John 15:9-15 (from The Message)
"I’ve loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love. If you keep my commands, you’ll remain intimately at home in my love. That’s what I’ve done—kept my Father’s commands and made myself at home in his love. “I’ve told you these things for a purpose: that my joy might be your joy, and your joy wholly mature. This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you. This is the very best way to love.
Matthew 11:28-30 (adapted from The Message)
"Are you tired? Worn out? Overwhelmed by the heaviness of it all? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I will show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me - watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I wont lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn how to live freely and lightly.
The final week of elementary school my daughter's whole 5th grade went to a camp together. She had heard about this trip since kindergarten, and was looking forward to every part of it, most especially the night walk with the science teacher, the slugs and snails class, "stream studies" and the ropes course. The bus would pull away from the school at 6:50 am on Monday morning and she couldn’t wait to be on it. All her stuff was packed and by the door and the excitement was so great that it was hard to fall asleep the night before.
But in the middle of the night, Maisy awoke with terrible ear pain, which turned out to be a full-blown ear infection. When Monday morning came there was no way she could go on the trip; she’d be seeing the doctor instead.
I drove to the school to let her teacher know, and spent the next two days with a devastated daughter, feverish and heartbroken. But by the second night, the antibiotics had kicked in and she was almost back to 100%. I told her we would wake up early and I would drive her up to camp to finish the week with her class.
On Wednesday at 4:30 am I gently shook her out of bed, and by 5:00 we were backing out of the driveway, preparing for our 4 ½ hour drive, which I would repeat in reverse after dropping her off.
Around 5:30 or so, Maisy, who up to this point could hardly keep the smile off her face and the wiggles out of her legs, got quiet and still.
After a few minutes she said, “Mom, I feel really bad that you have to drive me all the way up there.”
“You do?” I said. “Well, Maisy, I wonder if you can let that bad feeling turn into gratitude instead. Listen to me carefully: I am so excited to drive you up to camp. I know how much it means to you, and it makes me so happy to be able to do this for you.”
Her eyebrows shot up and she looked at me in wonder. “Really?” she asked.
“Really.” I answered, unable to keep the tears from my eyes or the grin off my face.
Her whole demeanor lit up, and gratitude oozed from her until she was practically bursting.
“Mommy! Thank you so much!” she exclaimed.
I marveled at the sudden shift in her, from feeling bad that I was doing something for her, to pure gratitude; the difference was dramatic.
These are both ways to greet a gift. But one kept her (and me) captive to a system of judging, measuring, unworthiness and transactions. The other set her free to receive not just the gift of a ride up to camp, but the whole rest of the week.
Every moment ahead of her, this child was ready to absorb with delight, far more, I suspect, than she would have if she’d boarded the bus alongside everyone else.
This experience was precious. It mattered so deeply to her, so it mattered deeply to me. I was willing to sacrifice a whole day driving for her to be there, and when she received that as a gift, she received her own life, all that was before her and within her, as an utter gift.
The joy that we both felt right in that moment could have powered the car.
I’ve been thinking about that moment as this sabbatical approaches.
What happens when someone asks, What would make your heart sing? If you can think up your wildest dream that would make you feel fully alive and free, what would it be?
And then you do the fun thing of thinking that thing up; you dream it and embellish it and throw in fun details like, a family cooking class in Italy! What about a hike in Switzerland between a town that makes cheese and a town that makes chocolate?
You say how you want to try living in a place where you don’t speak the language, trusting each day to bring a new adventure and working only to be open to what comes. And you want to do this with your whole family, together, say, in Paris. So you write all this down. And it’s hypothetical, and electric with dreaminess and fantasy. You send it off and then you work to let it all go. Aaah, it was fun to dream.
And then they say, “OK. You can have that.”
And at first it’s thrilling and unreal.
You book an apartment and renew your passport and look up the hiking route and buy guidebooks. And then suddenly it’s real.
And you start to think about how you’d better come back super spiritually recharged so that it will be worth the significant investment. Or how you need to write something meaningful and important that will last so the time pays off.
