Sermon: Create in me a heart free of temptation (Lent 1)

Lent 1B

February 22, 2015

Genesis 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15

            Every year, on this first Sunday in Lent, we get the story about Jesus being tempted in the desert by the devil. This year, in particular, I find this story especially helpful in setting up our Lenten theme of simplicity.

            Why is that? Because for me, and maybe for you too, temptation is one of the biggest barriers to striving to live a simple life. It is the temptation to opt for cheap and convenient over what’s best for me and the world. After all, usually what is cheap and convenient for me means that someone somewhere else is paying for it, whether that is poor treatment of workers or animals, low wages, the environment, or even my own health 20 years from now.  I also struggle with the temptation to be lazy instead of intentional about my choices. On the flip side, I am also sometimes tempted to take on more and get more done instead of take the rest I need.

But perhaps the temptation with which many of us are most familiar is the temptation to acquire and hang onto things because they promise us an easier or happier life. Advertising tells us that we have in our lives a hole that is the shape of this amazing product, and until you own this product, your life will not be complete. Indeed, your very worth is dependent upon owning this product, so buy it now! Or, it’s that you need to keep the stuff you already have – because it was given to you by someone special, or you might need it someday, or even though you don’t need it anymore, you got it at a time in your life when you did, and it’s just too sentimental and so now you can never get rid of it. And it is all very tempting, because sometimes these items do bring us happiness… it is just that this happiness is often fleeting, and then we just need to find some place to stash all our stuff, and our things become a burden, and we then aren’t so happy after all. None of these things, tempting though they are, provide us with the joy that can be found in Christ, the joy that can be found in the gospel, the joy that can be found in generosity and simple gratitude.

As I was compiling resources for this Lenten series, someone directed me to a wonderful children’s book called The Quiltmaker’s Gift. It tells the tale of a magical quilt maker who lives in the clouds and spends her days sewing the most magnificent quilts. She refuses to sell these quilts, but

rather, only gives them to people truly in need. Meanwhile, there is this king who revels in things. He orders everyone in the kingdom to give him several gifts a year, because he just loves presents so much. And yet, he never, ever smiles. None of his things actually make him happy. He decides he needs one of these quilts, that this is the thing that will finally make him happy. He orders the quilt maker to give him a quilt, but she replies, “Make presents of everything you own, and then I’ll make a quilt for you. With each gift that you give, I’ll sew in another piece. When at last all your things are gone, your quilt will be finished.” The king thinks this is ridiculous – he can’t give away all his beautiful things! He tries several tactics to get her to give him a quilt, but nothing works. I’ll read to you what happens next…

[He gives in, gives his things away, and lo and behold he starts to feel happy – so happy that he starts to relish in giving instead of getting. He gives until he has nothing left to give, and the quilt maker gives him a quilt. He spends the rest of this life helping the quilt maker give her beautiful quilts to the poor, calling himself the richest man in the world.]

Sometimes it is in simple stories that we hear the message the clearest: generosity trumps temptation. The king thought that having more things would make him happy. He, too, was fooled by this temptation that is a reality for so many of us. And of course, it was when he was able to let go of stuff and focus instead on generosity, gratitude, and serving those in need, that he was able to experience joy and live a life of simplicity.

I love this story for today for even more reasons. One is that in our Old Testament reading, we hear about how God promised never to destroy the earth again by a flood, and as a reminder of this promise God put a rainbow in the sky. Quilts are kind of like a rainbow, a promise, you can wrap around you.

Taken at International Quilt Festival,
2014, in Houston, TX

Another reason I like this story for today is that the image of a quilt reminds us that we are all stitched together into the body of Christ – that we are beautiful as individuals, like a lovely fabric print, but when we are put all together by God’s handiwork, we become something magnificent.

So today, I wanted to make with you a beautiful, rainbow colored heart that is stitched together and full of our promises to live into God’s promises. My hope is this project will continue throughout Lent, as you continue to add to it. One of the scriptural centerpieces of Lent is the Psalm on which our offertory hymn is based: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Our hearts are tarnished by all kinds of temptations, distractions, and sins, but this prayer is that God would create in us new hearts – hearts that are dedicated to generosity, gratitude, simplicity and service. We cannot do this alone: we do it only with God’s help, and with the support of the colorful community around us.

