Create in me a clean heart, O God . . .

      Ash Wednesday tends to be one of those services which the faithful memorize over the years and breeds a bit of familiarity.  I am ever reminded how parishioners love particular services, and readings, and even sermons.  As I was explaining to our seminarian, Casey, though, that makes such feasts and fasts a challenge.  How do we preach and teach something new?  Can we fill old wineskins with new wine, to use the vernacular of the Bible.  To be fair, Casey is having to learn these things as a seminarian doing student priesting.  But I notice a few nods.

     Ash Wednesday, though, is a blessing for us in the sense that we are given a couple choices of Old Testament readings, that we read two psalms, plus our Epistle and Gospel lesson.  That means I could go six years without repeating a sermon, not that I am a fan of repeating sermons.  This year, that multitude of readings allowed me to focus on the second assigned psalm, of which faithful Ash Wednesday attendees ought to have memorized.  

     In truth, this is a new kind of Ash Wednesday.  I am calling the church to a Holy Lent today, reminding us that we will spend a season self-examining our sins, with help from the Holy Spirit, and inwardly digesting our wretchedness before God.  In the western Church, I think there is often a pushback against this season.  Christians will sometimes think that Jesus died for the others, you know, the really bad people.  Jesus may have suffered some humiliation for our benefit, but we are basically pretty good people, and God is lucky we choose to serve Him rather than whatever idol.  Oooh, I see the squirms.

     This year, of course, we enter Ash Wednesday uncomfortable because of a war being beamed into our televisions and portable devices.  In what seems to be an all-to-real video game, we are watching one nation destroy another, watching a civil war among a tribe of the earth.  Some of us are of an age where we remember that both countries were once our “enemies” in geo-political fights.  So, we are a bit more detached than our younger generations.  But, as a sign of our wretchedness and need of a Savior, we find ourselves cheering for the battlefield successes of the just underdog, with little care or mourning for the young soldiers killed and the effects on their families, knowing that those young “antagonists” likely had no idea why they were fighting or, as is reported, where they were fighting.

     And that is just war.  There is a pesky pandemic raging, in case any of us have forgotten.  Many of us are excited that we may be getting back to normal in the not-too-distant future.  But as a country, we have been reduced to fighting about masks, distancing, and who knows what else, even as nearly 1 million of our brother and sister Americans have died, never mind those who have been sickened by the virus and suffered its effects, some of which are very long lasting.  Can you imagine we would ever be at a place in our lives as Americans where we tolerated the death of 1 million of us as “meh, life/death happens” or “Eh.  They were probably unhealthy and likely to die anyway”?  And some churches have been the places of the greatest political fights, though we have avoided them at Advent.

     In the further background is the “great resignation” and its ripple effect on our economy.  People have left the workforce, perhaps never to return, and suddenly our worship of mammon is brought to the foreground.  We need to make life so difficult that everyone goes back to work, with little consideration of what is going on in their family lives.  Are they caring for elderly?  Are they caring for children unable to do in-person education?  Does it make economic sense for them to work, given their home life?  These are nuanced questions, to be sure, but nobody is considering them.  In service of mammon we bludgeon and club our way to economic prosperity, despite the fact that those whom we are bludgeoning the most will never benefit from our worship of mammon.

     There are other consequences of sin still going strong in the world.  Though the attention on racial injustice from two summers ago was short-lived, we know it’s bubbling just beneath the surface.  We still are dealing with politicians and other media personalities who simply lie.  We were a nation that enjoyed the free flow of ideas.  We trusted that in those discourses some wisdom could be found.  But now we flat out lie, and we villainize anyone who disagrees with us.

     And I have yet to mention the effects of sin on individual lives.  Some of us are dealing with the death of loved ones, that is the big consequence!  But others of us are dealing with diseases and chronic conditions.  Some of us are dealing with strained or worse relationships with loved ones, with little hope of reconciliation.  Though I would have been better suited to mention this in the wider effects, the impact of all these consequences affects all our mental health.  COVID was enough to cause isolation and depression, but now all these others help add a slug of anxiety to each of us.  Heck, for the younger generation, they might have to hide under desks to practice a nuclear attack.

