives matter and brown lives matter.
Don’t fast from eating, but share your bread with someone who has none. Even in this prosperous nation, children are going to bed hungry, and
they matter.
Bring the homeless into your house and clothe those who have no coat during the harsh winter days. They have no safe and warm resting place and
their lives matter.
Isaiah goes on.
When you realize that lives matter, ALL lives matter, light will break forth like the dawn,
When you realize that ALLlives matter, there will be healing in your communities.
When you feed the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted and oppressed and those who become victims because of the color of their skin, then light shall rise up in the gray, cloudy skies; your gloom will be like noonday.
And you will be given a new name!
Repairers of the breach.
Restorer of the Streets.
Or maybe Just Love….
As we received ashes on Ash Wednesday, some of us heard these words: Let us be marked not for sorrow or for shame but for claiming everything God can do with dust and ashes. Our streets are filled with violence, with hate and the fear of difference, with poverty and homelessness, staggering people with vacant eyes. Notice these things Isaiah whispers down through the centuries, and be stubbornly and audaciously hopeful that together with God we will build something new out of the dust and ashes scattered around our feet.
Dr. Turner is a highly regarded preacher in churches nationwide. As an ordained minister, she served congregations of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) before beginning her full-time teaching career. Her educational background in Old Testament and homiletics enables her to research and teach methodologies whereby the lives of the preacher and the community come into a responsible en-counter with the biblical text. In addition to publishing numerous articles, she is the author of The God We Seek (2011), Old Testament Words: Reflections for Preaching (2003), and The Storyteller’s Companion to the Bible: Prophets I, vol. 6 (1996). With Mary Lin Hudson, she is co-author of Saved from Silence: Finding Women’s Voice in Preaching (1999).
JUST LOVE houston 