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Choose Life!“Come and Sit for a While”II Corinthians 12:7-10I have loved these sermons in this Choose Life series. Each week, when someone has told their story of making a decision, or facing in a direction, that has brought more life into an impossible-seeming situation, I have marveled at their courage and determination and faith. If you’ve missed any of these sermons along the way, I encourage you to go to the church’s website, where you can listen to them on-line. I’ve thought each of the last two sermons was the last one in the series. And then it seemed like there was one more story that I really wanted you to hear. We were supposed to start a new sermon series today. But instead, today I want you to hear one more story about choosing life. My story. Mine is not a triumphant story of coming out on the other side of a hard time. It’s not a story about having made a life-giving choice and all the good things that came out of it in retrospect. It’s about a choice that is in front of me right now, and how I am struggling with it. It begins with the passage from Second Corinthians that we read this morning, which is about one of those perspective-setting moments for the Apostle Paul. Paul was a really powerful preacher in the first century of Christianity. Many theologians say that he was, in some ways, actually the founder of the Christian Church—that even though everything he taught and preached was about the person of Jesus Christ, in fact it was Paul who interpreted the events of Christ’s life in a way that came to be the basis for a new religious tradition. And what made Paul that powerful and important a preacher is that what he preached—faith in God, the possibility of a new kind of life—was the only thing that mattered to him. He was relentless in his enthusiasm for his work. He never stopped. He hardly ever rested. He’d walk hundreds of miles to get to the next place where he thought people needed to hear the message. He’d come into towns and stay there until he made somebody so mad they escorted him out to the city gate and ushered him out with a swift kick. He disturbed the peace until he got arrested, and then he stayed in jail until the guards got tired of hearing him go on and on. He was like one of those children’s toys that you try to knock down and it just keeps bouncing back up because it’s round on the bottom and it can’t tell when it’s supposed to stay down. When he ran out of money, Paul would sew tents and sell them to earn what he needed to keep going, so that he’d never have to depend on any of the churches to support him. He was tireless because he was inspired. And he was secretly a little bit proud of how self-sufficient and independent he was, never needing anything that might look like charity. And then something got in his way. We don’t know exactly what it was; scholars have hypothesized that it was some physical weakness or deformity that plagued him. But it was annoying enough that Paul says he begged God to take it away. I know those prayers. I bet you do too—those please, please, please prayers. And even for Paul, God didn’t do exactly what was asked of him. Instead, Paul got another answer, an answer that I have no doubt he refused to hear the first several times God spoke it. But by the time he wrote it down, he was hearing God say: My grace is enough. It’s all you need. Because when you know you are weak, then you can let me be strong. And that was a lesson that would change Paul forever. It would make him understand who God is in a way he never had before. Enough that Paul says to the Corinthians, “Once I heard that, …I quit focusing on my handicap and began appreciating the gift. Now I take my limitations in stride…these limitations that cut me down to size. [Whatever they are], I have learned to let Christ take over. And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become.” And I want to tell you this morning that I am just beginning to hear the truth of that lesson; that I have not learned it yet. I could stand here and preach to you my whole-hearted belief that your life will be better if you can rest in the knowledge that God meets you, loves you, and can work with you best in your places of weakness. But I don’t think I have known yet what it means to “rest in God.” Intellectually, I understand it. I know that the idea of grace is at the center of what we believe as Methodists and as Christians; this idea that God’s love comes to us without us doing anything at all to deserve or even recognize it. But deep in my heart, I think I haven’t really believed it. Oh, I believe it for you. But for me? No. For me it’s been about striving, achieving, producing. It’s about persevering no matter how I feel, because someone else might need my attention more than I need it myself. It’s about working harder than I’d expect anyone else to work. And when I’m most honest with myself, I think I’ve unconsciously practiced this so that I might feel like I deserve all the good things that my life is filled with. But however much I do, my work is never enough. I can never do enough to deserve all the goodness I am surrounded with. No one can. Right now, I find myself at a