Rebooted

 It's Lent again. What's that all about, anyway? And what's that repentance thing that the pastor keeps talking about? What good is feeling sorry, anyway? This sermon, preached on Ash Wednesday, takes a good look at those questions. Maybe it will help explain some things that you've always wondered about.

If you use a computer, you know that sometimes it needs to be rebooted. I imagine that all of us have experienced a time when the computer just wouldn’t work right any more. You’re chugging along, surfing the web or typing a document; and all of a sudden, things start to go wrong. Your frantic clicks on the mouse are useless, because the screen is frozen and refuses to respond. When you press Control-Alt-Delete… nothing. That’s when you have to reboot the darn thing by turning it off completely and allowing it to start all over again from scratch. I don’t know why computers behave this way, although I’m sure that somebody does. My suspicion is that they simply get gummed up from the amount of nonsense they are forced to process on a daily basis. Pop-up ads, intrusive web sites, and viruses that sneak in computer from innocent-looking links in the email get them so thoroughly messed up that they don’t work right anymore. Sometimes they even need to be taken in to the computer experts to be cleaned out and put right again.

I’m told that all computers should be cleaned out at least once a year. I suspect that is the electronic equivalent of spring cleaning. My mother used to do deep cleaning every spring when she could open the windows and air out the house after the stuffiness of winter. She not only dusted and vacuumed, she scrubbed the windows, washed the curtains, and cleaned the baseboards. I’m told that my grandmother even scrubbed the walls to get rid of the dust that had settled everywhere after the coal furnace had been used all winter. It’s a good idea to clean things up periodically, whether you’re doing spring cleaning, rotating the tires and changing the oil in your car, or taking your computer in for a tune-up.

During this season of Lent, we are invited to do the same thing with our souls; and Ash Wednesday is the day that we are encouraged to begin by taking a good look at ourselves. When we take an honest look at ourselves, we’ll see that our souls are all gummed up with junk and they aren’t working as well as they should be. Some of them might even be as frozen as your computer screen is sometimes. After all, we have been dealing with all kinds of nasty stuff since last year’s Lenten season. We have allowed anger to creep into our lives, and resentment to take up residence there. Apathy has wormed its way into our lives, because images of the violence around us has desensitized us to the suffering it causes. The charity that we practiced last year has been crowded out by fear of the future. We’ve even fallen prey to the advertisers on Madison Avenue who tell us that we need more, more, more! What’s worse is that we have started to think that the anger, resentment, apathy, fear, and greed that have taken over our souls are normal! If your computer has run slowly for months, you start to think that it’s supposed to be that way. We are no different. On Ash Wednesday, we are invited to take a good, hard look at our souls, and to be reminded that who we are is not who we are supposed to be. We shouldn’t criticize ourselves for being human; but we should realize that we humans get gummed up on a regular basis, and every now and then, we need to start over again. You can think of it as rebooting our souls. It’s just as important to get rid of the junk in our souls as it is to get rid of the junk in our computers.

Now, Ash Wednesday doesn’t finish that rebooting; it only starts it. We need the whole Lenten season to finish the process. Of course, when we’re talking about making a fresh start in our spiritual lives, we don’t call it “rebooting,” we call it “repentance.” To some people, repentance simply means being sorry for something that they have or haven’t done. Being sorry is certainly vital to the process of repentance, but if we don’t go any farther than being sorry, our souls will be like that frozen computer screen and we’ll stay mired in our guilt. We need to move ahead to confession after we take inventory of our gummed up souls and are sorry for all the mistakes that we have made. Did you notice that the author of tonight’s scripture reading did that? “I have sinned,” he said, “and done what is evil in your sight.” Today, we usually say something more like, “Boy, did I screw up!” but it’s the same message. We realize that we have fallen short of God’s expectations for us, we’re sorry for it, and we admit it! That’s why we add a Prayer of Confession to our Lenten worship services. We publically admit our mistakes. And the good news is that we are assured that God has forgiven us! We can start over again! And that leads to the final step in repentance: committing ourselves to the hard work of changing. You can see why I say that rebooting our souls – repenting – is not a one-time event but a process. We start with recognizing that our souls need to be cleaned up; we are truly sorry for our mistakes; we admit those mistakes; we receive forgiveness from God (and sometimes from one another); and we start all over again.

Now, we can’t do any of this by ourselves. We need God’s help for every step in the process! We need God’s help to recognize our own failings, because every one of us has big blind spots about our own character. We need God’s help to be truly sorry about those failings. Don’t we all know people who take pride in their greed, or are righteous about their anger? We need God to help us to have the humility to face up to who we really are, way down deep. And after receiving the forgiveness that only God can give us, we need God’s help to start over again. But the good news is that God is more ready to help us than we are to ask for that help!

You know, we Christians talk a lot about walking on the right path as we try our best to follow Jesus. You might be surprised that the Hebrew word for “repent” actually means “turn.” When we repent, we turn from one path onto another one. We realize that there is a better path than the one we are following, and with God’s help, we change our direction. With the psalmist, we pray, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” If we can truly pray for that, then we are well on the way to repentance. And during this season of Lent, I think that’s what God really wants of us. Would you like to be rebooted? I invite you to hit the restart button right now.