So for the next few minutes, we will start making this heart of promise. Here you will find several strips of fabric, and some fabric markers. Choose a strip of fabric, and on it, write a goal you have this Lent to simplify your life, something you will do to overcome the temptations of this world, whether that temptation is for more stuff, or for convenience over consciousness, or for ignoring the negative impact your way of life has on the planet, or to fill your time with meaningless activities, or whatever other temptation you may face. Write your goal, or your prayer, on the fabric, and weave it into this heart, and as you add your color to our heart “quilt,” trust that as we pray for God’s help, God’s promise will not disappoint us.

When it looks like everyone who wants to has participated, I will close this time of reflection with a prayer, and we will sing our hymn of the day. And now, I invite you into a time of prayer and reflection…

          







  Let us pray… God of promise, we cling to the temptations of this world, even though we know that true joy comes when we cling to you. Create in us clean hearts, O God, and renew right spirits within us, so that we will be emboldened to change our habits into actions that are to your glory. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon: Create in me a clean heart (Ash Wednesday)

Ash Wednesday

Feb 18, 2015

Psalm 51

            “Create in me a clean heart O God, and renew a right spirit within me! Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with your free spirit.” [LWB Setting 1/ELW #186 tune]

            Sound familiar? How many of you have heard that before? When you hear it, are you transported to a different time and place? I am transported most strongly to the sanctuary of my home congregation, full of so many memories of significant moments in my life: my confirmation, several

Peace Lutheran Church, Grass Valley, CA,
is a part of my story with this Psalm

oboe recitals I gave there, my ordination, my wedding. My heart feels immediately comfortable singing these words, because they have been written on my heart since before I can remember, and I sang them, often to that tune, on many, many Sundays of my life in that sanctuary for 18 years.

            I knew those words and tune mostly as an offertory hymn, sung as the offering is brought forward and we prepare for communion. As I have grown older, I have come to appreciate even more the depth of those words and where they come from. We heard them today in the Psalm – and we do every Ash Wednesday and every Holy Week and often at some other point during Lent. Psalm 51 is the quintessential Lenten Psalm, because of its deeply penitential nature. Tradition says that King David wrote this Psalm after being confronted regarding his series of mishaps in which he coveted someone else’s wife (Bathsheba) as she bathed on the roof, then arranged to have her husband Uriah killed in battle, then took Bathsheba as his own wife. (It’s a great story for teaching confirmation students about the 10 Commandments, because David breaks so many of them in so short a time!) When David’s prophet Nathan confronts him, David is deeply contrite, and he writes this Psalm.

            Well, it may or may not have happened just that way, but I always found it very useful that this Psalm had a whole story to go with it. It helped me enter into it more deeply, to relate it to real life events. And it helped me to realize: whether or not that’s what really happened, Psalms are always connected to a story – whether it is someone’s story from hundreds or thousands of years ago, or my own story, or yours, right now.

            This year, the story it is connected to for me is the story of how we, as a congregation, are going to strive to live more simply during Lent this year, and specifically to my own efforts at this,
which I’ll say more about later. I am particularly drawn to that line, “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” That word, “create,” is the same one used in Genesis when God creates the universe. It is a uniquely divine activity. And the heart, in Hebrew anthropology, is the place from which one’s will and desires come. So the Psalmist is asking God to create in him a heart that is oriented toward God’s will, not his own.

And that’s just what Lent is about, right? It is about our attempts at personal reflection and evaluation, and considering the things in our lives that hinder our relationship with God, and trying to eliminate those barriers. And it is also about recognizing that in the end, only God can create in us clean hearts. Only God’s divine action can recreate our will.

And so spiritual growth becomes something we do together, God and us. For our part, we engage in activities such as giving up over-indulgence and excess, being more generous to those in need, or taking on a prayer practice. We participate in such activities in hopes that in doing so we are preparing our hearts to be created anew by a God who loves us too much to let us stay the way we are. We use these tactics to open ourselves up to the possibility of change, and then God, in His creative power, creates in us clean hearts that are oriented toward God’s will and way.

            To me, this is an essential way to approach the practice of living simply. So much of striving to live more simply has to do with overcoming old habits, habits that may work for us in our personal bubble, but have serious consequences when considered for their broader effect. For example, one area of simplicity we are talking about is limiting waste in order to care better for and live more lightly in God’s beautiful creation. So: it works just fine for us to go to the grocery store and bring

home food for our families in plastic bags. After all, we use those bags for garbage can liners and to pick up pet waste, or maybe we even go so far as to recycle the unused bags. So, no problem, right?

