Create and Make
When you find yourself completely engaged in a project—when your passion is in it and your time and energy funneled that way—it means you care about it. When you are working on something and you have to remind yourself to take a break and stretch your legs, that’s when you know your work has a hold on you. I am sure that at times activities have taken hold, and you have had to realize it was time to turn out the light and get some sleep. With that, you knew you were totally involved.
Consider that God is radically involved with you. In years when conditions allow us to gather, when we come to Ash Wednesday and open our forty days of Lent and Sundays in Lent, we are engaging God, and God is engaging us very deliberately. We are placing ourselves before God. Our Creator is invested in us: passionately working, making —creating a holy connection with us. When we are responsive to this wooing action of God, we open ourselves to that connected relationship. Take a look at the prayer for the day:
Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing that you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The main petition asked of God is “Create and make in us new and contrite hearts”, please. We ask this because when we receive this from God, good things happen: for example, we are unafraid to face changes we must make in ourselves. It makes us open to the mercy of God. Receiving divine mercy, we experience the cancellation of punishment that is due by divine justice. We receive forgiveness for the destructive ways we have maintained.
Think about what mercy is when it comes down to it. Mercy is not receiving from God what justice requires. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome. In his letter (Romans 6:23) there is this passage: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Right before this verse, Paul is developing how in Christ, we trade out masters. We have been employed, as it were, by sin, and thereby have a duty to righteousness, which never goes well for us. It gets us death, not life. He makes the point that we are now employed by God, and we have no duty to sin. We reap the fruit of being made righteous by Christ; this has resulted also in the promise of life forevermore at the end of the road. Sin pays its servants, and the wage earned with this master is death. What is given to those who serve God is the free gift of eternal life.
God is passionate and busy with us, every minute of our lives. That is just how invested in us the Holy One is. In Lent, we have the focused energy to invest ourselves in God. This is a day in which we admit that on our own, things go south. The smudge of ash that we would receive on our foreheads is an admission of our limitation. In this life we get less than a hundred years, most of us, sometimes far less, we just don’t know. Much of that time we are very distracted with things that pay us nothing but trouble.
Ash Wednesday redirects us beginning with our wonderful chance to admit, “We need God’s help!” We get the mark of our mortality; then we get busy with things that match God’s busy-ness in the world. We don’t mope around in fasting or lose ourselves in showy pietism; rather, we work for justice. God invests in us and we invest in God’s sort of work. Look at God’s determination in these passages from Isaiah:
The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places and make your bones strong. And you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations. —Isaiah 58:11-12
With the images of gardening and reconstruction, we see that God is passionate about putting us back together. That is what Lent is about! Forget about empty projects. God the Creator is making and creating in us new and contrite hearts so we can avoid distractions and things that harm us, and be on to things that matter. Here’s a poem for the day:
Foreheads smudged, examined hearts
thus our Lenten fasting starts
We are dust, formed of the earth
Holy Breath then sparks our birth
Wrapped amazingly in grace
We feel mercy’s warm embrace
Dust and ash not strewn or blown:
Imposed with care: that Love be shown.
—DWP + February 2009
God is totally and passionately involved with you in loving restoration. Take time to go into that little room and shut the door. The room of your heart is built by God. A meeting place for the two of you. In secret, there will God reward you. With words or wordlessly, God will most assuredly reward you.