moment in my life when I am not very strong. My weakness is partly because I’ve been trying to do too much and haven’t rested enough. But it’s also because some of the things I’ve thought of as unfailingly solid beneath my feet—my family, home, even my faith—have seemed shaky recently, and have taken more attention and energy at the same time I’ve been trying to keep up everything else I feel responsible for. Like Paul, my inability to handle everything well feels to me like a handicap that I can’t ignore or make go away. I’m a little less confident about my ability to make good decisions. My emotions are harder to control. My tears are closer to the surface. Maybe you’ve noticed. I’m fortunate to be surrounded by people who pay attention to me. Several of them, including our Staff Parish Relations Committee, our District Superintendent, and my colleagues on the church staff, have encouraged me to stop. Actually, they’ve been encouraging me to stop and take care of myself for a long time, and I haven’t known how. But now they are giving me the opportunity to take a leave of absence from everything for a few months, so that I can learn to take care of myself, and so that maybe I can learn what I have not yet taken in deeply enough: that it really is OK to be dependent on others; and that the truth of my life is about the way God just loves me, rather than the ways I have been good enough or strong enough to earn that love. Henri Nouwen has written about the Wounded Healer. He says that all healing work begins from the healer’s acknowledgement of his or her own need for healing. I’ve noticed before, and been grateful, that God seems perfectly able to use wounded and flawed people to do the work of bringing God’s kingdom to earth. But what I am just beginning to realize is what I think Paul was talking about in that letter to the Corinthians: that maybe God can only use wounded healers to do that work; that maybe people who are most conscious of their own dependence and need for help are the only ones who can fully understand what it is God can do. So right now I have a choice. I could just keep putting one foot in front of the other and doing the work I know how to do, taking care of all the things I think I’m supposed to take care of. That’s what I know how to do best, and it would actually be the easier thing for me to do. Or I can stop and accept the gift that’s being offered to me, to get away and just sit for a while. I think I’m going to choose the one that feels like it will bring more life in the long run. So, beginning after worship two weeks from now, June 20th, I will be away for about two months, on what is called in our United Methodist Book of Discipline a “spiritual formation retreat”. I’m going to be on a silent retreat at a monastery for part of it, and for another part I’m going to take long walks on the beach. I plan to read and pray and write a lot. I’m going to spend time with some people who will remind me of who I am when I’m not working. I’m going to try not to make decisions about anything until I’m filled up and not feeling overwhelmed by my life. And I’m going to write down and then put aside all the ideas that are already coming to me about new classes and new ministries we can do in the fall, after I get back. That image on the front of the bulletin this morning captures it well—the oars are still in the boat, ready to be picked up, but my boat will be on the shore for a while. A number of you have asked, as you’ve watched me seem not-at-my-best for a while, what you can do to help. I have really appreciated those offers, and I especially value the compassion that I know they come with. Here’s what I need from you most. I need you to help me remember that the church is not about its pastor; it’s about the people in it. Remind me, with your faithfulness and commitment while I’m gone, what I know about this place but forget from time to time: that it’s God who has the greatest hopes for First United Methodist Church, and that our work is simply to say “yes” when a door opens or a need becomes clear. That all of us do that together. You will have a pastor while I am gone; Carl Thomas has graciously, kindly, generously agreed to take my place so that I can have this time away. We will have a new team of lay leaders whose terms will begin on July 1, and I have great confidence in them. But you are the church, as you always have been. Forgive me for spending this sermon talking about myself. Paul’s next sentences after the ones we read this morning are, “Well, now I’ve done it! I’ve made a complete fool of myself by going on like this;” and today I know exactly how he felt. I don’t believe that pulpits are given to preachers either for expounding on their own opinions or exploring their own psyches. Sermons are for bringing the Word of God to life, finding the everyday words that will allow God’s Word to connect more clearly to your life. But sometimes the best way for me to do that is to tell you how that Word has connected to my life, with hope that my experience of God, and my realizing the ways I have not yet received God, will connect to your story too. May you too choose life.
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