Proper 18 C RCL, September 4, 2016
Rev Adam Trambley
(Verse 1) Take, Lord, receive all my
liberty,
My memory, understanding, my entire will.
My memory, understanding, my entire will.
Give me only
Your love and Your grace, that's enough for me.
Your love and Your grace, are enough for me.
Your love and Your grace, are enough for me.
Today’s
Gospel reading contains pretty difficult words of Jesus that, in effect, ask us
to offer him our entire lives. For me,
this song by John Foley is one way that we can pray the desires that Jesus
wants from us. It is our intentions that
are most valuable to God here, particularly as we say, “Take, Lord, receive
everything.” God doesn’t actually need
our stuff or our relationships or anything else from us. He pretty much has everything he wants or
needs – that one of the benefits of being Creator of the Universe. But our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving
– our desire to give everything back to God – is asked for because it is
fundamentally good for us.
Getting to
that kind of willingness to surrender everything to God is not so easy. So before we go to the Gospel, we want to
look at the first reading from Jeremiah and Psalm 139. These readings say important things about who
we are, how we were made, and why our offering back to God is so meet and
right, and even good and joyful, if approached in the right way.
In our first
reading, God tells Jeremiah to go down to the potter’s house. Apparently, the closest potter wasn’t very
good, because what Jeremiah sees is the clay getting all messed up. Instead of the lovely dishes or roof tiles or
whatever the potter was making, the clay ended up lopsided -- maybe it turned
out like my school art projects where one side of the pot was really thick and
could barely dry while the other side was so thin it almost immediately
cracked. Jeremiah’s potter had to take
his clay and reshape it. The clay wasn’t
working quite right for one item, so he decided to make something else out of
it.
God’s
message to Jeremiah for God’s people is that he is the potter and we are his
clay. Since he made us (and Genesis says
God formed us out of the dust of the earth and breathed life into us), then he
gets to shape us as he believes is best.
By offering our entire selves and our relationships and our possessions
to God, he can take them and reform them in the most straightforward ways to be
used for new purposes. Being reshaped
for God’s renewed plan for us is a good thing.
If we refuse to surrender, however, and try to hang on, we can think
about what it is like to try to reform hardened pieces of clay. The new purpose might be there, but instead
of being soft and malleable, there are brittle areas that weaken the vessel in
the long run.
So what
specifically am I talking about? Here
are a couple examples. First, we are at
the time of year when young people are going back to school, and some are even
going away to school. As our children,
or our grandchildren, grow up, we can either offer them to God or try to hold
on to the way things have been. By offering
our children, and our relationships with them, to God, we allow God to reform
our children’s lives in ways that let them be used for new and deeper purposes.
They can meet new people, minister to
people in more mature ways, and share God’s love in places we can’t go. Even
our relationships with our children can develop in ways that God will use for
our benefit and their benefit and for the world’s benefit. But if we refuse to take the risk of offering
them back to God, the new vessel God is turning them into can be weakened
because we are trying to keep a part of their life in a certain shape because
we are more comfortable with it. Our
spiritual work is to train our desires to not want what makes us comfortable in
our relationships, however, but to want those we love to be re-molded in
whatever way the divine potter knows to be best.
Or maybe we
have an image in our mind of what our life is supposed to be; maybe our parents
instilled it in us. A certain type of
house, cars, kids, grandkids, whatever.
And maybe we’ve even achieved most of that, but now it’s time for
something else. Maybe a smaller
apartment in a living situation where there are other people around – people we
will have an opportunity to minister to in some way. Or maybe we are supposed to go to a simpler
car or otherwise downsize so we have more money to give away. Or maybe we are supposed to use the space we
have to take in aging family members or foster children or volunteers for area
causes. Maybe God is just ready to take
the clay of our lives and do something new with it. But unless we are willing to say, “Take,
Lord, receive,” we aren’t cooperating, and may even be hindering God’s purpose
for us.
(Verse 2) Take, Lord, receive all I have and possess.
You have given all to me, now I return it.
Give me only Your love and Your grace, that's enough for me.
Your love and Your grace, are enough for me.
You have given all to me, now I return it.
Give me only Your love and Your grace, that's enough for me.
