Unclutter Your Lives - God's Spring Cleaning

“Yet even now,” declares the LORD, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.   Joel 2:12-13

I love what we are doing for Lent – Picking out one item a day for forty days to give up… Something we don’t need that we can give to someone who does need it.  When Donna first proposed this idea to me, all I could think about was all the clutter in my life – in my closet, in my dresser, on the kitchen table, on my home desk upstairs, on my desk here at church.  It seems like no sooner do I clean off the clutter and new clutter takes its place.  Sometimes the clutter gets so bad that I can’t work at my desk… or we can’t eat at the table. We have too much stuff.  This is a great idea.

Lent is the perfect time for this project.  What a great reminder that we also have too much spiritual clutter in our lives.   Just like its good from time to time to give our home our good spring cleaning, that’s what the season of Lent is for spiritually.  This is a time for God to give our Spiritual lives a good old-fashioned spring cleaning.  That’s what we are going to do these next few Wednesdays. We are going to consider all the spiritual clutter in our lives… the things in our lives that either crowd out or leave very little room for God.  We will be looking at the burdens we carry, the busyness that clutters our schedules…the worries that consume our minds, the conflicts that threaten our relationships, the false treasures that we think we can’t live without. Tonight, though we consider the worst clutter, the clutter we are ashamed of, the stuff we don’t want anyone else to see, the clutter we hide in our closets.

In my family when we heard someone unexpected was about to show up, my mom would go into a panic.  She didn’t want people to see any kind of mess.  We would take all the clutter and shove it in closets. That wasn’t really cleaning… that was just hiding the mess.  Too often that’s what we do with our spiritual mess.  In our shame we hide the mess. We cover it up.  We blame others.  We lie.  We do what Adam and Eve did. When their eyes were opened by their sin and they realized they were naked.  They tried to hide it.  “They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.”  Then when “they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day… the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God…  What are the things in your life you are so ashamed of that you don’t want anyone to know about them… so ashamed of that you would do anything to cover up that secret – an addiction?  Alcoholism?  Troubles in your marriage?  Something from far in your past? 

Let me tell you something important about all our attempts to hide our shameful clutter in the closet.  When my mom would tell me to clean up my room, I would often shove it in a closet or push it all under my bed.   That didn’t fool her for a second.  In the same way you and I can’t hide anything from God.  He knows all about the things we hide.  He knew where Adam and Eve were hiding. He knew why. He knows what you and I are hiding. Indeed, He made that clear today.  He marked us with ashes.  “Dust you are and to dust you shall return.”  With those ashes He said to you and me, “I know all about the clutter in your closet. I know you are a sinner!”  You can’t hide anything from Him.

So why try?  That’s the message of Lent.  Listen again to the reading from Joel.  “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” He invites us to fling wide the closet doorway.  Let Him see the mess… Let Him do His spring cleaning.  He does for us here what He did for Adam and Eve that day.  He knew what they done before He even asked them.  “The Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”  He said, “Who told you that “you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”   God didn’t need their confession.  They needed to confess.   He was giving them a gift – the opportunity to let Him clean out the closet.  That is a gift our God holds out to us as well – a time of confession in our worship… or if you need a private, confidential time with Pastor Bauer or me… or a Stephen minster or some other person you trust.  You need not fear.  You won’t shock God… You won’t shock us.  We already know this about each other – we are all sinful and unclean.  We will tell no one.

After all God has marked us with more than the ashes of repentance.  At baptism you and I were marked with the sign of the Holy cross both upon the forehead and upon the heart to mark us as those redeemed by Christ the crucified… as those for whom Christ shed His blood and rose again.  He did that for our sins.  We have been marked by Him at baptism… “by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing...”   God’s chief desire is clean out the closets of our lives… to remove the clutter… to forgive our sins!  Indeed, He already has in Christ.  That’s the invitation before us tonight… this season of Lent.  “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.   That’s my challenge to you this season of Lent – as you take out one item each day and place it in your bag… spend a few moments in prayer.  Consider the spiritual clutter in your life.  Give it to God.  Let Him do His Spring cleaning.  Amen.