God will settle all accounts.  Each of us labors under a stack of Past Due notices.  We’ve lived beyond our means.  We wanted to have fun, leave the worries for another day.  The good news is that God provides the way for the bill to be paid, but that doesn’t mean we can just keep recklessly pursuing the old, bad habits.  What we owe to God has been paid in the blood of Christ.  Let that stop you short, please.  We don’t see that blood all over the cross we keep before our eyes.  Our crosses are always clean, if a little dusty.  I really want to splash bright red paint all over that cross.  Not that I will; don’t worry.  I’m afraid we’ve got to start seeing the blood.  Then, I suspect, the blood may have its effect upon us as it already has for us.

The true sign of a repentant heart is a changing life.  It’s not a finished job for us yet; it’s the work of a lifetime.  We do not cause ourselves to repent.  Neither do we make our life change.  Only God can do those things—oh, He wants to!  We can cooperate, participate, pray and plead that God would make our living change and continue to change us until Christ is finally formed in us and we know at last perfect peace and full blessedness.  Yes, God is taking care of everything.  And we have work to do, and not just outside these doors.  Maybe we start loving our neighbors best when you and I invest in working on ourselves.

Yes, we are saved and safe.  Now what?  Christ resolves the Problem of Life, and the problems of life continue: temptations, the love of ease, comfort, and convenience, our inertia—what the old church called sloth, barely lifting a finger to help.  You and I can’t be Christians only when it’s convenient.  We have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live but Christ in me, in each of us: Christ to live and guide and love and reorder our living to reflect who lives in our hearts more brightly, more clearly.  Because whoever or whatever it is that lives in our heart will be reflected in our living.

Each of us must give our report to God.  If we’ve been given even only one talent, or only half, or half of a half, it has been given be to put to use for God.  Even small things, when done with great love, make a difference.  Ash Wednesday reminds us that the use to which each of us has put what God has given will be made plain, and weighed, on the Day of the Lord.  There is no running or hiding from that day, only the journey to it.  We shall each arrive, by and by.  And in the meantime?

The prophets were all quite clear, just like Joel—in the meantime, turn.  It’s time to turn.  Now is always the time to turn; the time to turn is always now.  If you’re here on Ash Wednesday—of all days—you are probably least in need of that turn, yet we all still have some turning to do—including me!  It’s time to turn.  No more neglect of the Lord.  Live for the Lord: life on God’s terms.  No more neglect of God’s Word.  Who says, “I love you but I’m not going to spend any time with you?  Sorry.”  “I love you, but I don’t care to listen to you.” “I love you, but I’m pretty sure I’m right and you’re not.”  No more neglect of being the integral part of the church that each of you are.  Truly, the church is not all it could be without you here.  I wish I could tell you—it would feel so liberating to tell you—that presence and participation in the worship service on Sunday is just a nice add-on, really just entirely optional, but God gave us the Lord’s Day for a reason.  Sabbath observance is a joke in our age.  Culture has got us, and we’re slow to let go.

It’s time to turn, return.  Return to Sunday worship.  Return to the congregation.  If you must be away, be in Sunday worship wherever you may be.  Are there no Christian gatherings, there, no churches?  Are the doors locked?  Is there no KHCB (or KSBJ for you hip people)?

The trumpet is sounding.  God tells Joel to have the trumpets sounded, sound the alarm.  The prophet is an alarm, and the Bible is filled with prophecy.  The alarm sounds to get our attention, to get us to stop what we were doing and to listen, closely, carefully.  Sometimes we need to stop what we are doing.  We get distracted, engrossed; we stop listening, we forget to listen.

The trumpet was also the call to gather.  There is strength, support, and encouragement in numbers.  If people gather at all, they gather for something important, something that matters and is meaningful.  I’m not the judge of what is important and meaningful in your life.  God is.  We are all answerable before God.

In the years of the tent in the wilderness wandering and in the days of the Temple in Jerusalem, the priests blew the trumpets both to call the people together and to call out to the Lord for help, for rescue.  We call that salvation.

In the New Testament, trumpets are heard most in Revelation, that other account of the Day of the Lord: its necessary, unavoidable, appointed arrival.  Each of us can experience that day either in the fear of the Lord or afraid of the Lord.  To experience that day in the fear of the Lord is to be living now on God’s terms—oh, imperfectly, always!—but striving, pleading, to avoid sin no matter the cost, seeking to know and do righteousness no matter the sacrifice.  This is Christ’s way, which is God’s way, and it is a most pleasing way in the eyes of God.  We can’t do it on our own!  We never would; on our own we wouldn’t want to.  We feel as if we can barely do it even with the Spirit: avoid all sin?  Do all righteousness?  Impossible!  No way.  Yet God makes the way where there was no way—see the cross; see the blood; know Christ.  God’s power is the power of possibility.  To know that power requires faith.

