Choosing Life, Being Found

                    

Jeremiah 31:31-34
 
This week I found myself needing to repent. I got caught up in a pattern of behavior that was life-draining for me and caused pain and confusion for others.  And when I woke up to it, I felt awful and flooded with regret.  Because I was thinking about repentance as our theme this week, it was especially uncomfortable because most of me was caught in the pain and agony of the experience, and a small part of me was watching myself and taking notes. 
 
The Greek word for repent, Μετανοεῖτε means literally “change how you think after being with,” in other words, turn around, shift your being in another direction, change your purpose after this encounter.”  Repent is not a moral word of judgment and condemnation, like we like to make it. It actually isn’t about being good or bad.  Repentance in the biblical sense is a complete reorientation.  It is turning from death to life.  We could think of it as laying down your mind and exchanging it for the mind, perspective, and purpose of Christ. Sometimes repentance is used as something that happens to you, rather than something you do.  One biblical scholar says, “It can be more about being found than about finding oneself." (Matt Skinner, Working Preacher).
 
When we recognize we have sinned, that is to say, when the lightbulb goes on and we can see that we have made a choice toward death and division instead of life, we are flooded with regret and sorrow. We can’t go back and undo what we did or take back what we said. So what happens next?  
 
Sometimes we double down; it’s too painful to honestly face what we’ve done or own what we’ve said, so we blame other people, or the circumstances.  We may make excuses, or drink to forget. We may deflect and point at someone else whose actions are “worse” than ours, to try to make ourselves feel better.  All of these things usually make us feel worse and more stuck.
 
We have no good human mechanism for getting ourselves out of sin, the power of sin, the mindset of sin, which is separation, isolation, judgment. Paul says we are a slave to sin.  Trapped in sin we move to the punishment of sin, condemnation.  Because Sin is living as though God is not God and we are not beloved children of God created to live with and for each other.  So when we get caught in sin, and we are suddenly aware that we are caught in sin, we often sin more to try to make ourselves not feel so alone, so trapped, so disappointed in ourselves.  Or we judge and condemn ourselves, or each other for the sin, which is just another way of staying locked in sin, being ruled by the way of fear.
 
But God has a mechanism to get us out of sin.  All the way back to Adam and Eve, through the prophets and judges and kings, to John the Baptist shouting on the banks of the Jordan this message is then embodied in Jesus himself who proclaimed the words that set us free: Repent! Repent for the kingdom of God is right at hand!
 
Translation: Trade out your way of sin and alienation and disconnection for my way of belonging and love.  Let yourself be found, for God’s way of life is right here for you.
 
Like sunflowers turning their face toward the sun, like exhausted, angry toddlers running back into their parent’s arms, repenting returns to our true selves, and our true place in God. We turn our wilting little hearts back toward their source of life.
We don’t even have to believe we will find mercy, though we will. We may be craving the judgment and condemnation we think we deserve, but this is the power and beauty of God’s way: once we repent, once we turn our sorry selves back toward love, we are released from judgment and condemnation. Once we repent, we receive grace and find ourselves held by God with others. We only need to trust just enough in that belonging to open up and admit we feel ashamed, and acknowledge our regret over what we’ve done.
 
So many of our texts this Lent have been connected to the Babylonian exile – the Israelites ripped from home and stuck somewhere unfamiliar and uncomfortable that is not home.  This feels fitting because this pandemic has been like the whole world living in a kind of exile.  The promise of this prophet to the people in exile is a relationship with God that is not dictated by rules, shaped by fear of punishment, or demanding careful tiptoeing, but a connection defined by love, covered in grace and secured by the Divine and not by us, steered by the One who anticipates our need for salvation and offers it before we ask.
 
These people don’t know if they have what it takes to live up to their end of the deal. In fact, all evidence from history and experience from history tells them and if it is up to them to remember their place and live from that truth they will fail at staying true to God.  But God says it’s not their job to uphold this relationship. God will make a new covenant, a new bond, not dependent on their ability to remember correctly and teach each other rightly, but written into their very hearts, every one of them. This covenant can’t be broken because it will be inside them and God will do the heavy lifting.  They will be God’s people and God will be their God, period.
 
We long to be connected and alive, to sense God and see others, and we long to contribute to connection and love and joy for others.  So for us, repentance is the gift of this connection, the tool right here in our own hearts, to come home when we fall away, to remember when we forget, to let ourselves be put back together again by God, whose love and mercy meet us not only when we step up and reach out, but especially when we’re stuck in our sin.
 
God’s goal isn’t punishment but reconciliation, reconnection. God wants for us wholeness and love.
 
So we get to step up and claim it. We get to accept being accepted, like we said last week that Sabbath rest offers us.  Repentance does this too.  It’s the wake up moment when we say, Oh! I want to trade my pitiful way of greed, resentment and constant condemnation, for God’s way of love that belongs me to God and other people!  And in that moment, we let God’s salvation meet us just exactly how we need to be met, to heal us where we are sick, and mend us where we are broken, and release us where we are caged and find us where we are lost.  Our anger or disappointment, our mistakes or our stupidity, do not get to set the terms, define our lives, keep us divided or trapped. God’s love sets the terms. Grace holds us. When we receive God’s forgiveness, we can forgive ourselves, and we can forgive each other.  
 
But we have to do that part. We have to repent. We have to take that step of complete vulnerability and say it – to God, to ourselves, to the person we’ve wounded. We have to admit we’ve gone off track and let ourselves get turned back around by God, to the way of love and trust, to our true selves.
 
After repenting, I felt relief and hope and clarity.  It’s painful to look honestly at yourself, but it means a new way opens up. Nobody in my house is under any delusion that I wont behave badly ever again, but I got to experience being seen, being forgiven, remembering my place alongside those I love, and more ready to forgive and see and love them as well.  We belong to each other. I belong to all others.
 
