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Clearing Out Room
For God to Move In
Reflections on the
lessons
for the First Sunday in Lent
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:3-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-13
What, in a nutshell, did we just read about in today's lessons? That's an easy one. The lessons all focus on and magnify one of the key characteristics of the nature of God:
Steadfast love.
Peter puts it well:
Jesus suffered and strove for one goal --
to bring us to God.
God, he says, wants to be friends with us,
longs for us to be like family,
wants us to be interested in "him".
Follow that logic and you soon
realize that it's a two-way street.
God longs for us,
and so we must be created to long for God back.
It hasn't really worked out that
well,
but we were created,
the Bible says from start to
finish,
to be close to God
and to enjoy God's presence in our lives.
St. Augustine - in the late 300s put it best in the opening line of his autobiography:
"God, you have created us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you."
One of the purposes of Lent is to consider the ways in which our hearts are restless.
What prevents us from realizing God's steadfast love?
What hinders us from allowing God's unimpeded presence in all the corners of our lives and our relationships?
Why are we restless?
Why don't we feel at home with ourselves all the time?
What is it about where we are, who we are, how we are that leaves us anxious and unsettled?
If only I lived someplace else.
Had a better job,
better children,
better friends,
better spouse,
better bank account.
If only I were a better person.
Maybe then things would be right, we worry.
But Augustine
and so many voices we hear
all around us
keep telling us that it isn't those things
even though many of those
things might ought to be worked on
it still isn' t things like that that keep our hearts ill at
ease.
The true source of a restless heart
is distance from God.
And the distance is created when we shut doors
and fill far corners of our lives with lesser things.
But, in transcendent grandeur,
God still waits at our threshold
like a pup on a doorstep
ready to come in and be glad
as soon as we finally decide to open up.
Many of us live with this distance
a large part of our time on earth.
I do.
It's easy to let separation from God
become an accepted part of daily life
as we worry about the various ways
we can temporarily blunt the aches in our uneasy hearts.
As we worry about what we can DO,
when the real challenge
is to find out what we can STOP DOING.
My old friend Betty Carter died in New Orleans last week at the age of 90. She was one of the short list of people I have met who believed -- and actually lived her life -- in the conviction that Christian people ought not to worry. She wasn't afraid of trying big things, so -- with her husband as co-editors of a small town Mississippi newspaper from the 1930s through the 1960s -- she took a leading role in the civil rights movement and changed the world she lived in mightily. She wasn't afraid of going broke, so she became somebody who could give generously in proportion to what she had and --through her leadership and example -- get others to give in much bigger ways.
And she stands behind dozens of important public improvements in her region and in national politics. And she wasn't afraid to fail, so she could talk about the messes she made and the things she never got around to in ways that made other people want to give them a shot themselves.
If she was worried about being dead she didn't show it. A friend told me she was talking to a writer on the phone about her paper's role in bringing down Huey P. Long's corrupt political machine three hours before she died. She was setting the record straight. She thought that the writer had overestimated and romanticized her part in the crusade. "Just the facts, Ma' am. Just the facts."
Human lives
including our
lives
can display a kind of closeness to God
that overrides worry and anxiety.
That's a big part of the victory over death that Jesus talks
about.
Closeness to God starts when we start letting God come on in
everywhere we can find a closed door to open.
When they're all open,
then we are transformed.
In the language of the fundamentalists,
then we are "saved".
Closeness to God has been described
by theologians
as both "gift" and "virtue".
Gift in that it is God's plan that makes closeness even
possible.
Virtue, which also means
"habit" in Latin,
in that closeness with God doesn't come in a flash of light,
but through a lifetime of habituated responses and
choices.
Ordinary people who practice the
habit of faith
instead of the habit of worry
find that their reward is a closeness to God,
a transformed life that is empowered for good --
maybe good in an outward and public sense,
maybe good within the small circle of your own home,
maybe for good just within your own life,
but empowered for good nonetheless.
It's all about where you live.
And Lent is all about planning and starting our move to live
someplace better.
It may not be very far on the ground,
but it will be a vast distance along the road within us.
You can't get from here to there by worrying,
nor by being nice,
nor by beating yourself up for small-time
naughtiness.
You wind up in a place where God
gets to be friends with you
by starting right where you are
and clearing out room for God to move on in.
It's a mistake to get busy.
Instead, just let down your defenses.
Sit back and relax.
God, you have created us for yourself
and our hearts are restless
until we find our rest in you.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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