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.