God of possible impossibilities, help us to open
our hands and let go so that we can receive your gracious love. Amen.
The rabbi and leadership consultant Edwin Friedman has a collection of fables that offer insight into the human condition. One is called “The Bridge.” The protagonist is a person who spent the first part of their life searching for truth and trying out different things, encountering both successes and failures. Through prayer and reflection, they finally have a sense of purpose; they feel like their life has a direction and destination.
So,
they set off in that direction no longer a wanderer, but as a pilgrim on the
way. The journey is going well when there is a bridge up ahead. Upon walking
across the bridge, they notice someone else who is dressed very similarly
coming from the opposite direction. Except this person has a rope tied around their
waist. Curious. As the stranger gets closer, they ask, “Can you please hold
this bit of rope for me?” This isn’t a major distraction from the journey, so
our friend agrees to help out. The stranger then says “Two hands now, hold
tight” and then proceeds to jump off the bridge.
Dragged
to the side of the bridge before regaining their footing, the pilgrim finally
is stabilized and yells down “What in the world are you doing?” The reply comes
up, “I’m your responsibility now, don’t let go.” “This is ridiculous,” they
think. And the stranger reminds them, “If you let go, I’m a goner, you have to
hold on.” Looking around, there is no help in sight and no place to safely tie
the rope before resuming the journey. So they yell down, “Look, you’ve got to
try to climb up the rope and I’ll help you get back on the bridge, but I can’t
stay here all day.”
“Nope,
sorry, not interested. You just need to hang on to me.” Well, our friend is
stuck and thinks “If I let go, they’ll fall to their death. If I stay here, I’ll
never reach my destination. Either way, I’ll be haunted by this decision.”
After hanging on for a while, the pilgrim realizes that the sun will soon be
setting and if the journey is ever to resume, it is now or never. Shouting down
they say “Look, I didn’t ask for this, so I’m giving the decision to you. Either
you let me help you and start climbing or I’m off.” “You can’t mean that, I’m
your responsibility now, you can’t go.” Our pilgrim says, “I accept your choice”
and then opening their hands, resumes the journey.
What
do you need to let go of? What things are tying you down and preventing you
from going in the direction of God’s mercy, generosity, and love? What burdens
have you been handed that prevent you from following the call of God? What do
you yearn to be liberated from and pray that God will free you from holding
onto any longer? These are the sorts of questions that this fable has us to ponder,
and it is the same question with which the rich man had to wrestle after his
encounter with Jesus.
Ultimately,
the Gospel is a liberation story. In the beginning, we were created and given
freedom. But we abused that freedom and have been bound by sin. This led the
people to being enslaved in Egypt. The central story of the Old Testament and
the beating heart of Judaism is the Exodus – the story of God delivering the people
from bondage into freedom. This is the story that Jesus takes us deeper into –
that we are freed from all that holds us back from being fully known and fully
loved. Our sins are forgiven, death’s grip on us is loosened, and love, which
we are given abundantly and freely, is all that matters. As St. Paul writes in
Galatians, “Christ has set us free for freedom.” Through and through, our faith
is about freedom.
Freedom,
however, has to be claimed and used. Divine providence and human participation go
hand in hand. Like the double-helix of DNA, both strands are needed. The jail
cell might have been opened by Jesus, but we have to get up and walk into the
freedom of eternal life. Which means we have to give something up. We have to
have open hands in order to receive the gift of grace. So there will be things
that we need to put down and drop.
For
some, these are addictions that we’d like to drop, we just need some help.
Often the hardest step is the first. When we go to our first meeting of the
Anonymous, or make the appointment with the couples’ therapist, or fill out a
pledge card for the first time. Even though these are good things, they can be
hard things because we have to admit that, to quote Taylor Swift, “It’s me. I’m
the problem. It’s me.” It can be hard to give up our sense of having all the
answers, of being in control, of our public persona.
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who stood up against the Nazis
and paid the ultimate price for doing so. He once wrote, “When Christ calls us,
he bids us come and die.” A part of what it means to follow Christ is to die.
We die to putting ourselves first, we die to worrying about our reputation, we
die to the values of the society around us. This is why we speak about Baptism
as being united to Christ in his death and rising with him in his Resurrection.
But this purgation, this dying, this letting go of the rope ise difficult.
And this is why we come
to Church – to gather in beloved community to support one another, to be
reminded of the power and the beauty of the story that we are opening ourselves
to, to receive with open hands the tokens of God’s love in his very body and
blood. So if you’re working on letting go of something – fear, self-righteousness,
perfectionism, resentment, self-criticism, anxiety, doubt, anger – this is the
perfect place to be.
There
are three main areas of life in which we might need to give something up. The
first is bad theology. This is what Job is struggling with. We heard in the
first reading, “Oh that I knew where I might find God, that I might come even
to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with
arguments.” Keep reading in Job and you’ll find that he’ll be singing a very
different tune when God responds.