But looking upstream, what about all the petroleum used to make those bags? What about the land and air that is destroyed or polluted to make those factories? What about the workers who breathe in those toxic chemicals? What about the trucks that transport the bags to your local Wegmans? And then looking downstream, what about the stray bags that get caught up in the trees and pollute our lovely streets? What about the sea turtles who mistake plastic bags floating in the sea

for the jellyfish they love to eat? They eat the bags and choke, or become too lethargic to migrate with the seasons, or to mate, and they end up dying – not just that one turtle, but the whole species. Suddenly, my innocent grocery trip has become a part of a large, complex web of detriment.

            We know these things happen, and that our habits contribute to them – so what keeps us from changing our ways? Inconvenience? Laziness? Forgetfulness? Ambivalence? Is a heart with these things as its value the sort of heart that is ready to praise and worship God? If God could create a clean heart, a new heart, in us – what might it look like? Where might that clean heart’s will be oriented?

            As many of you know, I have gotten very passionate in my preparations for this series. One thing I have done is started working to cut way back on the amount of plastic I consume. I’m primarily concerned with single-use plastic, the stuff that I know is only fleetingly a part of my life before it ends up a part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an island of plastic garbage twice the size of Texas in the Central north Pacific Ocean. I have learned about the toxins in plastic, which leach into our food and water, the toxins taken in by the people who make the stuff, and the ways this man-

made substance, which cannot ever decompose, pollutes our world. I have been horrified by the far-reaching consequences of plastic, and the many photos I have seen of the havoc it has wreaked. I have been moved to take some small steps, and to share my learnings with others, and plan to take more steps over the coming weeks and months.  

It has not been easy – but through my learning and my small action steps, I can feel my heart being created anew. I can feel God using this opportunity to reorient my will into one that relishes in the beauty of the eco-system God has created, instead of contributing to its destruction. I can feel God using this to help me see other things with fresh eyes, whether it is what I eat, how I spend my time, or how I view my relationship with and responsibility to my neighbors, both people I know and people I will never meet but who played an essential role in allowing me to live the life with which I am familiar.

            I will tell you, I didn’t go into this with the intention of having God create a new heart in me – I went into it strictly with my head, trying to plan this Lenten series. I didn’t intend to be changed because frankly, I thought I was doing pretty well already. And I will also confess, that when God

creates a new heart… it hurts a little. Having habits change can be a wonderful and healthy thing, but it can also be a frustrating, discouraging, and convicting thing.

As my heart continues to be recreated by my loving God (because God’s got a long way to go yet, believe me!), it continues to hurt, but it also continues to bring new life and new perspective. And that is why this prayer remains essential: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” It was David’s prayer when he recognized the depth and reach of his sin. It has been the prayer of many generations of Jews and Christians who have prayed this Psalm. And it is our prayer, as we enter this Lenten season: that God would use this time to open us to the possibility of newness and change. At the end of Lent, we will see how God turns death and loss into life and victory through Jesus Christ; and so let us, as we pray these ancient words, also pray that God would create life and victory in us.

            Let us pray… Holy God, create in us clean hearts, and renew a right spirit within us. Cast us not away from your presence, but bring us ever closer to you, as we work to open ourselves to your life-changing creativity in our lives. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Simplicity Calendar: 40 Days for a simpler life

Among other resources for our Lenten series on simplicity, we have put together this calendar. It includes a different simple activity for each of the 40 days of Lent, to help you engage in all the different aspects of simplicity that we will be exploring. This came together with the help of Nadia Bolz Weber's "40 Days for Keeping a Holy Lent," and the ELCA's resource, "Living Simply with God" hunger resource, but also a fair amount came from the brains and dreams of my planning team.

Here's how to use it: each day has a simple practice. In addition, each week has a practice. These are things that are beneficial to do for more than one day, and offers some more longevity in the practices, which allows you to dig deeper into them. These practices also offer a bit of reasoning/education as to why they are included.

So, use this as you like. I hope it helps you in whatever part of your simplicity journey you are right now. Happy simplifying!

Walking Simply With Christ Throughout Lent

Day 1 (Ash Wednesday): Pray for your enemies.

Day 2: Start a gratitude journal, writing down 5 things each day that you are thankful for.

Day 3: Don’t turn on the car radio. In the quiet, pray for people who are hungry.

Day 4: Give $20 to a non-profit of your choosing.

[Sunday, February 22]

à This week, write in your gratitude journal each day. Being grateful for what you already have is an important way to fend off wanting more. (Actually write it down, so you can go back and look later!)