Or what if it isn’t all you dreamed it would be and your family fights a ton and you freak out about not really knowing the language, and you waste the gift, and it goes too fast, and you don’t milk every second of goodness from the experience?
What if the wish granters made a mistake and should’ve granted someone else’s wish instead? Someone more worthy, or more deserving because they’ve suffered more than you have, or they don’t already have as much joy in their lives as you do?
And you find yourself grasping for expectations to meet, and ways to measure your progress or prove your worthiness. And then, as your wishes and dreams are coming true, you feel bad that someone is driving you all the way there, and your heart isn’t breathing, let alone singing.
Here’s the flat out truth of it: after nine years of talking about Sabbath and the vital need to stop it all and simply be, after all I’ve said about stepping out of the way of fear and into ive-giving connection with God and each other, after everything I’ve preached and practiced and written about remembering whose and who you are, when faced with this enormous, extravagant gift of a Sabbatical, this crazy chance to put everything down and go adventuring in the world I love with the people I love most with nothing else to do but that,
I am actually terrified to receive it.
I am finding all kinds of ways to resist it.
As it turns out, it feels so much more vulnerable to me to receive joy, than it does to embrace suffering.
That has come as a complete surprise to me.
I’m scared of that much grace! I am that intimidated by this amount of generosity and joy! That kind of heart-singing feels too good to be true so I’m apparently trying to make it not true so I won’t be disappointed or a disappointment.
Instead of teetering on the precipice of freedom and joy, I’m watching myself cling to anxiety, and grasp for the solid ground of self-judgment in the familiar territory of earning and obligation.
To complicate matters, we are in a time when it is treated like a violation to be joyous.
If you have too much contentment, you must not be paying attention.
There is so much to be worried or angry about, so much suffering, we could spend all day every day only dwelling on that, and many of us do.
So perhaps joy feels gaudy, naive, or thoughtless.
Perhaps we think it’s more polite, or woke, to hide our joy, or temper it with caveats, so it doesn’t make others feel bad.
We treat joy like a weapon that can wound those who are already suffering, or a limited commodity- there is only so much to go around, and if one person has too much joy they are hogging it from others, and should feel guilty, or at least have enough shame or dignity to hide it from the rest of us.
But joy is the word we use to describe the energy of being fully alive, fully connected to God, knowing who we are and whose we are.
Joy is heart-song.
And heart song it isn’t just one high, cheerful note. It’s the whole tune, with all its complexity. The low, groaning moaning parts from the depths of our lonesome souls, the laughter-tinged merriment of high notes, the goosebumpy harmonies and steady favorite melodies, and the rhythm that keeps the beat of it all.
Joy is the breathing open, fully singing heart with all its parts.
Joy is the car ride after you’ve lost the chance to go and it’s is handed back to you. Joy is not adversary to suffering, it’s partner and friend. Because grace meets us in suffering, and grace brings joy; both remind us that life is a precious and beautiful gift, both point us back to grace and invite us to receive.
Jesus said all he said so that we have his joy – joy that comes from being fully alive, fully connected to the Father, fully at home in love. When we are fully at home in love, that feels like joy. When you feel the depth of being loved, when you love others from your depths, when you receive God’s presence as love - your own life, a gift, not earned, not deserved, not only for the worthy, but for you, this life, all its beauty and all its pain, unique and unequalled anywhere else on the planet, your one gift of a heart-singing life held in love - you taste joy.
But even that I want to turn into something I can measure.
Am I receiving the gift fully enough?
No. I never could. It’s impossible. We could never fully receive the abundant and limitless measure of God's grace and love for us.
So I will stop trying.
I will hear the words of my heavenly parent who says from the driver’s seat, “It means so much to me to be able to do this for you. My heart sings when your heart sings.”
And I will hear, really let myself hear, the invitation Jesus gives:
Are you tired? Worn out? Overwhelmed?
Get away with me and you’ll recover your life.
I want to learn the unforced rhythms of grace.
That’s what these next three months are for. For me and for you.
We get to learn the unforced rhythms of grace.
