Sweet Surrender

Sweet Surrender

My son is 19 months old, and he really wants to collaborate with me when it comes to getting things done. He recognizes he’s got limitations. Mostly he knows he’s not tall enough to push the light switches, or get blue berries from the fridge, or pull the dangly chain thing that controls the light on the ceiling fan. Those are his 3 favorite past times right now.

But I have a total of 11 nephews and 2 nieces as well as a ton of friends who had kids at a younger age than me. So I know what’s coming. One of these days, probably in like 3 months, he’s going to decide that he doesn’t want to collaborate. He’s going to decide that he wants to be a solo act. He’s going to ditch my help and try to do everything on his own. And he’s going to be absolutely terrible at it.

And my job is going to be to just stand there and make sure he doesn’t incur serious injury while totally rejecting me and everything that I stand for. It’s just the way things go. I’m prepared for it.

Mostly I’m prepared for it because I’ve lived long enough to go through like every possible stage of self reliance. It’s human nature. It’s frustrating. But it’s just something that we do. But the beauty is that at some point, we can come to the realization that we don’t have to live life this way. We don’t have to be so desperately hooked on our own ways of living. We can look up from ourselves and see the outstretched hands that are offering us help.

We are here in the midst of our Lenten Sermon series called Painting with Ashes. This series is based on a book written by my friend Rev. Dr. Michael Beck, and what we are seeking to see is how God uses the brokenness of our lives to paint something new and wonderful, and that he’s yearning to show us how to participate in that work.

So last week we talked about what it means for us to get stuck in the deserts of our lives — in the places where temptation leads us astray from the life giving purposes that God has for our lives. I urged you not to buy land out there — not to chain your identity to the spiritually dry and broken places that you might find yourself in.

But I’m stubborn enough myself to understand that it might take more than that for you to take those first steps towards walking away from the desert. So I’d like to talk about what it really takes for us move away from the mess that sin and brokenness have created in our lives. It takes us practicing the subtle art of sweet surrender into the arms of the God who is standing there waiting for us to take his hand.

In the Gospel of Luke, we find a curious teaching from Jesus. He’s talking to the religious elites and leaders of his day, who have come to warn him that he’s caught the attention of King Herod — who is basically just a puppet king over Israel at the time. So this is what Jesus says in Luke 13:31-35

Luke 13:31–35 NRSV

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ”

What’s going on here is that the Pharisees, who are not in anyway fans of Jesus, are trying to run him out of town, likely because Jesus was actually wielding the power of God and threatening their authority. So they are like, “yo Jesus. Better run along. Herod wants to kill you.” And Jesus is like well yea, his daddy tried that when I was a baby. So I’m not really concerned about him”

Then Jesus turns this whole thing back around on them. Jesus was highly perceptive, he was always able to see the hearts and motives that drove people to do and say the things that they did. So He’s like listen, Jerusalem… this place that you think is like the epicenter of holiness, the place where you all are exerting your authority over the people… it’s got a history.

And what he’s talking about is how throughout almost all of Israel’s history they strayed from the ways that God had told them to live. They chased after other gods, they failed to institute the social structure that God gave them to care for the poor and the marginalized, and they engaged in all kinds of other garbage that they were expressly warned against. And God would send prophets to them to preach to them and say like “hey y’all. God delivered you out of the wilderness, out of the desert, and you’re here just living like he doesn’t exist. You’ve brought the desert here into the promised land.”

More often than not, these prophets would be killed or cast away. The people typically refused to surrender and look up and embrace God’s help. And Jesus is telling these religious leaders that they haven’t changed one bit, but that neither has God. Jerusalem might still be a corrupt place, but God is still waiting, desiring to gather his people. And that’s the mission that Jesus came to begin, and it’s the mission that continues through us, the church.

We are a people who have been called to reflect the person of Jesus personally, in our own lives. And as a church we are called to be a place where those who are stuck in their own desert places can come and find the loving arms of a community that embraces them and gives them the source of support that they need to find restoration and healing.

As we journey though the season of lent, we have to come face to face with the fact that often we reflect the attitude of the Pharisees in our own hearts which can cause our own community to look more like what Jesus and the prophets found in Jerusalem.

And so the process of sweet surrender is really a process that happens both at the personal and at the communal level. We want to see the personal transformation that happens when people walk away from the parts of their lives that are stealing them away from the good and beautiful plan that God has for their them, but we need to also make sure that as a community we have a heart that is willing to meet people where they are and then willing to nurture them in spiritual growth and development.

The truth is that as the church in America we are really good at the personal transformation thing. We are really good at convincing people that they are deep need of the grace of God. What we aren’t terribly good at is being vessels of that grace. But I think that we are coming to realize that when people encounter God and make a decision to change but then don’t find the support that they need then they inevitably find themselves back where they began. Stuck.

So here’s that part of the message, because I told you that I’d tell you. If you are stuck out in the desert, if you are consistently trying to do the same thing and get different results, the problem is that you need some help. And this help is avaliable to you through the church. Reach out, call me, let us know how to help you find your way back to loving arms of God, and then help us walk there with you. I’m here to tell you that you can’t do it alone. You can’t do it alone because you were not created to do it alone. You were created for the community of Love that is the church. Surrender your self reliance, your ideas about how you’re going to fix yourself and just allow God through the community of faith nurture you.

And Church, this is our job. To be a place of love and nurturing. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians gives us guidelines of how we are being called to deal with one another. Ephesians 4:1-6 says

Ephesians 4:1–6 NRSV

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

These qualities of humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another in love are the foundation of how we create the type of therapeutic community that differentiates us from the rest of the world. It’s what differentiates us from the world of Jerusalem that Jesus found. In Jesus’s day, the Pharisees were not creating an environment that nurtured people. They created an environment that demanded strict adherence to behaviors rather than fostering transformation. There is a stark difference between these approaches. One uses fear and shame to bully people into changing, and one nurtures and gives people the natural space needed to grow through the transformational process.

I’ve told you this before, but I grew up in a wonderful United Methodist Church in Pennsylvania. My pastor and the community that I found there was a wonderful example of what the church is called to be. They loved me, a kid who was trying to find a place in the world. They grew me in the faith and nurtured me. They showed me what love is.

Many years later I had hit the end of my own journey in the desert and decided to surrender and ask for some help. I was institutionalized, and on Easter Sunday of 2013 that institution took me to a little United Methodist Church in Tampa, and what happened was that I remembered the message of the Gospel, that I was in deep need of Jesus to walk with me out of the mess my life had become.

And as I kept going to that little church I remembered the love of the community of faith. I recognized the thing that had been given to me as a child. That church wrapped their arms around me and refused to let go. I’d smoke cigarettes in the parking lot and swear, and they’d put me on stage with a guitar and a microphone. They put me in charge of discipling teenagers. They recognized my call to ministry and sponsored me for ordained ministry.

This was a community that understood what it meant to be a therapeutic vessel of God’s grace, and it made every single difference in my life.

And so we, church, have been called to be the same. And listen, we’re good at this. I see the heart here. I see the willingness. So this is really just a reminder of the people that we’ve been called to be. A reminder of our role. We aren’t the manners and behavior police. We are the vessels of God’s grace that allow people to feel comfortable enough to truly embrace the healing power of Christ in their lives.

Just like my job is to be there when my son finally gives up and decides he needs my help, We the church are called to bring people out of their own deserts into this community called love. And we do this by remembering what it was like for us. Remembering our brokenness and the way that it made us feel to be loved and accepted despite it. We remember that we are wounded too, but that our wounds give us the credentials we need to bring healing to the world.