     Ash Wednesday and Lent are all about sin and its effects on us.  We are called to a season of self-examination and repentance in preparation of that glorious promise of Easter.  And so it is good for us to look at Psalm 51 and its wisdom and its ultimate desire.  Psalm 51 is the response we make to the ashes imposed on our foreheads and the reminder that we, too, are dust and will return to dust.  As such, we should not be surprised by its focus on sin.  The examination of sin in the psalm is, of necessity, short, but the psalmist recognizes the need for it to be purged, cleansed, and blotted out.  Those of us noticing the psalm for the first time, despite our familiarity with it, might be surprised to read the psalmist announcing that only against God has he or she sinned and the fact that he or she has been a sinner since birth.  Both deserve more attention than I will give today, but the psalmist is not wrong.  We understand that everyone we meet is created in the image and likeness of God.  When we sin against someone else, we are not just sinning against an animal.  We are sinning against someone who was fashioned by God for His glorious purposes.  Knowing that about ourselves allows us to give up the need for vengeance and trust that God will one day vindicate each one of us who have been sinned against.  Good, I see some nods and I see some faces with consideration on them.

     The idea of sinning has been present with us since we can all remember.  Sinning is doing what God says “don’t” or refusing to do when God says “do this.”  Most of us are parents here today.  When did you need to teach your children how to disobey?  It comes naturally, right?  If you could ask your parents, they would say the same thing about you.  And most parents determine not to make the same mistakes with their own children that their parents made with them, right?  We are so filled with hubris that some of us believe in the beginning that we fight human nature and our kids won’t be disobedient.  We will raise them to live into their full potential as God created them.  I see the chuckles.  You have had the same thoughts, the same desires.  I can succeed where my parents failed.  Some of us are so thick headed and stiff-necked that it takes us seven kids to learn that lesson!

     Another consequence of sin, of course, is that it continues throughout our lives, both its presence and the consequences of its presence.  How many of us have ever tried, consciously tried, not to sin when we left church on a Sunday morning?  Anybody make it to Tuesday?  Again, we laugh, but it is tinged with bitterness.  We understand through experience, like the psalmist, that sin has this crazy grasp on us, that despite our best efforts and strongest wills, we constantly disobey God and hurt others and ourselves.  Some of those sins have lasting consequences that impact us and others for the rest of our lives.  I have been here seven years and know some of those consequences in your lives.  Only you, prompted by the Holy Spirit, know them all.  Only you really know the grasp that sin has on you and your lives and those who you love or those whom you know.  You and God.

     As I was reading the psalm for the however many time, I was struck by verse 10.  For my part, I hoped you would all be as well, because I am going to make word nerds of us yet.  But the word used to describe the creation mentioned in verse 10 is incredibly specific.  The psalmist has a horrible problem.  He or she is a sinner and forced to live with the consequences of his or her sins and the consequences of those around him or her.  Despite his or her intentional desire to do what God wills, there is still this propensity to sin and the consequence of other sins swirling in the world around us.  Create in me a clean heart . . . The word translated as “create” in our psalm is the Hebrew word bara. 

     What makes this verb unique in Hebrew is the fact that it has only one subject.  Only God creates.  Think back in your reading of Old Testament Scripture, each and every time bara is used, God is the one doing it.  From the creation of the world and all that is in it in Genesis to our Psalm to the teachings of the prophets.  God creates.  Creatures make.  Because we are human beings, you and I can make all kinds of other creatures.  We can make tools which help us accomplish our tasks.  We can create systems and interactions which help us to relate to one another or govern ourselves.  Heck, we can even make another human being, so long as we have a man and a woman.  But God alone creates.  God does not need created things to make something else.  He is not taking this substance and that substance to make this thing or being.  He simple creates.

     Our problem with sin, now, should seem more obvious.  You and I can only work with what we are given.  We can love God and strongly desire to do His will in our lives, but we are still stuck with that same heart that has been with us since our birth, with that same heart that allowed Satan to tempt Adam and Eve with those horrible words, “Does God REALLY want what’s best for you?”  And so the psalmist, like us, recognizes our need for a new heart.  God needs to bara each one of us a new heart, if we are to escape our bonds to sin and the consequences of our sins.