While I am away doing this, you will be here doing it too. You get to, you’re supposed to! play, and heart sing, and use money you didn’t earn to do things together that feel frivolous or over the top. You get to step outside the ordinary patterns and try out things you wouldn’t normally do. This is the time set aside specifically for this: to learn to live freely and lightly, as Jesus says. To make ourselves at home in God’s love.
While I am away from you, practicing receiving grace with and from my family, you get to practice receiving from one another.
Not saying, “Oh no, I feel so bad…” but “Thank you.”
Practice listening to your heart song and letting it out.
Listening to each other’s heart song and letting it shape you.
Practice feeling joy whenever and wherever it meets you, and not hiding from it or pushing it away, but sharing it, because joy is meant to be shared and not hidden, claimed by all and not divvied up to individuals. Joy is powerful and contagious and resilient and it multiplies. Joy in one heart strikes a chord in the next and the music grows.
I am listening to French language cds to try to catch up to my kids who’ve spent the week at French immersion camp. The cds are unlike any language class I’ve ever taken. Instead of asking us to memorize vocabulary and conjugate verbs, he jumps right in to whole sentences and asks us to trust him. To show up and experience it, without trying to master it or get it right. Learning, he insists, happens through forgetting and remembering. You don’t memorize the backstory of your favorite characters on your favorite shows, you just get reminded and you forget and you’re reminded again, and gradually it sinks in and you know it. Learning is forgetting and remembering, over and over until it’s just there, part of you.
“But how can I remind you,” he asks gently, “if you haven’t forgotten?”
Grace cannot be grasped or mastered. It can’t be memorized. The unforced rhythms of grace are learned through forgetting and remembering.
So for me, every time now that I feel the resistance rise up, I am going to try to greet it with tenderness.
Oh, hello resistance! Look at you wanting to earn this gift! That shows you know it is a good gift. It shows you deeply appreciate it. I wonder if, in this moment, you might be willing to let the gift in, and let yourself feel how grateful you really are?
Over and over, I’ll forget and remember, until grace becomes part of me.
I with God, and Jesus with me, making my home in love.
What if, every time you feel resistance to grace, you too greet that resistance with tenderness and hear the invitation to let the gift in?
Because there is absolutely nothing else God would rather be doing than watching your heart sing. Your one precious heart that God made and treasures. And the harmony of all these hearts singing at once is the greatest music God could ever conceive of.
Howard Thurman famously said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because the world needs people who have come alive.”
What makes you come alive, Butch? What about you, Georgia? What makes you come alive, Linda? Lisa? Svea? Norm? What makes each person in this room come alive? What kind of glorious, soul-opening, spine-tingling symphony would emerge from this room full of fully-alive singing hearts?
In a world of dire news, exhausting commentary, unrelenting evil and a breakneck pace, what radical and powerful antidote is a community of joy-filled and joy-oozing people? What defiant and reorienting force is a even a single person fully at home in love? When we make our home in love, when we live in the joy of being connected to God and each other, it affects others. If you need proof, go see Wont you be My Neighbor. What a gentle, powerful witness Mr. Rogers is to the deep and transformative impact of loving others the way Jesus loves us. When we make our home in love it changes the narrative, frees us from the way of fear and draws us back into the real reality, the Kingdom of God.
Get away with me and you’ll recover your life, Jesus said.
I am RSVPing Yes to that invitation.
And you can too.
RSVP Yes to it with each other.
Remind each other when you forget. Receive the gift.
For goodness sake, spend the money. Hire each other babysitters and go see Mr. Rogers together! Buy flowers and music and indulge in beauty. Let yourselves play, go on outings, deepen your friendships. Share your stories and write new ones. Hear each other’s heart song.
This congregation has had lots of practice receiving grace in shared suffering. This time is for practicing receiving grace in shared joy. It’s all part of the hearts’ music and God can’t wait to meet you in all of it.
Let’s commit to being all in on this heart-singing thing, shall we?
While we’re apart, together we will be learning the unforced rhythm of grace that keeps the beat of it all.
Amen.
This is Part 3 of a series, "Grace Encountered. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.
