Mark 8:31-38 Susan J. Barnes
2nd Lent, 16 March 2003 St. Matthew's Austin
Grace and peace from the eighty women who went from St. Matthew's on
retreat last weekend. We missed you! We surely missed the men's
chorus! But in a real sense we took you with us--you were truly with
us in Spirit, just as those going to Laity Lodge in May and the youth
going to Iona, Scotland, will take the whole congregation with them in
Spirit when they travel.
The body of Christ is real. The Spirit that unites this congregation
is enriched whenever any part of it experiences the transformative power
of the love of Jesus. We don't have to go away for that
transformation. It happens here, too: daily, when we gather at the Bell
Tower chapel for evening prayer during Lent, or meet for Bible study,
or when we go into Austin to do outreach. But we are particularly
blessed when we can take time away, when we can gather for a weekend of
concentrated prayer and communion with God and one another: and blessed
we were!
On retreat, as on mission trips, we are freed from the everyday chores,
habits and preoccupations that claim our attention--set free from our
busyness, from television, radio, stereo, phones, snail mail and email,
even from the precious friends and family members whom we love. On
retreat, and on mission trips, we enter Kairos, God's time, God's
space. Freed from the distractions--however delightful--of daily life,
we can come closer to engaging with God's Holy Spirit.
As your priest I rarely lay down a dictum. Out of respect for you all,
and because I really don't know what is best for you, I try never use
the word "should". But here is an exception: every Christian should
annually make a spiritual retreat. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to
our God.
In today's gospel, Jesus said: "If any want to become my followers, let
them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For those who
want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for
my sake and the sake of the gospel will save it."
"Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose
their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it."
This may be the most profound paradox of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Coming to understand this paradox is to cross a threshold of faith,
according to my friend Rev. Mary Green, at Christ Church Cedar Park.
Crossing that threshold takes a total surrender to God's will, a
completely counter-intuitive, counter-cultural thing. But only by
putting ourselves--our present, our future--completely in God's hands,
only then do we find that God has been waiting to cradle us there all
along. Only when we let go completely can God catch us and hold us.
Often times we cross that threshold only when we are at the end of our
strength, the end of our wits or our resources. It happens when life
delivers us a body blow, brings us to our knees, and we throw ourselves
on God's infinite mercy. It is when we are broken, as Cynthia Clawson
sings, that God can fill us with grace.
That is the lesson of the Sacrifice of Isaac, which we just heard. To
contemporary sensibilities the story can seem an outrage--God's
demanding the sacrifice of Abraham's son? Not my God! After all, Jesus
asks us to lose our own life not someones else's. But here, as so often
in the Bible, context is critical. In the worldview of Abraham's time,
a man's seed, a man's offspring, was his own identity, his own legacy,
the measure of his favor with God. In that worldview the child Isaac was
an extension of Abraham, not an autonomous individual . Sacrificing
Isaac, the child of the promise, meant that Abraham was sacrificing his
greatest treasure, his legacy, sacrificing himself.
Jesus' call to lose our life in order to gain it sounds like a
nonsense. It is impossible to explain to people who have not
experienced that surrender and the grace that it brings. Even for those
who have experienced it, who know the love and the freedom that it
brings, it is hard. It is the greatest struggle with the greatest
reward. For me it is, ongoing, the greatest challenge. Why? Because
it means surrendering my illusion of control, my desire to conduct my
life in the manner I choose, set my own agenda, pursue my own goals,
instead of doing what God would have me do. The alternative--which
Jesus calls us to do--is simple, but not easy.
Losing our life means giving up our idols, those things that we place
at the center of our lives, the place where God and only God belongs.
They are the things that drive us, that direct our lives, the things we
strive for and by which we measure our worth. Each of us has our own
idols. The story in Genesis suggests that Abraham had made an idol of
the nation that God had promised he would father. My idols include self
sufficiency, self-reliance. It's absurd, really, for a priest: I still
catch myself leaving God at home while I come to church to do God's
work. But Self-sufficiency is one of the idols of our society. It and
other idols are so imbedded in our culture that they are hard to
recognize. In the book Living from the Center, which some of us are
reading together, Jay McDaniel names three idols of the consumer
culture: affluence, appearance, and marketable achievement. Let me
repeat, because he is right and we need to take it to heart. McDaniel
says that our culture idolizes affluence, appearance, and marketable
achievement. I know that for decades I did, and that by God's grace,
I'm in recovery.
Each of us must give up our idols. Furthermore each of us must
surrender and offer up to God our fear. Fear is the opposite of
faith--that's a bit of AA wisdom a friend gave me this week. Fear is the
opposite of faith. And fear is an enormous barrier to our relationship
with God. Fear makes us flail about like the person so panicked at the
thought of drowning that they miss seeing the life raft in front of
them. Fear makes us hold ever tighter to the very thing that we need to
release--our life, our own self. Only when we release it, surrender it
to God, as Abraham did, can God return it to us, immeasurably enriched
with God's love, as God's own gift.
You remember the story of the woman who struggled with her desire to
commit herself to faith in Jesus Christ? Drawn though she was, she
resisted, week after week, month after month because she was afraid:
afraid she would be called by God to be a missionary to China. One
Sunday, she could resist no more. As she approached the altar,
trembling, she heard a voice within, saying: "I'm not going to send you
to China. But you had to be willing to go."
Last Sunday morning I invited each women on retreat to spend some time
alone reflecting on what she needed to let go of in order to open her
life more freely to God, and to join me in offering that up in the
Eucharist. I offered up my illusion of autonomy, of self-reliance. And
I offered up my self-absorbed resistance to practicing the presence of
God throughout the day. It has really helped. God has become a
quickened presence in the past week.
You know, God is respectful of our free will. God is discreet. God
will not take something away until you surrender it. But God is
gracious, too, hastening to lift our burdens as soon as we let them go.
In closing, let me extend last week's invitation to the rest of you.
If you're like me, you know what it is you need to surrender. If you
don't know, spend some quiet time later today. Ask God to help you
discern what it is. God knows. And God is waiting to set you free.
