Return with Your Whole Heart

 Return with Your Whole Heart

Ash Wednesday 2006 and 20021

Yet even now, says the LORD, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning; Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the LORD, your God. For gracious and merciful is he, slow to anger, rich in kindness, and relenting in punishment. Joel 2:12-13

So, we are ambassadors for Christ as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake, he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. 2 Corinthians 5:20-21

But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you. Matthew 6:6

Piety

Father, your demands of discipleship are strict. Walk with us for the next forty days of this Lenten journey as we strive to follow your wishes and build your Kingdom here on earth. We ask this through the friendship and support provided by your son Jesus and through the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Study

Ash Wednesday 2006 was the birth day of Your Daily Tripod. In the Missionhurst Chapel, Fr. Bill Quigley preached about being “ambassadors of Christ.” He balanced the metaphor of ambassadorship with the figures in a statue of a dozen villagers helping to carry a cross.

New ambassadors present credentials to the heads of that government. What credentials do we have that would qualify us to serve in such a diplomatic posting? Can we use this Pandemic Lent 2021 to build up our “cred?”

Yet how do we balance the public role of ambassador with the paradoxical admonition in Matthew to conduct our religious life in private?

Perhaps God intends to call on each of us to have a personal (i.e., non-public) relationship with Him. Through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we should conduct ourselves in private to not appear to be doing any of these acts for personal gain. Our purpose is to advance, not ourselves, but the Kingdom of God.

Action

How do we reconcile these seemingly conflicting instructions --Be ambassadors but do it in secret? The cross and the tripod and the tripod hold that answer for me.

We do not only have one role any more than Jesus had. He was the Son of God as well as fully human. We have to balance our different roles and responsibilities to have a fully mature private friendship with God vertically.  However, in spreading God’s word and His Kingdom on earth, we must reach out in all directions as Christ does on the cross. That is the horizontal dimension of our faith. We need both working to have a complete relationship with God.

That horizontal dimension is the call to be an “acompañante” to someone in crisis and help them carry their cross. Being such a companion is the reason behind the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. We do these with and for others. 

“Whose cross can you help carry during this season?” How we answer that challenge privately and publicly is the challenge indeed – maybe not a challenge to give something up but rather to take something up?

Indeed! In deeds!