Sweet Surrender
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
For Sundays In Advent, Christmas, And Epiphany
John Bradshaw tells a parable about a prisoner in a dark cave.1 The man was sentenced to die. He was blindfolded and put in a pitch-dark cave 100 yards by 100 yards. He was told there was a way out of the cave. He was a free man if he could find it.
The cave was sealed and the prisoner took his blindfold off. He was to be fed for the first thirty days and then he would receive nothing. His food was lowered from a small hole in the roof of the eighteen-foot high ceiling. The prisoner could see the faint light above but no light came into the cave.
The cave contained some large rocks. The prisoner figured he could build a mound toward the light and crawl through the opening.
He spent his waking hours picking up rocks and digging up dirt. At the end of two weeks the mound was six feet in height. He figured he could duplicate that in the next two weeks and make it out before his food ran out. But he had used up most of the big rocks and had to dig harder and harder. After a month he could almost reach the opening if he jumped. But he was very weak. One day he thought he could reach the opening. But he fell off the high mound and was too weak to get up. Two days later he died.
His captors rolled away the rock that covered the entrance. The light illuminated an opening in the wall of the cave. It was the opening to a tunnel that led to the other side of the mountain. This was the passage to freedom. All the prisoner had to do was touch the walls around him and he would have found freedom. He was so completely focused on climbing up to the opening of light that it never occurred to him to look for freedom in the darkness. "The freedom was there all the time next to the mound he was building but it was in the darkness."
Certainly one of the major stumbling blocks in any life is the attitude of knowing that you are right. When we contend that we are absolutely right, we stop seeking new information.
This problem is at the forefront of today's passage from Paul's letter to the Romans. Paul, of course, was an educated Jew steeped in Jewish teachings. The theological issue at stake was the question of "works" and "the Law" versus "faith" and "grace." In writing to the Romans, Paul set forth, as positively and calmly as he could, his understanding of how the old law should not restrict the Gentiles. He understood that one is put in a right relation with God not through obedience to rules, however traditional, but only through faith in God through Christ.
Like the man in the parable of the dark cave, Jewish Christians were trying to escape their sins through leaping toward where they were certain the opening existed. So certain were they that the law held the way to freedom that they were in danger of ceasing to seek God's new information. In this passage Paul was not referring to the Torah but to the observance of Jewish ceremonial practices. He was referring to those special ordinances that separate Jews from Gentiles. Ceremonial observance of the law fixed a particular social identity for Jews. This apparently encouraged in Jewish Christians in Rome a sense of superiority over Gentile Christians who relied on their conversion experience and their abstinence from idolatry and immorality.2 Certainly Paul advocated the Torah as a moral standard for Jews and Christians alike. He wanted to do more than that. He also wanted to advocate a new definition of community. Obviously this was as difficult to do then as it is now.
Spiritual narcissism is an ever-dangerous exercise. When we think we have mastered a religious process, that is when we can be most certain that we are fumbling around uselessly in a cave of darkness with true freedom obscured but close at hand. Pushing oneself too hard toward a spiritual path of good works and scriptural and legalistic obedience can create havoc within a Christian community. Paul called for a sweet surrender to God's grace and a total absence of boasting. Since all have fallen short and sinned, there is the inescapable demand of surrender. If the power to surrender to God's grace is lacking, then every effort must be put forth to find out what the hindrances are. In the case of the Romans, Paul focused on ceremonial observances of the law that created arrogance or boasting. This was their great hindrance. It may well be our greatest hindrance as well.
The yielding of the very nerve center of one's religious consent over to God's grace is a supremely personal act. Yet it has community ramifications. Surrendering one's inner consent to God is not contingent upon creed or ceremony. A person can do it directly and this is a consistency from Paul's time to ours.
To the proud Romans, confident in their boasting, Paul's words must have cut to the quick. A similar awareness may permeate the mindset of us proud Americans when we respond to those same words. The words of Saint John of the Cross sum up this sweet surrender to God's grace when he says, "In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing. In order to arrive at knowing everything, desire to know nothing."3 This is still one of the most important themes in Christendom. It is the notion that we cannot make it happen. We cannot achieve it. It is an awareness to which Christians must return in every age. Even our unifying experiences as communities of faith are gifts given by God through grace and not the total result of planning or right thinking on the part of any individuals.
The creation of the first community of The Way (later to become the Church) by Jesus when he called his disciples evidenced the gift of grace to make something happen that should by all human reason never have happened. The fact that Simon and Andrew and James and John followed Jesus was not the way things were usually done in the religious structure of their world. As Barbara Brown Taylor4 has noted, rabbis did not go around seeking students in those days. To the contrary, students sought out rabbis. Teachers carefully interviewed the students who came to see them. They heavily weighed many factors before deciding to take on certain followers as their disciples. If you did not show an aptitude for religious thinking, you would not be selected. No rabbi would lower himself to recruiting his own students. Certainly the notion of selecting, as did Jesus, the first four you laid eyes on would have been completely bizarre. Yet Jesus set himself apart from the very beginning. God's grace, not human planning or ceremonial observance, began the Christian enterprise as much as it cemented it in the sacrificial death of Christ. The sweet surrender to God's grace was ours from the beginning.
