Online Sermons
The 5th Sunday in Lent: March 29, the Rev. Catherine Quehl-Engel
Welcome to our website. You are here: The Word --> Online SermonsI love that noon day prayer which says “O God, you keep in perfect peace those whose minds are fixed on you; for in returning and rest we shall be saved; in quietness and trust shall be our strength (BCP p. 138).” Yet it’s often hard to live this prayer, isn’t it? To keep at least a small part—say 20% of our mental energy recollected in God throughout our day. We often do the exact opposite. We shoot the wad of our mental and emotional energy on attachments to externals. Attachments not only to things in this transitory world but to our thoughts and fears.
Researchers say that something like 70% of our thoughts are caught up in worrying about the future or thinking about the past, and so we rarely are living fully in the present.[1] No wonder it’s so hard to practice what de Caussade called the Sacrament of the Present Moment, and Brother Lawrence called Practicing the Presence of God.[2] To be awake and aware of those eternal life this side of heaven moments which we catch on occasion. Run ragged by the tyranny of our thoughts, fears, and desires, and by forgetting to return to grounding in God’s being as home base throughout our day, we become lost. We forget the way back home as our sense of self is caught up in fleeting externals like appearances, popularity, possessions, power, honor, or lack there of and all the pain we create to go with it. It’s all the temptations named in Christ’s trial out in the wilderness.
When we identify ourselves with our ego-minds, its hard to relax. We’re restless. Grasping. Unsatisfied and insecure. And how often do we put on masks to cover our vulnerability—even though wearing them makes us itch?
Last week a student told me, “My deepest fear is that if I put down the mask people will find out my flaws and weakness; that they’ll find out who I really am and they won’t love me anymore.” My guess is that such fear of abandonment is what makes self-abandon into God’s care so hard. To live by faith and utter trust. To relinquish and free-fall into grace. To become like good seed falling into pitch black Iowa dirt so new life can rise is counter to our instincts. Instead of heeding advice by Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, about “not letting a good crisis go to waste,” ego-mind’s fearfully says “We’re doomed. Our falling, the falling apart of our plans for the future, the falling apart of our economy or of this city can only lead to death.” It’s hard for us to imagine that learning to fall and dying down can lead to the unleashing new life.
“Those who try to save their lives will lose it,” says Christ. But those who lose their life…those who follow me will find it. To follow the way of the self-emptying Son. Of imitating God’s humbly becoming human and weak like one of us to show us the way out of this exile from our true self made in God’s likeness. To not run from fear but to move closer to it. Of accepting the crosses we bear rather than resisting or struggling, or trying to suppress through work, drink, shopping, drugs, denial, or other pseudo escapes. Yes, of still allowing oneself to get angry and cry out like in our Gethsemanes like Christ did praying “Please, God, take this cup away.” But then acceptance.
That acceptance is your crucifixion.[3] Then in that acceptance, handing oneself over. Self-surrender and relinquishment like seed cracking open it’s seed casing so life can flow out of it. Self-abandon and surrender the way Christ showed us how: “Into Thy hands, Lord, I release my spirit.” Living into your baptism. That daily paschal rhythm of dying and rising, crossing yourself upon your lying down at night and upon your rising. Being a grain of wheat that falls and dies so that new life can be released. So that resurrection and ascension are possible. So that you, or your loved one, or Cedar Rapids, or this global economy can rise.
It’s hard to practice the imitation of Christ, isn’t it? To follow the way of the self-emptying Son. Of God who came to show us the wisdom way of being partakers in the divine nature—not through heroic invincibility but by becoming humble. Loosening the grip. Unclenching. Trusting. Practicing abandonment to God, trusting that it leads to anything but abandonment by God. That isn’t easy, I know. Trust me when I say preachers preach the very thing they need to hear assuming that it just might have something to do with the ruminations in your own lives.
Last Saturday my desire for sustaining a base run of 10 miles on a Saturday morning ended up being 4 with more walking, sluggishness, and feeling my finitude than desired. This Lenty feeling has been happening more often lately. It’s either March madness playing with my head or the start of the end. For thirty years running has been part of my sense of self—not only my prayer life and stress release but also my self-image of being tough, unstoppable, and strong. So this bodily tiredness and discomfort the pads of my feet and knees are an intrusion. Lent’s foul play. I did not tell God I was giving up long distance runs in the country for Lent. Sure, way back on Ash Wednesday I promised to give up over-striving. To slow down. To not take myself so seriously. I asked God to help me stay loose and light and live by grace and not by my own sheer willpower; that I’d give up grinding my ambitious, restless, always- trying-to-get-somewhere-Type-A-personality gears. But never, ever did I say that was to have anything to do with my Saturday morning long run. For whatever reason—most likely hubris--there was a discontent between that whole bit about ashes to ashes and this 5’2” bodily transport of a soul. Maybe in my head, those concepts couldn’t connect not only because running has been my communing time with God; in the words of 7th century Irish theologian, Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c. 815–877), the most basic Greek word for God means “God who runs through all things.” That is, God running through life’s veins out there on the Iowa prairie and in your and my very being.
