It's Lent, a time for repentance and self-examination. And I'm well-aware I haven't blogged as often as I had hoped during my preaching series on the
Heidelberg Catechism. But, nevertheless, the worship and sermon series continues in recognition of the 450th anniversary (last year) of the Heidelberg Catechism and as my own personal response to a challenge from my seminary professor of church history, Gary Neal Hansen. By the way, Dr. Hansen is the author of
Kneeling with Giants: Learning to Pray with History's Best Teachers. I highly recommend it. The challenge--it should be noted--was to preach through the catechism--nothing in the challenge about a blog. This was my own doing. To "press the reset button" is like starting this blog over again. And pressing the reset button is one way to look at repentance or conversion. I'll get to that in a few paragraphs.
Heidelberg450 continues this Sunday at First Presbyterian Church Lake Crystal with Lord's Day 33. It deals with "genuine repentance or conversion;" the "dying away of the old self" and "rising-to-life of the new self;" and revisits Lord's Day 32 (Why do we do good works?) by defining good works as only those deeds born out of true faith. Seems quite appropriate for Lent, doesn't it? This conversion (Gk.
metanoia) is, in the words of one of my confirmation students, "a transformation from one thing into another" like converting dollars into euros or rubles. Conversion is "foundational and incisive.... It is about the complete turnaround of my life by 180 degrees. It is about turning away from the life I have been used to up until now so that this old life stays behind me and is done away with. And it is about turning to another, unfamiliar life, unknown to me until now, so that with every step I take, this new life is ahead of me" (
Eberhard Busch, Drawn to Freedom: Christian Faith Today in Conversation with the Heidelberg Catechism, p. 266).
An interesting contextual note: Lord's Days 32 & 33 are at the very beginning of Part III entitled "Gratitude." So here the catechism is addressing "genuine repentance or conversion" immediately prior to its exposition God's Guide to Grateful Living, the Ten Commandments. The catechism does not portray the commandments as rules which, if and when broken, put us into hot water with God; but rather, the catechism envisions these mandates in the context of the last paragraph of Q&A 1, "Because I (already!) belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit... makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him."
Conversion is an every-day event, I think. Every day there is a reset button. Every day is a new life. This, make no mistake, is not to take our shortcomings lightly. Not at all. The "dying-away of the old self" consists of being "...genuinely sorry for sin and more and more to hate and run away from it" (Q&A 89). And yet, to paraphrase the RCA baptismal liturgy, when we fall, we need not grovel, nor "despair of God's mercy," nor continue sinning as if there's no hope of ever escaping its chains in our everyday, ordinary lives. Not at all, for "...baptism is the sign and seal of God's eternal covenant of grace with us." And grace doesn't leave us chained to sin but sets us free!
