The Rev. Virginia W. Nagel
Episcopal Diocese of Central NY (Retired)
Today's collect begins by affirming our belief that God alone is able
to bring into order our unruly hearts and minds, with all their passions,
emotions, fears and hopes. We are reminded of the creation story, where
we are told that it is God who brought order into the chaos that existed before
he began his creative work. Lent, in a way, is a time when we especially ask God
to continue his work of creation by bringing order into our lives, into our very
being. The coming climax of Lent, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, are also the
climax of creation, when God shows that he is able to bring order into the minds
and hearts of his people through Christ's vanquishing of sin and death. No
matter how badly we have messed up our lives and our part of the world, God can
heal it and straighten it out, and bring it back into order again, giving us, as
well as all of his creation, a fresh start, a new beginning.
But, you see, this is not automatic. God does not come in and "take over" our
lives and the life processes of earth. We have to ask for this healing, this
ordering of our affections and lifestyles and thinking processes. Jeremiah tells
us that this will occur when we offer ourselves to God to be re-made, cleansed
and made whole again, once again becoming the image of God as we were when first
created. The process, Jeremiah says, involves our willingness to accept God's
writing of his law and his plan on our hearts, so that we live and breathe God's
law, God's plan, God's vision for creation...and for ourselves. At Baptism, we
affirm that we are determined to follow our Lord Jesus Christ, and to seek him
in all people, modeling our lives on his. This is part of the process, of
course. Jesus, you see, was the only human who perfectly showed God's law and
God's plan in his life and his actions: I come not to do my own will, but
the will of him who sent me. This is how God wants us to be, too. When
we give ourselves over to this cleansing, this re-creation into God's image, we
are in fact inviting God to have his way with us, to do whatever is necessary to
teach us to re-order our lives and our thinking and feeling, so that we are
perfectly in tune with him and his dream and vision for his creation.
Jesus, in today's Gospel reading, warns that it's going to cost us. We will
have to be prepared to lose our lives in order to gain our lives. We need to be
prepared and willing to give up our own way of looking at things, our own
selfish desires and dreams, our own interpretations of Scripture that, probably,
let us get away with things that deep down, we are quite aware God would not
approve of. We need to offer ourselves, our memories, our imaginations, our free
will, to God, to clean the corrosion away and reshape the crooked parts back
into their original beauty and splendor...the image of God. We will need to put
aside our pet sins and the ways we try to "get around" God's law, the things we
are so proud of doing all by ourselves, the things that make us feel that we are
better than others in various ways...and allow God to pare away the calluses and
wash away the grime, straighten the crookedness and reshape us into what he
originally intended us to be...and finally, to engrave his laws so deeply on our
hearts that, like Jesus, we become incapable of living apart from God. Yes, it
hurts. Yes, we lose OUR lives, and yes, we come through the process living anew
GOD'S life, as he intended from the beginning. The glorious thing about all this
is that we will have no regrets for the loss of our selfish, egoistical,
prideful, big-headed life. We will find ourselves so blessed and happy with the
results that, like Jesus, everything we do or say will give glory to God. We
will glorify his holy name without even having to think about it, because that
will be our new nature, the nature that he made us to have from the beginning.
Giving praise and glory to God will be the air we breathe and the life we live,
and it will give us immeasurable joy forevermore. Amen.
