It’s the first Sunday in Lent, so let’s briefly review what repentance is all about. Repentance isn’t just saying sorry; rather, it’s a deep reorientation to the life God desires for us. It’s looking at the road we’re on, how we got here, how it’s working out for us, what went well and where we’ve strayed, and at the end of the day, getting back on God’s path. Repentance isn’t a solo endeavor, at least not on our end. Repentance is the work of the Holy Spirit, who molds us into Christ’s image. Our part is collaboration, but the Holy Spirit begins, sustains, and brings to completion the whole work of our repentance, though. It’s all rooted in God’s Word. Repentance is about being honest with ourselves, acknowledging the truth, and letting God reshape us. Repentance isn’t a one-time event. It’s a lifelong journey of transformation. It’s not about wallowing in our wretchedness, but about embracing God’s grace to become better versions of ourselves. Repentance leads us to true freedom and abundant life with ourselves, each other, creation, and ultimately with God. It’s good for us to revisit from time to time what this means, especially since we talk about it so much.
Let us pray. May only God’s Word be spoken and may only God’s Word be heard; in the name of Jesus. Amen.
A presenter leading a workshop says to the participants, “Without question there’re problems in the world—globally, nationally, and even personally. So raise your hand if you’d like to see some change.” Without hesitation, every hand goes up, eager chuckles throughout the room. The presenter continues, “I’m right there with you. Now keep your hands up if you want to change.” Some murmuring. Hesitancy prevails. All the hands retreat. The presenter highlights a simple truth for many, if not all of us at a basic level. Our longing for change, generally speaking, often clashes with our reluctance to embrace it wholeheartedly, or in other words, for us personally.
Change is a universal—and is arguably itself unchangeable. “Constancy,” the German poet, playwright, novelist, philosopher, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe writes, “in change.” The only constant is change. And understanding this constant is something that seems almost innate. We have an deep-seated sense that things will change, for good or for bad. The constant striving that marks so many of our lives is a witness to our own desire for something to change—something to change for the better, whether our lives are good or not. The wealthiest people the world over are always looking for something new, some change in their lives, to satisfy that longing that something different will bring them one step closer to fulfilment. Many of us want change. We yearn for better relationships, better life circumstances, and especially societal change.
We long for renewal—or at least that things would be different. Just look at the most recent Gallup poll about the direction of our country—20% are happy with the direction we’re headed, while a whopping 78% are unhappy. In the past ten years, the highest satisfaction with the way our country was headed was 45%. That means that even at our most satisfied, about 55%, more than half, were still unsatisfied. Humanity has a collective desire for change. Yet we want the benefits of change, but the idea personally changing—that causes us to hesitate, to step back, or even get angry. Yes, I want change, but I don’t want to change. We want our cake and eat it too…
During Lent, we hear over and over again an iconic, favorite line from Scripture. So iconic to Lent is this line that it’s almost become “the” Lenten line—because in a lot of ways it does encapsulate the point of Lent in a word. Lent is about repentance, about stopping, looking at our lives for they are, and changing what needs changing to be aligned with God’s plan. And so it is that psalm 51 gives clear voice to this: “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” This isn’t just a throw-away line from Scripture, but it’s also a prayer, one that echoes across time and cultures, resonating with the inborn human longing for change. But while for us it’s easy to simply think, “How nice. What a poetic way to think of change,” what with evoking the heart and the spirit—both images littered across poetry to speak metaphorically of human desire and psyche—this simple line from Scripture actually says much more than that. In fact, it expresses an ancient, even cross-cultural understanding of the heart as the seat of human essence, of what makes us who we are.
Let’s start with the ancient Chinese. They revered the heart as the center of moral and spiritual life. They saw the heart as the dwelling place of virtues like benevolence, righteousness, and wisdom. It symbolized the balance between yin and yang, the harmony of the cosmos reflected within each of us.
Among the Lakota people, the first people to live in the region that is today western South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho—among them, the heart was the center of courage, wisdom, and connection to the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka. In fact, the Lakota Sundance ceremony, a sacred ritual of renewal and purification, centered around the heart’s devotion to Wakan Tanka. Dancers underwent physical and spiritual challenges, including fasting and piercing, to demonstrate their commitment and to strengthen their connection to the sacred.
