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How Else but Through a Broken Heart? Ash Wednesday, 2020
Oscar Wilde, the Irish poet and playwriter, harldly known for his Christian faith, who spent two years in prison for being a homosexual wrote these words as he reflected on his time in Reading jail: “How else but through a broken heart may the Lord Christ enter in?”
The prophet Joel, in our text tonight, is calling God’s people, and us, to turn or return to God. The great Hebrew word is Shuv. Turn, turn around, return. God’s words are: “Return to me with all your heart!” All your broken heart.
I think all turning to God is a returning, a returning to the God who made us and loves us. Tonight you will hear these words as I place ashes on your forehead: “You have come from the dust and you will return to the dust.” I also want you to hear: You have come from Love and you will return to Love!
Joel then says, “Rend your hearts not your garments.” There was this public ritual of repentance and mourning, the tearing of one’s garment. God is saying that this ritual must go all the way down to the heart. “It is your heart that needs rending, God is saying, else you will never return to me.
All kinds of things break our hearts. Sorrow for the mess we’ve made in our life, with our life, how we’ve wounded ourselves and others. Sorrow for loss, inestimable loss. A lost love, a lost dream, a lost life, or so we fear.
Sorrow for the world itself, how “mad and bad and sad it is,” to use the words of Browning. From the ravages of ignorance and greed and power.
Failure can break our hearts, or the sight of a child getting in all kinds of trouble.
In the movie The Last Convertible, a character says, “Life is completely fair….it breaks everybody’s heart.” Yes, sooner or later it breaks everybody’s heart.
But here is the gospel: A broken heart opens us to God, to the kindness and love of God. Why return to God? Because we are returning to the one who loved us first. Joel uses that verse I’ve told you is the most repeated verse about God in the Hebrew scripture and says:
Return to the Lord, your God for God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.
One of Leonard Cohen’s most famous lyrics is this:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. (“Anthem”)
I think he is right. That’s how the light gets in, that’s how love gets in, that’s how God gets in. “How else but through a broken heart can the Lord Christ enter in?”