The Art of Letting Go
“The Art of Letting Go”
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, September 8, 2019
Jeremiah 18:1-11 Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18 Luke 14:25-33
Pastor Andy Kennaly
Sandpoint, Idaho
There’s been a lot happening around here in the last few weeks, months, and years. April 27, 2013, over six years ago, was the spring clean-up day in which we removed the Ark play structure, along with the chain link fence along Fourth Avenue. On that cool spring day we noticed a change taking place. Not so much sadness as the ark was gone and the fence down, but excitement as the yard seemed bigger, more open and inviting. It was so noticeable that we set up a Church Yard Task Force to look into what this new energy might mean, to discern how God may be calling us as a church to make use of that outdoor space.
It didn’t take long to admit a desire to connect with the community, to offer the church yard space as a way of inviting neighbors into relationship. We recognized that more important than watering the grass was the yearning of sharing hospitality, welcome, a sense of peace, creating an outdoor spiritual sanctuary; these types of themes began to emerge. Thanks to financial gifts given at key times, like the Pietsch Family Trust’s initial $5,000 dollar donation, the Peace Garden began to take shape. With that and other gifts we were able to hire a designer, Karen Olsen, who helped us organize our thoughts, taking ideas and putting them onto paper so we could have a visual rendering and a plan. We’re still working the plan.
The last six years is the process of allowing that plan to unfold in unhurried yet appreciative ways. Partnerships develop, such as Sandpoint Rotary gifting the community with a gazebo, Presbytery of the Inland Northwest giving grants to help fund such things as the Peace Pole, and interfaith and ecumenical gatherings to mark important times claiming peace, unity, hope, and a shared desire to encourage people in their lives and faith and help the world be a better place. There are other visions that have yet to be realized, like a prayer labyrinth and a rain garden, a couple more picnic tables, and some pathways. We’re still working the plan.
But in the midst of this process, other aspects of maintaining a facility come along, like the need for new steps as the awning ripped, the concrete crumbled, and the railings rusted. A similar theme of wanting a more open feel, a welcoming connection, guided the process of designing and building the Stairway to Heaven project. As Todd Vorhies and his crew worked with Reid Weber of Boden Architecture, the old structure was removed, revealing rusted rebar and no foundation with layers of concrete that had already been patched at some point in the history of the church. A hole was dug, deeper for footings, and the new steps are solidly anchored and protected by a lovely timber frame roof, under which you can see the front door from the street. An anonymous $5,000 gift got the ball rolling as others gave money and encouragement to reach our goal to cover the 50,000, plus 3,000 unanticipated expenses. More recently, Lynn Anderson built a new church sign, thematic of Slovenian traditional architecture as inspired from the 2017 Sabbatical visiting beekeepers. This new sign, which is also still in the process of getting custom wording installed, replaces the old sign which happened to blow off it’s frame in a wind storm this past spring.
Lot’s going on around here as a church. But we need to be careful. We need to guard against that old saying, “If you build it, they will come.” This is not a true statement, and the new steps are less designed to bring in new people, and more designed to help the church go out in mission, to connect with the work of God’s Holy Spirit in the world today. The Church is not a building, the Church is a people, a people called. We need to be careful, as in full of care, as we go out to share good news because our purpose is not to fulfill some agenda or meet some quota or try and make everyone else just like us. Classic biblical metaphors describing Christians include ‘salt’ and ‘light’ and ‘leaven’ in the dough. These are critical ingredients that, just by their presence, changes the mix, serves as catalyst. And this involves the prerequisite of nothing less than total transformation.
Today we read some very classic scriptures, parts of the Bible that seem to shimmer over the years as we see that image of Jeremiah and the potter’s wheel, remaking the clay so that even when it’s spoiled it finds renewal. The Psalmist reaching deep into trust, claiming God’s knowing and loving Presence from eternity, as One who shapes and forms and holds with awe and wonder. This is an intuitive, sensed knowing held deep in the heart-mind-body-soul connection, linked into the larger Mind, a broader field of Consciousness and love. And Luke, who’s Gospel not only shares stories of Jesus, but gives, by the very structure of those stories, lessons in following Christ through faith. These lessons come hard because they not only change what we think, but the very process of thinking itself. Jesus is teaching that our mind, our thinking, is not what opens us to love on a cosmic, divine, eternal scale. Luke is sharing words of Jesus to get us out of our heads and create a new being. For Protestants, this is especially difficult because we favor words and ideas and structure our lives on learning more and studying, especially scripture, because we think that’s how you grow and we’re suspicious of experience and we question inner life.
But even Jesus uses symbols, like Baptism, because lived experience and symbolic language are needed to carry the weight of dying in Christ and rising in Christ, both important necessities.
The passage we read from Luke concludes as Jesus says, “None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions.” Earlier he tells them to hate their parents and family, even their own life. As used back then the word, “hate,” doesn’t carry the same emotional intensity that we tend to attach to it. Jesus is using “hyperbole,” exaggerating in order to focus on how important something is, in this case, to follow him as a disciple.
When Jesus says, give up all your possessions, it seems he may be talking about material things, kind of like we’re talking about steps and awnings. But just like the church is not a facility but a foundational community, Jesus is also talking about more than possessions in terms of materialism, but is including intangible things to which we cling.
What if, instead of the word, “possessions” we used other words? So, Jesus says, “none of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your attachments, paradigms, loyalties, attitudes, prejudices, ideas, filters, opinions.” These are all products of our false self, our conditioned understandings of who we think we are.
