Sermon Preached By Rev. Patti M. Smith - February 13, 2002

Psalm 51:1-17

We are the people of God, bound together in covenant.  A covenant made with God in our baptism and nurtured by regular prayer and worship.  In our corporate worship we sense God’s presence, hear God’s word proclaimed through hymns, prayers, scriptures and proclamation. We are given opportunity to respond to that word and indeed become a living testimony to the word in our daily living.  In our worship we offer our thanks and praise to God for all that God is.  This is good.  As we say regularly in our Communion Liturgy, “It is a good and joyful thing always and everywhere to give thanks and praise to you, Almighty God”. Beyond the praise and thanks giving we come to worship to be transformed by the word of God.  To become newly resolved to be the Holy People of God. 

Tonight,  we enter a special time in the church year when we are invited -- well actually –  more than invited, we are called to practice holiness in ways we have neglected.  A season when we prepare our hearts and minds for the presents of the Risen Christ. On this Ash Wednesday 2002, I am inviting you to keep a holy lent. In this invitation I feel a need to provide for you some guidelines.  I am not going to focus on the spiritual disciplines which are often reviewed on this occasion.  Rather I wish to speak a more personal word which has relevance to each of us. 

Come with me to the beginning.  Listen to what is recorded in our  Holy Book.  In the beginning God created.  God created everything that is and it was all perfect.  In it was everything necessary to sustain life for all creation.  In it was the perfect balance of resources and creatures.  Into this paradise, God created human kind.  Man and woman made in the image of God,  set up in a garden of paradise.  Perfection!  But along with God’s  perfection, came another gift.

One which brought with it the built-in possibility for problems.  That gift is free will.  It is the power to make choices.  Not just the power of choice, but the drive to choose.   There are many choices to be made and a multitude of voices calling out ‘pick me!!  pick me’.  Adam and Eve, early on in their life in paradise,  made a choice – a bad one!  They chose to disregarded God’s instruction; “You may eat fruit from any tree in the garden, except the one that has the power to let you know the difference between right and wrong.”  They chose to  believe  that they knew better than God what would make they happy.  With bad choices come disagreeable consequences.  True for Adam and Eve, and true for you and me. 

There is more than one truth to be learned from this Genesis story.  In addition to our drive to make choices, we also learn that we are created to live in relationship.  No man, no woman is created to be an island unto himself or herself.  A major arena for living out our covenant as God’s people is within our human relationships.  It is from our spiritual center that we form the bonds which hold us together in marriage, in families and in community.  It is when we make bad choices within these relationships that the bonds of our love is strained.  Let’s look at just one of the ways where we seem to have advanced skill in driving stakes into the heart of our most important and intimate relationships. We say mean and hurtful words.  We ignore the feelings of our spouse, our children, our parents.   We deliberately bring pain and hurt to others, and  souls, ours and theirs,  are spattered with the blood of the wounds.   

When I was a child, I liked to play in the mud.  I liked to feel the soft warmth of the mud squishing between my toes.  Then what was even better was to squirt the mud off with the hose! Finally to get into the warm water of the bath tub and wash myself clean!  If I had to pick one time in my adult life when a shower felt the very best it would be the time on an ASP trip when I crawled under a very smelly back porch. The family garbage has been thrown there and the chickens had sought out its coolness in the heat of summer.  The work crew before us had put a new roof on the house and jumped the short distance from roof to porch which caused the porch  to drop about two inches.  My job was to jack up the porch so that it did not sink any further into the muck.  At the end of the work day I smelled really bad -- even to me.  But oh how good it felt as the hot soapy water flowed over my body removing all the dirt and the smell.  How good it is to be cleansed. 

These stories are about getting our physical bodies dirty.  But what of those things that cause dirty spots on our souls.  Those things which make us unholy.  Just how do we cleanse our souls? 

Do you wonder if Eve ever said to Adam, “I’m sorry I said hurtful words that sucked you into a bad decision.”  Or if Adam said to Eve, “I’m sorry I blamed you for making a bad choice when it was equally my decision as well.?”  Do you think they ever ask each other for forgiveness?  Do you think they asked God for forgiveness? 

What about us?  It is through our human relationships that we learn the meaning of belonging to God and to one another.  And it is through these same relationships that we mess up. I want you to think about a time when you said mean and hurtful words to your wife.  When you spoke with harsh or unhelpful words to your husband.  When you yelled at your daughter because of some trivial thing which was more about your pride that her shortcoming.  When you assumptions about a situation got in the way of the what you son was trying to tell you. When have you insisted on choices governing the lives of your aging parents which were more for your convenience that for their well being. 

Our relationships need cleansing and healing.  It is in the waters of baptism that God offers such healing! Baptism isn’t a one time thing.  All we need do is to remember and reclaim  God’s promises.  The message of Genesis is still true.  In the image of God we are created, male and female.  Created for each other to love and respect, and to live together in covenant.  

It is a sacred covenant in which we find an abundance of joy, a source of energy, where we together  create a synergy far greater than that we could achieve alone.  It is into this sacred relationship that God places children to be loved, nurtured and molded into adulthood.  

God has given us friends to cherish and to make our days meaningful. And for how long?  How much time do we have to perfect these relationships?  We have no idea of the length of our stay on this earth!  It is therefore imperative that we not waste a single day of the joy which is ours.  You see, every day is a gift.  In just a few minutes you will be invited to come to the altar and to “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  Put another way, You have come from God, you belong to God, and you shall return to God.  We have a limited and finite quantity of time on this earth and we just can not afford to waste any of it hurting each other.  We will miss out on to much of God’s goodness, joy and hope.  Make this a Holy Lent by allowing God to bring healing and wholeness to your most important relationships.  Whether with spouse, child, siblings, parent, your student or your teacher; your business associate or friend.   I know that not all good ideas work.  And I know that not all relationships turn out the way we planned.  Sometimes they end.  But there is no reason to make that an ugly and mean experience.  Take this lenten season to transform  your life and your relationships by getting right with God and with the people you love.   Amen. 

THE CONGREGATIONAL PRAYER

THE PASTORAL PRAYER

[Prayer]