Preparing the Canvas

Psalm 51:10-12Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right[a] spirit within me. 11  Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. 12  Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing[b] spirit.

INTRO

So often in life, we find ourselves in this extreme state of busyness. It doesn’t seem to matter whether one is younger, working, or retired. In fact I have been told many times about the busyness that talks place after retirement.  Whether we are busy with work, children or grandchildren, doctor’s appointments, or life, we find the world and time is speeding right past us. Especially in the time that we find ourselves in the life of our country, we get stuck thinking that life is happening around us rather than to us. Life happens around us rather than to us when we are stuck in a constant state of busyness. 

Life happens around us when we are constantly catching up to life, and when those things that are supposed to bring us joy are more like chores. Recently, they kids were home, life was busy, and Samuel asked me to play with him…instead of saying “yes” and setting aside time to enjoy my son…I looked at my watch and mumbled about all the things I needed to get done before Sunday. When so much is happening in our lives, in the lives of the people we love, and to our communities, we can’t process all that is happening. We can’t dwell and think, or give ourselves the space to feel all the emotions that need to be felt.  

We tend to keep busy as a means of distracting ourselves from the painful stories and moments that we have endured. Most of us have pain that we are dealing with, whether it be physical pain, existential and emotional pain or a combination of the two. We do not like to dwell in the spaces that remind us that we are but dust and to the dust, that we are mortal, we are human beings and if we slow down we are afraid of what life might look like it we let life happen to us not instead of around us. 

When we don’t take the time to “stop and smell the flowers,” we are missing something. That’s why we take time to slow down durning the lenten season. That’s why we start be remembering our mortality, it stands as a stark reminder that we should not let life fly by but take time to be in the moment. During the journey towards easter we will be putting a frame around the stories of Jesus’ passion, we will spend time in the moment, and in doing so, we are able to stop, look closely, and understand more deeply the last week of Jesus’ life. 

On this Ash Wednesday, as we prepare our hearts and our lives for this Lenten season. It is critical that we prepare ourselves so that we can truly enter this journey ready for where the Spirit will lead us. I have been thinking a lot about our text for this evening, the Psalmist prepares by declaring, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit” (Psalm 51:10-12).  This, Lent and Ash Wednesday, invite us to consider the ways in which we have fallen short, the ways we have let life happen around us instead of to us. 

Psalm 51 is one of the most famous Psalms to facilitate this sort of lament. It invites us to consider the ways we act selfishly and the ways in which we harm others. It invites us to consider the ways in which we separate ourselves from God. But this Psalm also invites us into something deeper. If we enter into an honest conversation with God, we can truly examine our lives and the ways in which we are in a relationship with God. 

In this reflection, we begin to truly understand the story in new and different ways. We begin to shift our understanding of Christ’s passion as an act of love, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. We begin to realize that we cannot move forward into new life without God’s grace working in our lives. When God’s grace is at work in our lives we move beyond our failures and shortcomings. We move from a way of lifting ourselves up while reveling in the sins of others, to focusing on our lives and our own relationship with God. 

As we prepared for Lent, we were invited to write down our sins, failures, and shortcomings. We placed them in a bag, and, prior to this service, I burned them all. Much like the ashes of last year’s palms that will mark our foreheads, our sins, failures, and shortcomings were turned into ash. In a little while, we will do something special with them to remind us that God takes our imperfections and builds on them. By God’s grace, the ashes of our failures form the foundation of a beautiful future. God makes beautiful things out of the dust of our lives. After all, isn’t that what the story of Jesus’ passion is about? God takes the crowd’s screams of “crucify him” to bring about their redemption. 

Each week we throughout lent we reflect on God’s redeeming work of love, mercy, and grace.  In this season, we are invited to reflect on our own part in the story of Jesus. The story of Holy Week is just a part of the ongoing story of Jesus Christ. I have often found that we struggle to talk about our story as a congregation. Often, when I ask churches to “tell me their story” they focus on the heyday. They talk about the high points, not the difficult parts. If that was the case in the story of Jesus, we would ignore most of Holy Week. Yet each part is a part of the story. As we frame up our lives in new ways, we are also invited into new spaces of reflection.

In her book Entering the Passion of Jesus, AJ Levine invites us to ask ourselves, “what should I have done that I did not do? What risk should I have taken that I was afraid to take? When did my sense of self-preservation trump my sense of courage?”

As we reflect and as we observe a Holy Lent, may our time be spent in the different means of grace, whereby we are fully present to God and God’s will for our lives. May we slow down enough to see that even in the busyness, even in the pain, God restores of the joy of salvation. May we see that this joy is found in being present with God and one another. May we see that in this work, God is preparing the canvas of our lives so that even in our shortcomings and failures, God is building something new and joyful in our midst that our clean hearts and right Spirits might open us up to view the passion of our Lord in new and different ways. 

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.