"Time to Clean"

 The junk is piled high and wide. When in doubt, I throw it in the furnace room. I am trying to work up the will to clean it out and, take it all to the town dump, but excuses abound, like “try writing about it and perhaps it will make the mess disappear.”

 Kathleen Norris wrote Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith, containing short entries about faith and life.  In her entry on “Repentance” she tells the story of a little boy who wrote a poem about how angry he gets when his father yells at him. In his poem he imagines his response is to, “throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town.” The conclusion reads, “ ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself I shouldn’t have done all that.”

 It is hard to clean up the messes we make in our lives. Sometimes we prefer to ignore the growing monster in the other room, allowing hurts and wounds to pile up because it seems easier to throw them in the furnace room that to throw them out. Sometimes we allow our emotions to ruin not only our lives but our families, our homes and even “the whole town.”  It isn’t hard to create a messy room, but it is really hard to clean it up, as any mother of a teenager or wife of a “rat packer” like me can attest.  I know that once I get the junk out the door, into my trunk and delivered to the dump, I will feel like a man set free. Why do I wait?

The little boy, in his confessional poem, was taking the first step toward the healing that repentance offers in the great tradition of “Have mercy on me, O God….” (Psalm 51) This second weekend of Lent, let’s find time to begin cleaning up the mess we all carry around inside our lives, so that by Easter we have made room for the sheer joy of the Resurrection to fill the cleaned up space. Norris concludes,  “If the house is messy…why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell.”  

Time to clean.

Reboot Your Life (Lent I)

You know that experience when your computer just won’t do anything?  The screen is frozen, and you are in danger of losing all of your work. You shout ‘Ugh!’, or more colorful words What is the one remedy to resort to when the computer is just resisting all other efforts?

The one thing that your frozen, uncooperative computer will respond to is this: reboot. When you restart a computer it wipes out all the garbage that is standing in the way of that machine doing what it's supposed to do. Sometimes the only way to remove the trash inside, to free up the memory, is to reboot the thing.

Psalm 51 is the plea to God we use when life brings us to the point of realizing we cannot fix this computer on our own.  It is just stuck, so we need to start over. If you are feeling stuck in your life a good place to begin the process of becoming unstuck is to review whether there is anything it would be healthy for you to confess before God; not for God's sake, but for your own. 

This year you have enough stuff to make you feel down about life.  I declare that this Lent you don't need to feel guilty about eating a piece of chocolate or having a second cup of coffee. Because God does not delight in sacrifice. What God desires from each of us is a broken spirit and a contrite heart as signs that we recognize that there are things in our lives that are blocking us from peak performance.

The Church imposes ashes each year as a symbol that we are dust, not just to remind us of our own mortality, but also as a reminder that we need a new start by allowing God reboot our lives.  The ashes remind us not that we are dead, but that we are dead to sin and that you are alive in Christ. 

Lent is the annual journey from Ash Wednesday to Easter. It is a time of preparation, of cleansing, of starting over. Use this season to reboot your life, to restart your interior life, replacing the dirge of dying with songs of joy and gladness.

Heavenly Conversations

Imagine your first conversation with Jesus.

Where are you? Who starts the conversation?  What is the first thing you say?  You are not going to talk about the weather, are you?

While I generally follow the counsel of John Calvin, who recommends that we do not inquire into mysteries that are beyond human comprehension, I think we do have some basis for allowing our imaginations to run free on our first heavenly conversation.

This weekend the Church thinks about the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ. (Mark 9:2-9) In this event two Jewish men who had died centuries earlier meet with Jesus on a mountain top. What we learn there gives our imaginations room to roam. We learn that Moses and Elijah are alive, that they are physically present, not appearing as ‘ghosts’ or as in a dream. No, they ‘appeared’. They could be seen.  Their presence was real enough that Peter, somewhat foolishly, suggests putting up a tent for each of them.

They were recognizable and ‘knowable.’  That is, someone, presumably Jesus, knew them by sight and called them by name.

They  could speak and be understood. They appear in person to speak with Jesus, presumably in Hebrew. There is no suggestion that they are afraid of speaking with the Son of God.

I sure don’t claim to know exactly what the next part of our existence will be like.  But, from this event (and others in the Bible), I believe we will have real bodies which Jesus will recognize and know by name.  We will speak in awe, but not in fear, and be understood. We will see, hear, and comprehend Jesus in all of his glory.  

Imagine with joy your first heavenly conversation with Jesus.

She Will Raise You Up

 

Barb made 6:00 a.m. tolerable.  Sitting in a tiny outpatient room in a hospital 40 miles from home at that hour was a challenge to our minds and bodies, but Barb greeted my wife (the patient), and after telling her what a cute name she had, she asked, ‘And where did we get him?,’ referring to me, the scruffy man huddled in the opposite corner.  We had a pleasant conversation as all of the vitals were taken and as Jill modeled the beautiful hospital gown.

Nurse Barb got me an exemption from the rule requiring me to vacate the room during surgery since the procedure was relatively brief. So, while the surgery was underway I remained in the room working on my sermon text, which includes a little vignette about Jesus visiting Peter’s mother-in-law who was suffering from a bad fever. “So he went up to her, took her hand, and helped her up.”(Mark 1:31)

Soon thereafter the surgery team returned, wheeling the patient back to one side of the tiny room. Barb asked me to get up out of the ‘big chair’ because she had to move Jill to a seated position to start the recovery process. And so she did. Barb took Jill by the hand and helped her up.

The book of Mark was written in Greek, and the word used to describe Jesus helping up Peter’s mother-in-law is the same word that Mark uses to announce, “He has risen!” (16:6)  I believe that Mark wanted us to see the act of raising up Peter’s mother-in-law as a glimpse of what was to come for Jesus, and one day, for all who are ‘re-covered’ by Jesus’ healing power.

Which made me think about Nurse Barb, and the thousands upon thousands of caregivers who every hour of every day, 24/7/365, take someone by the hand and help them up. I am praying that Barb, and all her sisters and brothers in the world of delivering healing, know that they are doing the work of Jesus.  “We need to get you up so you can be well.”

She will raise you up, offering spiritual eyes a glimpse of the eternal.

God bless the healthcare workers who raise us up so that we may be made whole.  Just like Jesus.