GOD’S RETURN POLICY (Joel 2:12-13)
Rev. Canon Dr. Rebecca Margret Nyegenye
As we prepare for the lent season that begins on Wednesday 6th March 2019, let us embrace the return policy as a direct command from the Lord. Return is one of the most popular words used by the prophets when people had sinned as a call to repentance. “In Hebrew, this verb means ‘to arrive again at the initial point of departure.’ It is calling back one who had been originally with God and moved away. Return is a change in direction, and a reorientation, a word of hope and a word of covenant, trusting that returning to God will bring about restoration for his people. Joel follows this understanding of return to call the Israelites back and rediscover their identity as children of God. God’s return policy rests in the truth that God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from sending calamity” Joel 2:13.
God is calling us during these forty days to take an inventory of our lives and return it all to him even the things we are too embarrassed to talk about. God is always ready and waiting, to receive us. In the return policy we do not just identify our sins but name them one by one. Naming helps us to understand the source in order to make the changes needed and hopefully avoid repeating them in the future. God’s exchange process helps us to be solely reliant on his love and grace. Returning to God, as Joel outlines in verse 13, is more than just a transactional return; this is a process of transformation.
Lent makes us to understand God’s return policy in view of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ when God’s grace was revealed to the whole world. In Christ, the promises of God from the very beginning were sealed forever. In life and in death, we belong to God. On Wednesday we will gather to remind ourselves of what Christ achieved for us. We will receive crosses on our
foreheads to indicate whose we are; ashes remind us of our own mortality and our utter dependence on God for all things. Confessing of sin and acts of humility, covering in ashes in the days of the prophets was a process of returning to God who created from nothing, and loved them unconditionally irrespective of their hardness of heart.
There is no return that God will not accept. For God already knows everything we could possibly bring, and has chosen to love us anyway. So brothers and sisters come, return to the Lord. Trust that God is gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and always ready for your return. May the return policy cause you to return to the Lord wholeheartedly and in turn God will forgive us and repay us for what the locusts have eaten (Joel 2:25).
Rev. Canon Dr. Rebecca Nyegenye
AG. PROVOST