We all have things that we learned about Church and God that simply aren’t true. Some people are taught that God only likes people who look like us. Or that God blesses people who are good and smites those who or bad. Or that God is an old-fashioned idea that doesn’t work in the modern world. Or that spirituality without religion is anything but narcissism. Or that God is a man. But no matter how much we might want those things to be true, they are not. I’ve been mentoring a new priest recently and he shared with me a text he received, asking for advice on how to respond. The message came from a church member sharing their reason for leaving the Church was that they could no longer accept that gay people serving as clergy. They said “Either the Bible is the word of God and is true or it’s not. And I want to be a part of a Church that thinks the Bible is true.”
As
easy as it might make our lives, Biblical literalism just isn’t true. That’s
just one example, but we all believe things that don’t align with the radicalness
of God’s love. We think things about the Church that allow us to be overly critical
and dismissive of it. The invitation is to consider what beliefs need to get dropped
so that we can accept God’s embrace more fully.
The
next thing we need to let go of are our expectations of ourselves – both those
we impose on ourselves and the expectations of others that bind us. Most psychologists
tell us that the struggles that many of us deal with stem from roles that were
given to us as children. We carry those labels around with us and they hold us back.
Some of us were given and took on the role of being the problem-solver, the
peace-maker, the perfect child, the life of the party, the selfless giver. The
problem with these roles is that they are static. They don’t allow us to go on
a pilgrimage with God, they don’t allow us to grow.
A
question that a fitness coach once asked that has stuck with me is “Who sets
your standards?” Often, our standards come from expectations that are imposed
on us and keep us chasing goals that are either impossible, unhealthy, or that
we don’t even truly care about. Sometimes, in Act 2 or 3 of our lives, God
gives us a new role to play, so we need to work on laying down the scripts were
had been given. An added difficulty is that sometimes when we set something
down, someone else, trying to be helpful, hands it back to us. Not only do we
have to set it down, but we have to do so more than once.
My
favorite music band is the Barenaked Ladies – known for hits like “One Week”
and the theme song to “The Big Bang Theory.” I’ve been thinking a lot recently
about this question of roles and one of their songs has been on repeat in my
head for a while. The song opens “When I was born, they looked at me and said ‘What
a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy.’ And when you were born, they
looked at you and said ‘What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty
girl.’ We’ve got these chains hanging around our necks. People wanna strangle
us with them before we take our first breath. Afraid of change, afraid of
staying the same, when temptation calls, we just look away.”
This
is the invitation to, when we hear that call to play a different role or to
read from a different script, that, with God’s help and grace, we will recall
that our true role and our only purpose is to enjoy being God’s beloved.
And
lastly, something we need to work on giving up is money. This was at the heart
of the interaction between the man and Jesus in the passage from Mark. St.
Augustine once wrote “Riches are gained with toil and kept with fear. They are
enjoyed with danger and lost with grief. It is hard to be free if we have them;
and impossible if we love them.” The thing about money is that it’s a false
idol – we think that it has something to say about how valuable what we do is,
but that’s a lie. We think that money says something about how smart, creative,
or industrious we are, but that’s not true. We think that money is a necessary component
for a good life, but the opposite is generally true. As one rap artist has put
it, “more money, more problems.”
The
thing about money is that it’s incredibly powerful. Money can lead us to make
decisions we’d otherwise not make and it becomes a master that we serve. The
test to know whether or not you’re in control of money or if money is in
control of you is to let it go. Give it away. If you cannot give your money
away, then that’s a sign that money has more power over you than you do over
your money.
As
far as how much to give? Well, this encounter that Jesus has suggests that the
more money you have, the more you need to give away. And that’s the right word “need;”
not “should.” When it comes to generosity and stewardship there are no shoulds or
oughts; no shame or guilt. It’s about our need to give. We are created by a generous
God to be generous. Giving is natural to who we are. So how much do we need to
give? Enough to challenge us, just as this rich man was challenged.
Our lifestyle should be
different because of our generosity, if not, we’re just giving out of our excess
that doesn’t really matter. That’s money pulling the strings. A good number is
ten percent – that’s what Tyler and I do. Five percent of our income is pledged
to St. Luke’s and five percent goes to other charities that we want to support.
And if you don’t want to give to St. Luke’s, fine. But for God’s sake, and
yours, give your money away. In giving up money, we remind ourselves that God,
not our wallet, is our true provider and that we are surrounded by abundance.
Whether
it’s a deeply held belief, a role we’ve been playing for a long time, or money,
it can seem not only hard but impossible to let go of these things. That’s
precisely what Jesus says, “For mortals, liberating ourselves is impossible,
but not for God; for God all things are possible.” In Jesus Christ, for us and
for our salvation, God gave up everything. Living among us, Jesus gave up his
life and was then able to take it up again on the third day, raising us up with
him.
Before
Jesus responded to this rich man, Mark records “Jesus looked at him and loved
him.” Jesus looks at each of us and loves us, beckoning us to go on a journey
deeper into the image in which we are made and the love that is making all
things well. Jesus reaches out his hand to us and says “Follow me.” Will we take his hand and let go of what's hold us back?