Day 5: Reach out to someone who is sick or in need of companionship.

Day 6: Look out the window until you find something of beauty you had not noticed before.

Day 7: Give 5 items of clothing to the South Wedge Mission’s Free Store.

Day 8: Notice your trash today and see how much you accumulate. Think of ways to reduce waste. (Could you have composted something? Used something reusable instead of single-use?)

Day 9: Stop saving items to “read later.” Read it now or recycle it.

Day 10: Buy a few $5 fast food gift cards to give to homeless people you encounter.

[Sunday, March 1]

à This week, take 5-minute showers, and/or have some no-shower days. Many people in the world don’t have access to clean water at all, yet we in the Western world tend to waste it.

Day 11: Call an old friend.

Day 12: Pray the Paper (pray for people and situations in today’s news).

Day 13: Read Psalm 139. Memorize one verse that speaks to you.

Day 14: Pay a few sincere compliments.

Day 15: Think about the first thing you touch in the morning. How much value does it have compared to everything else (including people) you touch today?

Day 16: Spend 10 minutes looking at the sky, trees, and land, and give thanks for creation.

[Sunday, March 8]

à This week, incorporate rest into your daily routine, even if it is just taking a moment of quiet once every hour, or finding 15 minutes to sit quietly. Use this time to rejuvenate and be with God, whatever that looks like to you.

Day 17: Forgive someone. Or, apologize to someone.

Day 18: Write someone a hand-written letter.

Day 19: Change one light in your house to a compact florescent.

Day 20: Take a walk with someone you love, or a new friend.

Day 21: Schedule a more significant Sabbath in your day. It should be a 6-to-1 ratio, with one hour of rest to 6 hours of work. Use that time for meditation, retreat, or volunteering.

Day 22: For two hours, turn off all devices (phone, computer, etc.). Use this time to play a game with your family, call an old friend, or have a conversation – in short, to connect with people you love.

[Sunday, March 15]

à This week, try having two meatless days. Water used to raise livestock accounts for 40% of water consumption in the US (compared to 13% for domestic use like showers and toilets), and livestock are responsible for most of the methane gas and ammonia put into our atmosphere. If a four-person family skips steak once a week, it has the same environmental impact as taking your car off the road for nearly three months. (Plus, it’s good for you!)

Day 23: Introduce yourself to a neighbor.

Day 24: Read Psalm 121. Memorize a verse that is meaningful to you.

Day 25: Bring your own reusable mug/water bottle/takeout containers. If you don’t have these, acquire them.

Day 26: Make a meal completely from scratch.

Day 27: Don’t buy anything today. Give thanks for what you already have.

Day 28: Light a candle and say a prayer for someone you have seen recently who is in need.

[Sunday, March 22]

à This week, set aside a chunk of time to tackle one category of “stuff” in your house (clothes, kitchen, hobby room…), and decide what to discard. Ask yourself, “Does this item add value to my life? Does it spark joy in me?” If the answer is no, and it is good shape, then donate it to the South Wedge Mission’s “Free Store” (donations taken 4:30-6pm on Wednesdays). Otherwise, throw it out.

Day 29: Write a thank you note to your favorite teacher.

Day 30: Invest in (or make!) canvas shopping bags. Bring them not only to the grocery store, but into every store. Try not to acquire any bag you will later throw away/recycle.

Day 31: Use Freecycle to get rid of stuff you don’t want. www.freecycle.org

Day 32: Donate art supplies to an elementary school, locally or in Rochester City.

Day 33: Read John 8:1-11. Memorize a verse that is meaningful to you.

Day 34: Smile at people today, because your glass is half full! It’s a great practice, and it can make someone’s day.

[Sunday, March 29]

à This week, try to shop local whenever possible. Go to the public market or a local bakery, talk to the farmers who grow the food, buy products made in New York, support local business. One of the biggest oil impacts on the earth is transportation of food and goods. Buying local takes out that middle step that is so expensive (financially and environmentally).

Day 35: Extend small kindnesses to people today: pay for someone’s coffee, open or hold the door, give someone your place in line.

Day 36: No sugar day – where else is there sweetness in your life?

Day 37: Give $20 to a local non-profit.

Day 38: Pray for peace.

Day 39: Educate yourself about a different religion. See how it is the same or different from your own.

Day 40: Pray for your enemies (you probably have new ones by now) then decide which of these exercises you’ll keep for good.