Your love and Your grace, are enough for me.
While Jeremiah gives us the metaphor of God
as our potter, Psalm 139 depicts ways in which God has known us even in our
mother’s womb and paid attention to the smallest details about us. We are marvelously and wondrously made by him
and he is aware of every word we speak, of every step we take, and even every
thought we have. He has plans for us -- plans
beyond anything we can even begin to understand. “How deep I find your thoughts, O God! How
great is the sum of them! ...to count them all, my life span would need to be
like yours!” the psalmist writes.
So if God has made us with such love, and
if really are the miracles that Psalm 139 says we are, we can trust the ongoing
work he is going to do with us. We can believe that what God will do for us and
through us tomorrow will be even better than what it has been today. Even if part of God’s will is more difficult
for us so that others can benefit, we accept and even rejoice in that suffering
to further God’s plan of salvation. God
loves each and every one of us too much to waste the amazing gifts that we are,
so if we are willing to cooperate with God, we will never be brushed aside or
forgotten. But we may be
challenged. We may be transformed. We may die in some ways to receive new life
in others.
This surrender to God is what Jesus is
talking about in the Gospel. When he
talks about hating family members, he doesn’t want mean some kind of visceral
fury when we see our parents or our siblings walk into a room. He is saying that if there is a choice
between what they want and what God wants, we choose what God wants. If we have the choice between clinging to the
relationship we’ve always had with them or having that relationship transformed
so the kingdom can be built up in new ways, we choose to let God be a party to
our relationship and focus on God together.
Taking up our cross means that we accept whatever struggles or suffering
we may face in the future to get to where God wants us to be. These choices make sense since God is our
loving maker and our potter.
But the fact that we continually offer our
lives and our relationships back to God does not mean that every day our life
is turned upside down. Most days it
isn’t. Most days, God is happy to use
the relationships that we have in the ways that we have them. Most days, God has us right where he wants
us, and by offering our lives and relationships to him, we are allowing him to
deepen the love we already share with those around us.
The same principle holds true when Jesus
says, “none of you can be my disciples if you do not give up all your
possessions.” What Jesus says is
true. We can’t follow God if we tightly
hold on to our stuff. But the times we
are really called to give up everything are fairly few. I’ve had to do it a couple of times,
including when we moved to Sharon and gave up our house and our savings and a variety
of other possessions. We took a risk that God would take care of us, and he
has. Even at that time, however, some
things moved with us – my guitar, clothes, a bunch of books, some furniture. I could have given them up, but then God
would have had to go get me new ones. Yet
everything we have has been offered to him and is his. I hope I am always using my possessions for
God’s work, even if some of that work is to keep me alive and happy so I can
live into my call to be the priest here.
If I gave away my house or my car every day, God would take care of me
and somehow get me where I need to be and stop me from freezing to death, but
that care might come by a divine voice that says, “I gave you a house already,
so use it.”
I don’t think it is a copout to say that we
can give up all our possessions without dragging a moving van of all our stuff
to Goodwill. Instead we can take three
steps that demonstrate our intention and desire to give our possessions to God,
and that desire to give all to God is crucial.
The first step is tithing our first fruits. We step out in faith by
giving the first ten percent of our income back to God and asking God to bless
the rest. Second, we really acknowledge
in our hearts that everything we have is God’s, not ours, and be willing to let
go of it should the reason arise. Then,
third, we try to use all that we have for God’s glory, as if our possessions,
which are now God’s possessions, were items dedicated for service at the
altar. Because in a way they have
been. All of us are God’s children and
our lives are meant to be holy. Anything
that we have is meant to help us live and love, and in a very real way is devoted
to God’s holy work as much as the altar candles are.
God is our potter. He made us with love and formed us for his
purpose. We can trust the next steps in
his loving purposes for us, even during times of significant change. We can ask him to take and receive our
possessions, our relationships, and our very lives, trusting in his love and
grace to continue to provide us what we need.
His love and his grace are always enough for us.
(Verse 3) Take, Lord, receive, all is Yours now.
Dispose of it, wholly according to Your will
Give me only Your love and Your grace, that's enough for me.
Your love and Your grace, are enough for me.
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