Turn to the Lord with our Whole Hearts

In today's first reading, Joel 2: 12-18, the Lord says to us through the prophet: "return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping and mourning; rend your hearts," the Lord says, "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....Blow the trumpet in Zion! Proclaim a fast, call an assembly; gather the people, notify the congregation; assemble the elders, gather the children and the infants at the breast....And say, 'Spare, O Lord, your people, and make not your heritage a reproach....'  Why should they say among the peoples, 'Where is their God?"

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. This Lent, may we as a nation return to the Lord with our whole hearts. Let us acknowledge our sins before God. "Perhaps he will again relent and leave behind him a blessing." No doubt, in my mind, peoples throughout the world are saying of the U.S.: "Where is their God?" as they witness greed, avarice, narcissism, pride and arrogance, deceit and corruption, violence and hatred erode the values upon which this great nation was built by our forefathers and foremothers.

"Be merciful, O Lord," for we have sinned," we pray in today's responsorial psalm, Psalm 51.

May you and I personally return to the Lord, asking mercy for the ways in which we have succumbed to the sins of hatred, greed, narcissism, pride, lust, avarice, gluttony, selfishness, deceit and/or any others ways in which we are not in right relationship with God, self and others.  During this Lenten season, let us heed the Scriptures above and remember what St. Paul says to us in today's second reading, 2 Cor 5: 20-6:2:  "We are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us."
St. Paul asks us to "be reconciled to God" and reminds us that God the Father "made [Jesus, His Son] to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him."

Through Christ Jesus, you and I are "the righteousness of God."  Do our behaviors and attitudes, our interactions with others, reveal this truth?