     You and I are fortunate as we read this psalm on this fast day.  We know how the story ends.  We are not left miserable, wallowing in our sins.  We are not left hopeless, realizing that our hearts are pre-dispositioned to sin against God and one another.  We are, of course, reminded of the truth, that God must create in us a clean heart.  It is something only He can do; we cannot do it ourselves, no matter how hard we try.  And, just as the psalmist looks forward to that time when God will create that new heart within himself or herself, we look forward, too.

     Of course, you and I are blessed to live after the time of the coming of Messiah.  We know that God came down from heaven, that He lived among us and manifested God’s love to us in the work and person of Jesus, that eventually we, those whom He came to save, rejected Him, so thick and fatty were our hearts, that we betrayed Him, caused Him to be tortured and humiliated for our sins, and that He died, suffering the consequences of our sins that we deserved.  And for His faithful obedience to the Father, He was raised that Easter morning!  Better still, His faithfulness and Resurrection make it possible for us to become God’s children and to begin to experience circumcised hearts, even as we wait for God finally to create, bara new hearts within us.  Hmmm.  The Psalmist recognized the need for Messiah in his or her own life and experiences.  The psalmist, some six or seven centuries before Jesus walked the earth, understood that humans cannot create in themselves, only God can!

     In this day and in this age, the truth of this psalm ought to be more apparent to each of us.  We live in a world that is far closer to WW3 and perhaps even nuclear war than most of us would have scarcely thought possible mere months ago.  We live in a world still besieged by a virus, just in case we forgot as some of our brothers and sisters have apparently forgotten.  Now that we are closing in on a million people dead from the disease in our country, what is the loving response?  I have my rights!  They would have died anyway!  The ripple of that hard-heartedness will affect us for a long time to come.  Our healthcare workers are tired.  They treat people who could avoid much of the effects, both to their health and their loved ones, all in the name of selfish choice.  And we expect them to be cheerful?  We live in a world beset by economic uncertainty.  On top of the pandemic impacts are the effects of the Great Resignation.  Bosses are complaining that people like doing their jobs from home, that employees are comparing salaries, and that the old way of doing business is changing.  Employees are mad that bosses expect them to have two or three jobs to make ends meet.  Finally, I have said nothing about the individual experiences we all have that testify to our need to have God save us and bara new hearts within us.  Some of us are struggling with injuries and diseases other than COVID.  Some of us have frayed, if not outright broken, relationships for any number of sinful reasons.  And, lest we forget, we won’t even talk about our anxieties and mental health in the midst of all this because, well, we don’t want people to think we don’t have our act together, that we are unable to keep ourselves sane in the midst of this crazy world.

     But, like the psalmist, we know we do not have to wallow in our sins.  We know our Lord despises sin, that He will purge His people of sin, and that He will deliver His people through the consequences of sin.  I know, we won’t all get the deliverance we think we want or need, but we know that our Father will do what is best, not just for us, but for those around us.  And because He has demonstrated both His power and His willingness to raise His children from the dead, we can bear our crosses confidant that He will deliver us.  One day.

     In the meantime, we are nourished, fed, and reminded that there are others wallowing in the consequences of their sins who need to hear the promise and hope of the Gospel of Christ, that not only will Jesus bear the ultimate consequences of sin, namely death, but that He promises to bara in all of us a heart like His!

     Brothers and sisters, in a few moments, I will call you to the observance of a Holy Lent.  I will impose ashes upon those who want that physical reminder that they are dust and will one day return to dust.  We will spend a season intentionally self-examining our wretchedness before God.  To outsiders, this might seem like a call to wallowing or communal self-deprecation.  But for us it is a reminder of our need for God.  It is a season where we intentionally remind ourselves that, when we could not save ourselves or create a new heart within us, our Lord, because of His love for us and His mercy, came down to save us and to promise each one of us that one glorious day, He will give us that heart we know we need.  That self-examination is not meant to be undertaken as a wallowing or an emotional flogging.  It is meant ultimately to remind each one of us of the joy we ought to experience at the Paschal Feast, that we are so loved, so treasured, that our Father came for each of us and for all those in our daily life and work!  Like the psalmist, you and I are reminded this season of our need for a Savior, and of the joy that we have that He found us!

 

In Christ’s Peace,

Brian†