If we do not or will not experience the Day of the Lord in the fear of the Lord, the only alternative will be to experience that day afraid of the Lord.  We want nothing to do with what makes us afraid.  We want what makes us afraid to go away, leave us alone.  Those who are afraid of the Lord know they have cause to be, that no excuse or so very reasonable explanation will do them any good: all the happy lies by which people make their attempt to set God to one side, come back to Him later, maybe.  Live your life; God won’t turn you away; yes, we just love that God is love, and Jesus himself says that he will say to some: “I never knew you.  Away from me!” (Mt 7:23).  How?  Why?

At the end of the Bible, the trumpets sound.  Revelation tells of the arrival of the day of the Lord about which Joel warns us.  The day of the Lord is for victory—God’s victory.  The day of the Lord is also for defeat—the final and utter defeat of all that is against God, all who are against God.  But who is against God?  No one is beyond forgiveness, would you agree?  And how many make a lifetime of casually, thoughtlessly casting themselves beyond forgiveness.  Time to turn.  The time is always now.  When it isn’t now it’s too often too late.

Who is against God?  What the prophets tell us, so many times as to make it impossible not to hear and remember, is that God’s own people are against God.  Can you imagine the shock?  The confusion?  The resentment?  They never could believe that.  They were sure that was just wrong.

The day of the Lord—when accounts are settled and answers must be given.  If you’re anything like me, you are expert at making excuses: perfectly reasonable, logical, sensible, and (as we think) so beautifully persuasive excuses.  We’re in love with our excuses—I am!  Excuses are at the heart of so many broken relationships, broken promises.  We know the futility of making excuses.  We keep making excuses.  Psychologically speaking, it sounds sort of crazy.  Theologically speaking, it sounds like sin: we know it doesn’t do any good, that it does a lot of harm, and we keep doing it.  God’s people have a long history with sin.  The Bible tells us what God does about that.

Isaiah sings of the Day of the Lord.  It’s not a happy day (Is 13:6, 9).  Ezekiel assures us that all the things of this world in which people put their faith to keep them safe and make them happy will fail utterly, miserably, in the Day of the Lord (Ezek 7:19).  God who sees within our heart of hearts isn’t really swayed by all the nice things we say or kind things we do.  He also sees quite clearly and remembers very distinctly everything we did that wasn’t especially kind, all the things we’ve said, were so fond of saying, that weren’t especially good.  No one is getting to God on their personal record.  You and I won’t be asked, on that day, did you do some nice things?  Did you say some kind things?  We will be asked did you know Jesus.  And Jesus will be asked, do you know this man, this woman?  And what will he say?  And will he hesitate before he says it?  God wants to look at us and see Christ: let us clothe ourselves with Christ.  Others can see what we are wearing.  We know a police officer when we see one.  We know someone in health care by the scrubs.  Will people recognize Christ in us?

Joel looks by the Spirit and sees a vast army, the armies of God who come like devouring fire and leave behind consuming flames (2:3).  What is left?  What emerges?  Fire destroys and is also for light by which to see in the darkness.  Fire is for heat where the cold threatens life.  Fire is for purification.  In the burned over land, what is left is what can withstand the fire.  What emerges is what has been purified as by fire.  We think of forest fires as terrible things, and to be in the fire is terrible, and to lose everything to the fire is beyond devastating, and these fires are God’s own provision for promoting health, not only growing and green but durable, resilient.  God will put His own through the fires.

Joel describes how, on that day, “the earth shakes, the heavens tremble, the sun and moon are darkened, and the stars no longer shine” (2:10)—Golgotha! the cross, the blood!  Joel sings, “The day of the Lord is great; it is dreadful.  Who can endure it?” (2:11).  The answer is not no one: one had to endure it, endure it for all of us.  There comes a reckoning for sin—life without thought of God, without regard for God—and all the bull’s blood in the world wouldn’t atone.  God established that Old Testament sacrificial system that so bores and repulses us to recall His people visibly, audibly, tactilely to repentance, to the turn, in the blessed assurance that God was indeed merciful and always ready to forgive.  Why delay?

If we would turn our eyes to the blood we never see on the cross yet is there for all to see, we would see the atonement provided by the Lord: the assurance of His mercy, forgiveness, and grace.  With God, it’s never too late.  Without God it’s always too late.  “‘Even now,’ declares the Lord, ‘return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning’” (2:12).  Not that our fasting and weeping and mourning will atone—all the right gestures.  All your heart.  Turn all your heart to Me, God urges us.  He makes atonement, but what good is it for those who reject it, who deny they need it, who refuse to face their sin and amend their living?

“Rend your heart and not your garments” (2:13).  Well, I’d say our hearts are pretty well torn up by life, especially over these recent years.  And we keep letting life trample all over our hearts when, instead, we could be lifting these hearts to God, asking Him to hold and keep them with Him.  To rend is to tear open, just as God tore open the heavens at the baptism of Jesus; just as, at the death of Jesus the curtain in the Temple was torn in two, top to bottom, high to low.  God breaks through to us, opens the way for us to Him.  Because He wants to; because He wants us.  Won’t you open your heart to God a little wider, more hopefully, more faithfully?  “Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity” (2:13).  Nobody wants calamity.  Who wants God?  Let him, let her come.  God’s arms, God’s heart, are still open for you.