When you throw in the image of taking up your cross to follow Jesus, this is even more an image filled with the willingness to be rejected, to take on the shame our culture tries to layer upon those who question the status quo by people who don’t want to change, by people who cling to their attachments, attitudes, opinions, identities. Jesus is inviting us to get in touch with our divine core, our created-in-the-image-of-God identity, our True Self that exists, as Paul says, “hidden with Christ in God” for eternity. That’s how the Psalmist can honestly say, “You eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.” This is Christian Cosmology, a deep trust in eternal Love, an overwhelming awe and wonder that relativizes all other expressions, including our own ego’s definitions and ego-centric misconceptions of identity. Jesus is giving us an entirely new way of thinking, and actually less a form of thinking and more of an invitation to Being. Our thinking mind does certain things well, like designing Peace Gardens and pouring concrete. But the energy for life itself, which sustains all things is an energy of Being, far more reliable than mere thinking because Being is grounded in God. This is the comparison as Jesus talks about people wanting to build but not being able to finish it, or going to war, yet needing to ask for terms of peace because the odds are overwhelming. Jesus is inviting transformation from the thinking mind and ego-centric life to Love in Being energy experienced in Christ-centered living. You cannot be a disciple and follow Jesus without giving up everything your false self clings to. The only thing that has any eternity to it is Love.
Richard Rohr explores the life of St. Francis of Assisi. By way of introduction, Richard Rohr is a Franciscan Priest in Albuquerque, New Mexico who started the Center for Action and Contemplation which now reaches millions of people with teachings, spiritual practices, and encouragement.
Coming alongside the life of St. Francis and the themes he lived, Rohr reminds us that “You have got to get to love, or you’ll never find your soul’s purpose, you’ll never find the deepest meaning of your life… Without a certain degree of inner freedom, you cannot love, and you will not love… [Most people] haven’t thought of religion as a path of freedom; it was mostly a set of prescriptions, do’s and don’ts, musts and ought’s and should’s…but this is low level religion. … High level religion is simply to tell us where true freedom is to be found. First of all, freedom from the self, from my own self as a reference point for anything. […] The world does not circle around me. This is a necessary ego humiliation, a necessary descent, a necessary falling.
On my computer, the screen’s wallpaper is a photo I took on the Sabbatical in Assisi, showing a bronze statue depicting St. Francis sitting cross-legged with his hands on his knees, palms up, as he meditates while looking out over the Perugia valley from an olive grove on the hillside…
As Rohr puts it, “He observed the natural world, the things. When you sit quietly and for extended times in the natural world, you see that everything changes. If you stay longer, you see that everything dies or erodes. Nothing stays in the same shape or form for long, and all of the animal world seems to accept this dying. All of the natural world seems to accept this change of seasons, it does not resist dying, it learns gravity’s fall, as it were. Only one species resists that movement [you and I].
“So this very freedom […] can…lead us to resist, to oppose, to deny, to seek to climb instead of to descend. But [as Meister Eckhart puts it,] ‘The spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition.’ All great spirituality is about letting go. But you and I have grown up with a capitalist world view, which doesn’t make us bad or totally wrong, but it has blinded our spiritual seeing, and we tend to think at almost every level that more is better, that more will get us there…
He observes, “[…] instead of involving ourselves in this world of climbing and achieving and performing at which almost everybody loses on one level or another. [We are invited to a world of freedom, a world of joy] as Jesus is teaching the art of letting go.
“…Surrender, letting go; to Western or comfortable people, sounds like losing, when its actually accessing a deeper, broader sense of the Self, which believe it or not, is already whole, already content, already filled with life, and abundant. There is a part of you that has always loved God, there’s a part of you that has always said, “Yes,” there’s a part of you that is love, and what we have to do is fall into it, it’s already there. Once you move your identity to that level of deep, inner contentment, compassion, you realize you’re drawing upon a life that is larger than your own, from a deeper abundance. Yet once you learn to do that, why would you ever again settle for some scarcity model of life […] When you fall into the big Truth that is Grace itself, you’re overwhelmed by “more than enough-ness.” Live in that abundant place, where you don’t have to wrap yourself around your hurts, your defeats, your failures, [your pains, your fears], but you can get practiced in letting go, in saying, ‘That’s not me, I don’t need that; I’ve met a better Self, a Truer Self.’ That’s what the spiritual journey is all about.
(Richard Rohr, CD series, The Art of Letting Go, Session 1, Track 6 and 7 and 8, Religion’s True Essence and The Real Purpose of Religion and All Great Wisdom Can Be Found In Nature, and Session 6, track 2 The Courage to Let Go and Live In Abundance).
To close, I’d like to lead us in an exercise, a prayer experience. I’ll share from Psalm 46:10, where it says, “Be still, and know that I am God…”
I’ll read it a few times, dropping words along the way as we practice letting go and raising awareness to our grounded True Self, in Christ, with Being, as we simply “be.” I’d invite you to take a couple breaths, close your eyes if you’d like, as we contemplate together. We will pause in silence in between.
“Be still, and know that I am God.”
Be still, and know that I am.
Be still, and know.
Be still.
Be.
As we journey with Jesus, O God, help us learn the art of letting go, and help our True Self be as you form all things in awe and wonder, NOW, and always. Amen.