Surrender to Win (Proper 8 Year C Gospel)

Surrender to Win 

Luke 9:51-62
Homily delivered Fifth Sunday of Pentecost (Proper 8; Year C RCL)
27th June 2010; 10:15 a.m. Said Eucharist
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Seattle Washington
Readings: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20;
or 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21; Psalm 16;
Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

I remember very vividly the moment when I knew I needed to leave the denomination of my youth and become an Episcopalian.   I read in Thomas Merton’s book Zen and the Birds of Appetite a passage that said something like this: “Any God that needs to be kept alive through constant effort of mind and acts of will is an idol." The next day, I read in Merton's Meditation and Spiritual Direction, "God does not expect us to be a robot army of victim souls.”  The two passages, taken together, spoke to me clearly and struck me to the core. 

I remembered that St. Paul says the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23).   These things were not present in what I had been calling my “spiritual life,” but I had glimpses of them in Episcopal worship.  The God I had been experiencing really did seem grim, set upon my becoming a robot, and I felt like a victim, and was angry.

 Thomas Merton

I realized I had been worshiping at the altar of an idol, and needed to come to the Table of Christ, the altar of the loving, gentle God of all. 
 
Jesus in today’s Gospel has his “face set to go to Jerusalem” and seems particularly grim, if not outright fierce.  He scolds a man who wants to take a day or so off so that he can fulfill that most basic obligation of a child, to bury his father.  “Let the dead bury their own dead,” he says.   He then refuses to let another go and bid his loved ones farewell.

These are two of the so-called “hard sayings” of Jesus.  It is important to understand what he is saying.

It is not that he wants us to be heartless robot souls.  He is not calling us all to be irresponsible people negligent of our duties and common decency.   Even in these verses, he reproves his followers for mean-spiritedness and he seems almost wistful in telling the other disciple just how hard the path he has chosen has been for him.

Jesus is set on the road to Jerusalem, where he will fight on behalf of all God’s creatures the final battle with Evil, the Powers of this world, Law, Guilt, Sickness, and with Death itself.    He is focused on the real and true dynamics of evil and death in the world.

These hard sayings are about a key issue, the very one behind Merton’s insight.  God is Love itself, Reality itself.  We must love God above all others.  All else—no matter how good—corrupt and are part of the reign of Evil that God sent Jesus to overthrow.  

Soren Kirkegaard

Danish theologian Soren Kirkegaard said “Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God . . . Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God.”

The first of the Ten Commandments tells us something profound about the nature of sin and evil:  “I am the Lord Your God, and you shall have no other God before me.”   Jesus says that the first and most important of all the Law’s commandments is “You shall love God with all your heart, might, and mind.”  It is only then that we can truly love our neighbors (and our families) as ourselves.

When I was young, I took the image of a jealous God very literally, as if God were a very petty, insecure person who just couldn’t bear having us love anything or anyone beside him. After long, painful experience trying to find my sense of self worth apart from God I realized that the image of a jealous God is a distorted mirror image of us when we place other things in God’s stead.   It describes how our relationship with God feels to us when we don’t put God first. 

Everyone gets their identity, their sense of being distinct and valuable, from somewhere or something.  Sometimes it’s work, sometimes it’s duty, sometimes it’s relationships, sometimes it’s a search for one’s will or one’s own pleasure.

Kierkegaard’s point is that we are made in such a way that we must love God supremely, center our lives in him above anything else, and build our sense of worth and distinctness on him. As
Saint Augustine famously says in the Confessions, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee!”

This means that sin is not just choosing bad things.  It means that sin also includes choosing anything over God, even good things.   Even things like family relationships, obligations respected, and religious practices upheld.

These are good things.  But all good things, if pursued in the wrong context, in improper amounts, or without right motives, by their nature become distorted, become exploitative or harmful.

Think of the difference of the innocent pleasure of alcohol moderately indulged in among friends and the bitterness of the addiction of alcoholism, and its destruction of relationships and all enjoyment.   Contrast the loving joy of physical intimacy between newlyweds, and the exploitation and ruined self-esteem from intimacy outside of the right context.   Contrast the faith and religion of the truly humble who seek God’s will, whatever it may be, and try to do it as they find out more and more of it, with the harm done by religious people who are sure they have already found God’s will, close their hearts to further light and truth, and then insist that one size fits all.

Even such a basic good institution as the family can be distorted and turned into something very ugly if it is pursued as an end in itself.  “The family” without God is the Mafia.

The choice we have is this:  love God above all else or eventually lose all the other loves.  This is not because a petty jealous God will blast them to spite you, but because without that hole in our hearts filled by God,  we place too much expectation on these other loves, and we twist and ruin them.  

A right ordering of loves, putting love of God above all, redeems other loves already corrupted, and sanctifies and purifies all our loves, so that they be what God intends as he creates us.

You have to be willing to give the other loves up.  Not that you actually have to give them up, though this may be necessary, but that you be willing. 

Jesus said you must first lose your life in order to find it (Matthew 10:39; 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; John 12:25).  He was describing from the inside what it feels like to reorder things, to put God at the center.

Twelve-Step recovery programs stress that the first steps in recovering from any addiction is admitting one’s powerlessness, coming to believe in power greater than oneself, then turning one’s will and life over to that greater power.

Several years ago, my wife and I encountered some real problems in our relationship.  We went in for couples counseling to help us sort things out.  It was a lot of hard work, but both of us wanted to make the marriage work.  Part of the problem was my wife’s burden of emotional hurt caused from years of selfish behavior on my part.  As long as I wanted to keep the relationship going for my own purposes, the counseling made little headway.   I then realized that out of love for her I needed to be willing to lose her and have her go her separate way if that is what she needed to be whole.  Only then was there a breakthrough.    Only when I was willing to lose her for her sake (and for the sake of God) were we able to start actually making progress in repairing the relationship.

Love is always a risk, whether it is love of God or love of others.  We often are afraid of trusting our fragile hearts to someone else, especially if our heart has been bruised or broken.  But not loving is not an option.

C. S. Lewis writes:  “Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”

Jesus is saying in this passage that you have to be willing to give up everything for God.  It’s as simple as that.  Whether you do this from desperation because nothing else seems to work, or out of pure love because of grace you have experienced, is irrelevant.  This side of paradise, our motives will always be mixed.  As St. Julian of Norwich taught, do the right thing regardless, and God will redeem your motives.  Just don’t think that this trusting God, this willingness to give up all for God, is somehow an act on your part that will make you worthy and put God in your debt.  Doing so would be just setting up another idol you will be putting ahead of God.

Putting God first, surrendering to God, means letting your own will and desires take second place.

It means having an open heart rather than a closed one.

It means sensing God’s love, and giving love in return.

It means doing good because we love it and want to, not because we are obligated to.  It means avoiding evil not because it is against the rules, and breaks the commandments of Law, but because it is not what we know God wants for us.

We are damaged goods, all of us. But God made us for a home we have not yet ever seen, and that we can barely even imagine now  And he loves us dearly, each and every one.

The death of our Lord on the cross, and his glorious coming forth from the grave not only shows us the way, but also gives us the power to return God’s love.

Let us all make the effort.  We must lose our lives to find them.  We must surrender to win.

In the name of God,  Amen.