Nothing He Has Made
The first words we hear in our Ash Wednesday liturgy are these:
“Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and
forgive all the sins of those who are penitent.” Isn’t this an
encouraging thought as we begin another Lenten journey? No matter what
we have done or have left undone, God loves us. No matter what we
have done or have left undone, God is willing to forgive us if we seek
forgiveness and are willing to turn again to him and to a new way of
life.
One of the parts of our baptismal covenant is: “Will you persevere in
resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to
the Lord?” We respond, “I will, with God’s help.” Our covenant
does not read, “Will you persevere in resisting evil and IF you fall
into sin…” Sometimes it takes us a long time to persevere in resisting
some evils and even longer to repent, to turn around, to make a fresh,
clean start. Often we have to let go of past hurts and disappointments.
We have to lighten our load. And each Lenten season, we are especially
given the chance to work on it again.
The liturgy for Ash Wednesday is one of five special liturgies that we
will be using during this Lenten season. It is full of powerful
imagery and words that convey God’s compassion for our humanity.
The opening collect for today says that God hates nothing he has made.
Shouldn’t we do likewise? On this day we can choose to begin to
let go of things—not focusing on those things that don’t really matter,
but the things that do. When I was a child, it was much easier to
give up candy for Lent than it was to stop picking on my little brother
or sassing my mother. As an adult, it is much easier to give up candy
for Lent or to clean every closet and drawer in my house than it is to
give up behaviors that are spiteful or unnecessarily anxious or
unloving. It is much harder to clean the closets in my heart than
the closets in my home. It isn’t easy to change those deeply
ingrained ways of thinking but it is possible, with God’s help. God
hates nothing that he has made. He wants us to clean off and out the
dirt and grime that hide the beautiful, shining soul that is hidden
deep down within each one of us.
How many of you grew up in the Episcopal Church? Perhaps you
remember that before 1979, we observed a Pre-Lenten Season which
included the three Sundays before the first Sunday in Lent. Those
days were called Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima and they
were the Sundays seventy, sixty and fifty days before Easter Sunday
respectively.
Septuagesima was always the Sunday when I started worrying about Lent because I knew what was to come in three weeks.
It wasn’t the solemn Ash Wednesday service when we would get ashes
smeared on our foreheads. It wasn’t giving up candy or eating a
lot of canned fish for six weeks. My anxiety was related to a
project that our church took on every Lenten season. On that
first Sunday in Lent we were all given cardboard mite boxes (so-named
after the widow’s mite). We put them together in Sunday
school. That was fun. Then we were to fill them with money
during Lent. They would be presented as part of the Easter offering to
help orphans in our companion diocese in Nicaragua.
Here’s the part I dreaded. During the service on that first
Sunday in Lent, each child had to walk up the aisle to the
bigger-than-life rector. He would hand us each a big box. It
contained ten boxes of waxed paper, ten packages of copper scrubbies
and ten bottles of imitation vanilla. If you were very small, an
adult was allowed to accompany you to carry the box back to your
pew. We were expected to sell every single one of those items to
help the orphan children in Nicaragua. Everything was priced at fifty
cents an item. Additionally, we were expected to report orally in
church each Sunday on the exact amount of our sales for the week. It
was recorded on a huge bulletin board in the parish hall for everyone
to see.
There were five children in my family. That’s a lot of stuff to sell.
You do the math. We lived on a farm and didn’t even have close
neighbors. There were lots of rich kids in our church whose parents
bought all their stuff on the first Sunday in Lent and on the second
Sunday in Lent their mite boxes were full and their success was
prominently displayed on the parish hall bulletin board for all to see
during coffee hour. No alms were given in secret in that church!
Somehow every single year all five of us sold all our stuff by Easter
Sunday. It wasn’t easy and I didn’t like doing it. The
whole ordeal was an unhappy memory I’ve carried for many years.
This past week I ran the whole tape through my mind again, just like
I’ve done for fifty plus years.
But this time, I decided I would try, with God’s help, to rub off the
dirt and grime of that memory. I would try, with God’s help, to
see if there was anything good that had been buried among those rotten
memories for so many years. If God doesn’t hate anything he has made,
doesn’t it follow that we should let go of the heavy baggage of
negative and hateful feelings?
How on earth did we sell 150 boxes of waxed paper, copper scrubbies and
imitation vanilla? Seventy-five dollars was a fortune for my
parents. They certainly didn’t buy our stuff although my mother
used her egg money to buy one item from each of us. She probably owned
enough imitation vanilla to last a couple of lifetimes. My grandmothers
approached life in two very different ways. It was evident in the way
they handled our requests to buy our Lenten wares. Grandma Wilson
bought one item from each of the three younger kids. She said the
big boys (probably all of eight and ten years of age) could go around
her block and sell their own stuff. On the other hand, Grandma
Streeter put our names in a hat and very dramatically drew out three
names. She bought one item from each of those three lucky kids.
As I look back, I’m sure she called her rich friend, Verlie Smetzer,
who called our mother, who told us that Mrs. Smetzer was very low on
vanilla and needed waxed paper to roll out her pie crusts and didn’t
like the last batch of scrubbies she bought at the store. Mom
always drove us over to Mrs. Smetzer’s and Mrs. Smetzer always bought
lots of stuff from all of us. The list goes on and on. Our
Uncle Chuck, who was our mailman, bought something every week from one
of us. Our Sunday school teachers quietly bought an item from us.
Aunt Edna sent a mail order to us from Iowa. When my big brothers sold
all their stuff, they helped us younger ones sell ours.
The painful memory of that yearly Lenten project is still there but the
sting is gone. The sting is gone. For I finally understand that
God hates nothing he has made. He loves the poor kids just as much as
he loves the rich kids. He even loved those poor misguided people who
believed that the end justified the means in that Lenten project. I
finally get it. My brothers and I were the ones who were truly
blessed because we were showered with love by so many people who helped
us every year. We didn’t have just two parents who bought everything.
We had a whole community of friends and teachers and relatives who
supported us and loved us. God loved each one of us through every
single one of them. And I can choose to remember that with a grateful
heart or I can choose to dwell on the unpleasant part of that
experience for years and years to come.
We can’t change the past but we can change our perspective both on the
past and on the present. We are given no guarantees that our
lives will be a bed of roses with only perfectly wonderful
memories. I have never met anyone who had no difficult
memories. I have met people who have lived their lives in
positive joyful ways even though some of those same people have lived
through very difficult and devastating experiences. They choose to
focus on the fact that God hates nothing he has made. They choose to
wipe away the dirt and grime and to focus on the goodness in others and
in their own lives instead.
As we enter this season of Lent once again, may we examine our lives
and then let go of those things that are weighing us down and instead
focus on the goodness that is all around us and within us.
The resurrection awaits us.
God hates nothing he has made.
Amen.
The Rev. Betsy Porter
Ash Wednesday, Year A
February 6, 2008
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