Sure, I told a college chapel full of folks to remember that Lenten disciplines aren’t about proving the strength of one’s will power. That Lent is about humbly feeling one’s finitude, weakness and need; of knowing owns dependency upon a strength larger than self. About utter trust and self-abandon into the arms of God. I even posted self-reminders about this. I’d journal about St. Therese the Little Flower who was also a driven little thing and why I and so many others love her is not because she is the sugary sweet little saint many of her biographers make her out to be. Rather, we love her because like you and me she struggled with her failings, neurosis, and human limits until she owned them; because she gave up thinking she had to earn God’s love; because she learned of her belovedness and preciousness in and through being ordinary. Without the need to be spectacular. Because she finds healing not by trying to save her life—as our good Gospel would say, but by dropping ego-mind’s constant scrambling to save it.
Advocating the Way of Spiritual Childhood, Therese wrote “If you can bear in peace the trial of being displeasing to yourself, you offer a sweet shelter to Jesus….fear not. The poorer you become, the more Jesus will love you.” And if speaking to the likes of me and my guess you or someone you love, she says:
And suppose God wishes to have you as feeble and powerless as a child? Do you
think that you would be less worthy in God’s eyes? Consent to stumble, or even
to fall at every step, to bear your cross feebly; love your weakness. Your soul will
draw more profit from that then if…you vigorously performed heroic deeds which
would fill your soul with self-satisfaction and pride.”As I named earlier, acceptance of this self-emptying way of the cross is hard. So, after ruminating about all of this as I walked home last Saturday with my ego-pride dashed, there was only one thing left for me to do: Charge up the electric-powered hedge clippers and take it all out on the yard.
With Luke Skywalker moves I downed wide expanses of tall prairie grass. Like Edward Scissor Hands I sliced and diced my way through innocent died stalks of black eye susans and cone flower. I shaved dead ends off shrubs. I went after just about any lifeless or out of control vertical thing I could find. It felt powerful. It was satisfying. It was healing. It was transference. Unlike getting back into shape, or parenting, pastoring, teaching, fixing Cedar Rapids or the global economy, and practically anything having to do with your and my spiritual growth, that clipping rampage provided immediate results. This went on for hours. Next I moved on to a patch of oak leaves, raking like a maniac to liberate suffocating daffodils and pink peonie tips trying to rise after a winter’s slumber. After downing several aspirin, my Type A, full-throttle, over-striving self proceeded to tackle the twenty-feet high bamboo looking thing, and heave-hoeing it to the curb. Of course the next day, in the wake of all this hubris and angst, I was even more sore and unable to run. So I downed more aspirin, went to Trinity in Iowa City to teach about Therese’s humble Way of Spiritual Childhood which I so often resist yet am lured toward, and then together we worshiped God to help hand ourselves over. To hand ourselves over as Christ handed himself over, and for him to bear for us what we can no longer bear about ourselves. To accept the things that cannot be changed, change the things that can, and have the wisdom to know the difference. And with that, to ask God to help us learn the difference between hubris and tenacity—the necessity of tenacity without which the ministry and leadership of Christ Episcopal Church and in our individuals lives would not be possible.
Maybe the key is knowing that in handing oneself over—as Christ allowed himself to be handed over, one finds a strength, and an ease, and a peace which our own brilliance, bodies, portfolios, and world cannot always give. May you and I dare handing ourselves over, learning to fall so we can rise. To ask Christ whom Mary mistook for a gardener outside the tomb to show us how to humbly accept our weakness and let go in order to find strength and new life. To let go of whatever needs to die or be pruned inside us so new life can rise. To die to the false self and crack open its shell casing in order to find and free our True selves grounding in the divine which runs within you and all. To live the prayer “O God you keep in perfect peace those whose minds are fixed on you.” To return to that place within you where Christ our inward Lover and the Advocate—the Holy Spirit delight to dwell. Then to live that old phrase—“Not I, but God in me.”
[1] Research by Dr. Kabit-Zinn, Boston Univ. Medical School Mindfulness research. See Full Catastrophe Living, Coming to Our Senses, or partake in the UofI Hospitals Mindfulness program.
[2] See excellent books by these titles attributed to authors named.
[3] Credit goes to Eckert Toelle for this perspective. Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
pp. 171-191.