And then in ancient Egypt, everyone’s favorite blockbuster ancient culture to refer to for history’s mysteries—in ancient Egypt, the heart was understood as the vessel that carried you through the journey of the life. For the Egyptians, the heart was the source and seat of consciousness and character. When you died, your heart underwent rigorous examination in the afterlife judgment hall. It would be weighed on scales against a feather representing truth and harmony. This weighing ceremony determined your eternal fate. A heart lighter than the feather of truth, you were considered justified and entered the eternal field of reeds. A heart heavy with ingratitude for all you’d gone through in life and instead harbored negative thoughts and memories, and it, your whole essence, you were thrown to the floor where your being would be devoured by a god with the face of a crocodile, the front of a leopard, and the back of a rhinoceros, known as Amut, or given his job, “the gobbler.”
Closer to home, to the ancient Hebrews, who gave us this beloved line from the psalms, the heart wasn’t merely a physical organ but the core of being. The heart homed emotion, thought, and intention. To speak of the heart was to speak of a whole person. A beating heart was the sign of a living being—flesh enlivened by spirit. It’s this understanding that underpins what we’re doing when we come before God at communion, and you’re invited to “Lift up your hearts.” That’s an invitation to lift up our whole lives, everything about us—our selves, our time, and our possessions. Our hearts are our whole selves. We receive this tradition from our Jewish forebears, and it shapes our self-identity as Christians.
As disciples of Jesus, descendants of the line of Abraham and David, God calls us to embrace fundamental, heartfelt change in our lives, and promises us that a life oriented to his way will change us, will renew us. Daily repentance invites us to relinquish the old and embrace the new, to surrender our will to God’s power to renew the spirit that gives life within us, to recreate our hearts, our whole selves, to raise us to newness of life.
That’s what resurrection is all about, in fact—creating in us a clean heart and renewing a right spirit within us. In the resurrection of Jesus, we see the ultimate fulfilment of what happens when God’s change takes place—redemption. His victory over death heralds change marked by newness of life. As disciples of Jesus, we’re invited to participate in this ongoing change from death to life. The resurrection of Jesus assures us of that, of life beyond death—literally, to be sure, but also now. When we face the death of someone we’re close to, the hope of resurrection provides us comfort and solace, since we know that death isn’t the end but the gateway into eternal life with God. But life beyond death is a promise for change that we experience before our bodies actually perish, and this is the change that is harder for us to bear. But it’s the change that makes a difference in our world, in our lives, in our hearts now.
The promised change of the resurrection calls us to radical obedience. We’re challenged to surrender our own desires and ambitions to follow Jesus wholeheartedly even when the path is difficult or uncertain. This requires sacrificing personal comfort, security, or ambitions for the sake of serving others and advancing God’s kingdom. In other words, it requires us to change. We hope for a better world, but we hope as if we expect someone else to do it. We think of a better world, but we think as if we expect it to happen without us changing. We pray for a better world, but we pray as if we want God to do his work without us—and heaven forefend God should change us for this better world!
Our world is marred by injustice, poverty, and inequality, and we bemoan all that. Yet we cannot, and true Christians do not believe that Jesus’ resurrection simply erases all that’s bad in the world without sacrifice, without transformation, without renewal. The resurrection, our promise that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, not even death, motivates us to work towards what God desires—justice, kindness, and humility. Our belief, our conviction is that God’s will ultimately prevails. And God’s will is that this world change from despair to wholeness, death to life, hate to love. Our whole lives, our hearts, rooted in the resurrection promise of God, are committed to bringing about God’s promised newness of life by living out love, compassion, and mercy, in our own day-to-day lives, but also with an eye toward those we don’t know suffering in the whole human family—the marginalized, oppressed, terrorized, and persecuted the world over.
And to do that, we need change. If we want change, it begins first with us—with us who have been changed by God’s mercy, grace, and love. Filled with hope that the same goodness from God that changed us, so we can also go assured that God will use us as instruments of his change to create clean hearts and renew spirits in a world, in lives that desperately need them.
In Lent, we pray for clean hearts. We want lives shaped by, lives conformed to God’s love. Change brings surrender and renewal, and openness to change, in every avenue of our lives, is a testament to our faith, to our relationship with God through Jesus—who changed death to life for our sake. This prayer, “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me”—this prayer means so much more than first meets the eye. It’s a very fitting prayer for Lent, when we step back and take time to seriously consider our lives and what about them is out of step with God’s design for good life. Lent is a time for us to change, to realign, to repent to God’s plan. As disciples of Jesus, when we embrace change with courage and conviction, and most of all with a fundamental hope in God’s promise, we put our trust in God and in God’s love. As disciples of Jesus, when we embrace change with our trust in God, we raise our hands not only in desire, but in commitment. We lift up ourselves to God’s will. We raise our hands in surrender to a change of heart.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Rev'd Daniel W. Spigelmyer, Jr. 