remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return
Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C: Hebrew Bible
Welcome to Liturgical Threads! This is the first material of the week, focused on the Hebrew Bible selection from the Revised Common Lectionary: Joshua 5:9-12. You can look forward to materials from the Epistle and the Gospel later this week.
Grace and peace,
Justin
Joshua 5:9-12
The Lord said to Joshua, "Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt." And so that place is called Gilgal to this day.
While the Israelites were camped in Gilgal they kept the passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho. On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.
This week's Hebrew Bible reading is an odd inclusion in the Lectionary. We get this little rump of a story, from Joshua, about the first Passover celebrated in the Holy Land by the refugees from Egypt. The first few times I read this passage, as I took notes and prepped for what to write, I struggled, wondering constantly: why are reading this passage?
I have some hints towards why this is included during Lent (namely, the link between Lent and Passover), but more than anything, I want to take the opportunity this week to reflect a bit on the season of Lent, something I haven't done much yet during my writings this year. And, in doing so, maybe we can shed some more light on this odd little passage.
Lent is my favorite part of the liturgical calendar. My personality is geared towards introspection and gloominess by nature, and so a season of penitence and looking inward just comes naturally. The side of me that longs for a more monastic way of living relishes forty days of self-denial and *memento mori* and days ordered not by the passions, but by an ascetic desire to better commune with God. I certainly don't achieve these kinds of spiritual heights myself during Lent, but its not from a lack of desire to do so.
Advent is more often thought of as a season of preparation, but I think Lent is too. We're preparing, liturgically, for Holy Week, and Good Friday, and finally Easter. But, spiritually, the Ash Wednesday liturgy that begins Lent - *from dust you came, and to dust you shall return* - is a reminder that life is but one long preparation for death. It is the certainty of our lives, the driver of all of our neuroses and preoccupations and particularities. Its not popular to say that, at least in more progressive church circles, but its unavoidable. Lent is about death, because death is what we all suffer; the difference lies in how well we reconcile ourselves to that fact in the time we have.
Lent isn't just dreary, though. In the Anglican tradition, as the Book of Common Prayer notes in the Great Liturgy for Ash Wednesday, it is "also the time when those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church." Death is a reminder, the church seems to be saying, that life is too short to not practice forgiveness and penitence and reconciliation.
Preparation and penitence and introspection: all these things require from us an acknowledgement of a time set aside, an active recognition that things are different right now, during this season. This is why Lent is a season of fasting, as well. The inward work requires an outward sign, a practice of self-discipline that signals our seriousness about what we are about. Despite our best attempts to turn Lenten fasting into something palatable to capitalism, this fast should be something uncomfortable, and demanding, and requiring of you daily recommitment and acknowledgement of our inability, on our own, to do this work. To harken back to our thoughts on the imitation of Christ last week, we should remember his example during the forty days in the desert.
Preparation and penitence and reconciliation and introspection: these ideas get at why we're reading from Joshua this week. The Israelites are also in a season of preparation: they've crossed the river, entered the Holy Land, and are ready to make their home in it. But, before they can, God requires them to stop, and observe Passover, and mark the end of wandering and the beginning of something new.
And yet, we ask, what are they preparing for? The next chapter of Joshua kicks off one of the most troubling parts of the Bible: the subjection of the land of Palestine and the genocide of the Canaanites who lived there, ostensibly at the instruction of the very God who just saved the Israelites. Chapter six throws us right into the Jericho story, which we all heard so triumphantly from the Israelite perspective growing up, stories that conveniently left out passages like 6:21: "Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys."
I have a hard time believing that a God who is love, who puts first the least and the weak, directed the wholesale destruction of a people, for the simple crime of living in the land they had long called home. Its the same reason I have a feel certain today that the repetition of these acts in the Palestine of today, in the West Bank and Gaza, does not have the approval of God. And so, it raises the point about our understanding of this time of preparation: what we are preparing ourselves for is just as important as the preparing. The pious retreat into the desert means nothing if we come out the other side ready to fight a crusade, to smite our enemies and assert our dominance. Remember: Jesus went into the desert, and rejected earthly power, whether political, economic, or cultural. This is the imitation we are called to in Lent. This is what we are preparing for: death, and a life lived according to the remembrance that, in the end, we all die, and all we do turns to dust. So do it all gently, peacefully, and most of all, with love.
From the Book of Common Prayer, Liturgy for Ash Wednesday
If ashes are to be imposed, the Celebrant says the following prayer
Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the earth; Grant that these ashes may be to us a sign of our mortality and penitence, that we may remember that it is only by your gracious gift that we are given everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen
The ashes are imposed with the following words
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Reflect
How does the Lenten emphasis on ideas like mortality and death sit with you? Do you welcome this season, or push back against it?
Does the state of the world this year change how you feel about a season of penitence?
What are you preparing yourself for this Lenten season? Is it worthy of the preparing?