Imagine the scene. Simon and Andrew were casting their nets from the shallows of the sea. James and John were a little richer, so they were fishing from their father's boat. Both sets of brothers walked away from families, friends, and businesses to follow a stranger who called them. Jesus called and they followed. They did not know this man, Jesus. They were not themselves religious types. Something just happened to them. They did not plan for it. They did not celebrate it. They did not agonize over it. They just surrendered to something that was beyond their control.
To make the best use of life, you and I must learn how to accept the new while we are retaining the best of our heritage. Jesus and his disciples worked within their inherited framework of Judaism. But they went beyond it. Paul, the great author of this text, was true to many aspects of his Jewish upbringing. But he went beyond the old even as he kept to the best that he had understood. The early Christians kept all the old truth and accepted all the new truth. James Freeman Clarke5 is quite correct in stating that there are two kinds of people who can make no progress. One is the conservative who can never accept the new and the other is the radical who can only take a truth by dropping an old truth. One is illustrated by a person who refused to look through Galileo's telescope to look at the satellite moons of Jupiter. The man explained that there was no use in looking, for no moons would be there.
The radical is, perhaps, best illustrated by a little child whose hands are so small she must drop an apple she is holding to reach out and take another apple. The radical can only get to new ground by deserting the old ground. How complete is the surrender called forth in this scripture. Both heaven and earth are changing. The earthly realm is not an evil entity to be run from. Pie-in-the-sky escapism is not the surrender called for. Nor is an embracing of an obsolete tradition the kind of surrender that is visualized. God's grace is not that confined -- to either the old or the new.
God can create the best out of the worst and feed our hungry souls. Once we get beyond the hindrance of our own ego, we can see just how right Paul was. What do you think, fellow Romans? Shall we listen and act? Or, is this stuff we have heard before?
____________
1. John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame That Binds You (Deerfield Beach, Florida: Health Communications, 1988), p. 117.
2. See the excellent work by Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 124-125.
3. Saint John of the Cross as quoted in Gerald G. May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 57.
4. Barbara Brown Taylor, Home By Another Way (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 1999), pp. 38-39.
5. James Freeman Clarke, "The Use of Time," Half Hours Volume I, pp. 227-228.
The cave was sealed and the prisoner took his blindfold off. He was to be fed for the first thirty days and then he would receive nothing. His food was lowered from a small hole in the roof of the eighteen-foot high ceiling. The prisoner could see the faint light above but no light came into the cave.
The cave contained some large rocks. The prisoner figured he could build a mound toward the light and crawl through the opening.
He spent his waking hours picking up rocks and digging up dirt. At the end of two weeks the mound was six feet in height. He figured he could duplicate that in the next two weeks and make it out before his food ran out. But he had used up most of the big rocks and had to dig harder and harder. After a month he could almost reach the opening if he jumped. But he was very weak. One day he thought he could reach the opening. But he fell off the high mound and was too weak to get up. Two days later he died.
His captors rolled away the rock that covered the entrance. The light illuminated an opening in the wall of the cave. It was the opening to a tunnel that led to the other side of the mountain. This was the passage to freedom. All the prisoner had to do was touch the walls around him and he would have found freedom. He was so completely focused on climbing up to the opening of light that it never occurred to him to look for freedom in the darkness. "The freedom was there all the time next to the mound he was building but it was in the darkness."
Certainly one of the major stumbling blocks in any life is the attitude of knowing that you are right. When we contend that we are absolutely right, we stop seeking new information.
This problem is at the forefront of today's passage from Paul's letter to the Romans. Paul, of course, was an educated Jew steeped in Jewish teachings. The theological issue at stake was the question of "works" and "the Law" versus "faith" and "grace." In writing to the Romans, Paul set forth, as positively and calmly as he could, his understanding of how the old law should not restrict the Gentiles. He understood that one is put in a right relation with God not through obedience to rules, however traditional, but only through faith in God through Christ.
Like the man in the parable of the dark cave, Jewish Christians were trying to escape their sins through leaping toward where they were certain the opening existed. So certain were they that the law held the way to freedom that they were in danger of ceasing to seek God's new information. In this passage Paul was not referring to the Torah but to the observance of Jewish ceremonial practices. He was referring to those special ordinances that separate Jews from Gentiles. Ceremonial observance of the law fixed a particular social identity for Jews. This apparently encouraged in Jewish Christians in Rome a sense of superiority over Gentile Christians who relied on their conversion experience and their abstinence from idolatry and immorality.2 Certainly Paul advocated the Torah as a moral standard for Jews and Christians alike. He wanted to do more than that. He also wanted to advocate a new definition of community. Obviously this was as difficult to do then as it is now.
