Rend your hearts and not your garments

Rend your hearts and not your garments, let repentance never cease.

Fast with weeping and with mourning, let your cries to God increase.

Turn to God with all your heart, so that sin and wrong depart.

 

Let your heart be broken fully for the sin we all have done.

Swayed by fear and filled with hatred, webs of wrong that we have spun; 

Turn from such indulgence now! Our God longs to show us how.

 

Let your heart be broken also for the right we have not done;

Works of love and life-repairing that we still have not begun.

Let us turn to God aright and do justice in God’s sight.

 

Now return to God Almighty all of your allegiance due; 

Slow to anger, sure in loving, gracious, merciful, and true,

Turn to God with all your heart, so that sin and wrong depart.

 

 

 

TEXT: Charles Spence Freeman, March 2021; after Joel 2:12-13

MUSIC: Tune LUX PRIMA, Charles Gounod, 1872.

Another visit to scrpture texts primarily associated with Ash Wednesday, written within the framework of Lent more generally. The outer verses derive from Joel, while the second and third verses point towards the repentance we need to engage, for both "sins of commission and sins of omission" as they were called when I was young. (Also, I did not know that there was a tune by Charles Gounod in our hymnal.).