Spiritual narcissism is an ever-dangerous exercise. When we think we have mastered a religious process, that is when we can be most certain that we are fumbling around uselessly in a cave of darkness with true freedom obscured but close at hand. Pushing oneself too hard toward a spiritual path of good works and scriptural and legalistic obedience can create havoc within a Christian community. Paul called for a sweet surrender to God's grace and a total absence of boasting. Since all have fallen short and sinned, there is the inescapable demand of surrender. If the power to surrender to God's grace is lacking, then every effort must be put forth to find out what the hindrances are. In the case of the Romans, Paul focused on ceremonial observances of the law that created arrogance or boasting. This was their great hindrance. It may well be our greatest hindrance as well.
The yielding of the very nerve center of one's religious consent over to God's grace is a supremely personal act. Yet it has community ramifications. Surrendering one's inner consent to God is not contingent upon creed or ceremony. A person can do it directly and this is a consistency from Paul's time to ours.
To the proud Romans, confident in their boasting, Paul's words must have cut to the quick. A similar awareness may permeate the mindset of us proud Americans when we respond to those same words. The words of Saint John of the Cross sum up this sweet surrender to God's grace when he says, "In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing. In order to arrive at knowing everything, desire to know nothing."3 This is still one of the most important themes in Christendom. It is the notion that we cannot make it happen. We cannot achieve it. It is an awareness to which Christians must return in every age. Even our unifying experiences as communities of faith are gifts given by God through grace and not the total result of planning or right thinking on the part of any individuals.
The creation of the first community of The Way (later to become the Church) by Jesus when he called his disciples evidenced the gift of grace to make something happen that should by all human reason never have happened. The fact that Simon and Andrew and James and John followed Jesus was not the way things were usually done in the religious structure of their world. As Barbara Brown Taylor4 has noted, rabbis did not go around seeking students in those days. To the contrary, students sought out rabbis. Teachers carefully interviewed the students who came to see them. They heavily weighed many factors before deciding to take on certain followers as their disciples. If you did not show an aptitude for religious thinking, you would not be selected. No rabbi would lower himself to recruiting his own students. Certainly the notion of selecting, as did Jesus, the first four you laid eyes on would have been completely bizarre. Yet Jesus set himself apart from the very beginning. God's grace, not human planning or ceremonial observance, began the Christian enterprise as much as it cemented it in the sacrificial death of Christ. The sweet surrender to God's grace was ours from the beginning.
Imagine the scene. Simon and Andrew were casting their nets from the shallows of the sea. James and John were a little richer, so they were fishing from their father's boat. Both sets of brothers walked away from families, friends, and businesses to follow a stranger who called them. Jesus called and they followed. They did not know this man, Jesus. They were not themselves religious types. Something just happened to them. They did not plan for it. They did not celebrate it. They did not agonize over it. They just surrendered to something that was beyond their control.
To make the best use of life, you and I must learn how to accept the new while we are retaining the best of our heritage. Jesus and his disciples worked within their inherited framework of Judaism. But they went beyond it. Paul, the great author of this text, was true to many aspects of his Jewish upbringing. But he went beyond the old even as he kept to the best that he had understood. The early Christians kept all the old truth and accepted all the new truth. James Freeman Clarke5 is quite correct in stating that there are two kinds of people who can make no progress. One is the conservative who can never accept the new and the other is the radical who can only take a truth by dropping an old truth. One is illustrated by a person who refused to look through Galileo's telescope to look at the satellite moons of Jupiter. The man explained that there was no use in looking, for no moons would be there.
The radical is, perhaps, best illustrated by a little child whose hands are so small she must drop an apple she is holding to reach out and take another apple. The radical can only get to new ground by deserting the old ground. How complete is the surrender called forth in this scripture. Both heaven and earth are changing. The earthly realm is not an evil entity to be run from. Pie-in-the-sky escapism is not the surrender called for. Nor is an embracing of an obsolete tradition the kind of surrender that is visualized. God's grace is not that confined -- to either the old or the new.
God can create the best out of the worst and feed our hungry souls. Once we get beyond the hindrance of our own ego, we can see just how right Paul was. What do you think, fellow Romans? Shall we listen and act? Or, is this stuff we have heard before?
____________
1. John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame That Binds You (Deerfield Beach, Florida: Health Communications, 1988), p. 117.
2. See the excellent work by Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 124-125.
3. Saint John of the Cross as quoted in Gerald G. May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 57.
4. Barbara Brown Taylor, Home By Another Way (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 1999), pp. 38-39.
5. James Freeman Clarke, "The Use of Time," Half Hours Volume I, pp. 227-228.