A few of us meet online for morning and evening prayers each day. Every Friday night we pray Psalm 40:8. It says, “I delight to do your will, O my God, your law is within my heart.” We delight to do God’s will. We delight to feel ourselves part of the fabric of life, connected to others, aware of God, awake to gratitude and fullness of joy. God’s way is inside us, part of us, leading us, and leading us back when we lose our way, bringing us home again.
Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Exhaustion and What to Do (or Not Do) About It

 

Psalm 107:1-9, (or check out the whole psalm if you want), Matthew 11:28-30

This is the Sunday one year ago that we suddenly suspended in-person worship.  A year ago we were hunting for toilet paper and hand sanitizer and stockpiling dried beans.  A year ago my kids came home early Thursday and didn’t go back to school on Friday. A month later my daughter and I walked through the spooky empty halls to clean out her locker, glimpsing half-finished projects scattered in abandoned classrooms and discarded boots and mittens lying on shelves.  
 
Imagine if you could have told us then what we were in for. 

I feel exhausted, emotionally, psychologically.  Things take more mental effort, my memory feels a bit feeble, and I have energy for fewer things in a day.  This is what we talked about 10 months ago as visiting a new culture, pandemic culture, and how culture shock and adjusting to a new culture, always calculating and modifying, is so draining.  It’s like we’re buffering, or continuously searching for a wifi connection, with what in our house we call “the spinning wheel of death” on our screens.  We may not be accomplishing a whole lot, but our battery is draining precipitously.  And while we’re constantly adapting the exhaustion is compounding. For. A. Year.  I’ve had a year of thin-skinned irritability.
 
What is a good life and how do I live it when I am exhausted? 
Who is God and what is God up to when we are exhausted?
 
Our scriptures today say something about both of these.  
I love Psalm 107. This is just a small part of it. It’s made up of about six different vignettes that describe God’s salvation coming in just the way people need it, God coming in and saving them exactly how they need saving.  This is who God is and what is God up to, the Psalmist says.  Several years ago a few of us wrote our own versions – here are two of the LNPC vignettes:
 
Some were overwhelmed with grief for a brother’s loss of his son
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble 
and God delivered them from their distress
God quieted them to hear their brother, and clarified their need to be present for their brother.
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
For God’s wonderful works to humankind.
            For God covers our time being with one another in suffering with grace and tears, joy and gratitude.
 
Some of them had confusion about their “call,” their vocation, and had trouble recognizing their own gifts and letting themselves be used by God 
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble 
and God delivered them from their distress
God comforted them through friends, and directed them through mentors, and gave them patience on the unfolding journey
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
For God’s wonderful works to humankind.
For God brings peace in the midst of the journey.
 
We cry out to God in our trouble and God delivers us from our distress. And we thank God for God’s steadfast love, and wonderful works to humankind.  That is who God is and what God does.  Like Theresa said last week with the dead bones who can’t reanimate themselves – they can’t even cry out or thank God like this Psalm, and still – God does this, God brings salvation, breathes life into our places of death. It’s what God does.
 
Come to me, Jesus said, all you who are weary. Come to me and I will give you rest. The Bible often uses “the rest of God” as a synonym for “salvation.” Rest is what being saved feels like.  Rest is being saved.  


Last year, in the middle of Lent when we were plunged into this pandemic we were talking about the way of fear, that asks “what if…” and the way of God, where hope answers, “even if…” 

Worry is practicing fear. Worry trains us to fear by saying over and over again, “What if… what if… what if…”  And this year has been serving us worry opportunities on a platter, daily, nearly moment to moment. We don’t have to search for what if’s… we’re drowning in chances to practice fear.  

But rest, rest is practicing trust. Rest trains us to trust by saying over and over again, “Even if… Even if… Even if…”  When we rest we step out of the vigilance, we put down the weird belief that our worry and our work can somehow guarantee our security, protect our future, ensure our own safety or stability. When we rest, we practice trusting God to do what God does. We turn back to God, who does the saving. 
 
The way of God is the way of rest. Taking Jesus’ yoke means joining Jesus, and carrying what he carries into the world: the embodiment of complete belonging to God and belonging to others.  It is a restful, easy way, because it is the way we are designed to live:
where "the other" is not threat, object or burden, but my sibling, my neighbor, my friend.  Where there is enough and it is meant to be shared.  Where love has the first and final word.  Where the end it is all heading toward is wholeness and connection.  

Whether we forget or not, God's redemption and love is already and always happening.  We trust this. We live always into, out of, and toward, this reality.  Rest reminds us whose we are and who we are.  
 
It’s is easy to think everything will be all right when we feel alright. And when we don't feel alright, when the things that felt foundational get taken away, it’s easy to feel like we won’t be ok. We won’t be ok, so how dare we rest until we are? How dare we stop, how dare we play? How dare we waste time, squander energy, on anything other than saving ourselves or fixing what’s broken in the world?
 
In this mostly stay at home life, we have so overruled rest with worry and work – or the worry that we should be working – that when this thing ends, (and it is ending, you guys), we are going to feel pressure to go harder than ever, to make up for lost time. It will be more difficult than ever to rest. We will think we don’t deserve it. We will assume we’ve just spent a year “resting,” for pete’s sake! So we had better get out there and get going!
 
We tell ourselves rest is reward to be bestowed on those who’ve earned it, or claimed by those who are sick, or selfish, or simply too exhausted to go on.
 
In truth rest is returning to our deepest, most vulnerable selves, made in the image of a God who rests and who wove rest into the fabric of creation.  A God who tells us in the top ten rules for life that resting, regularly, on purpose, no matter what, is essential.  That rest is how we come back to our belonging to God and each other. It’s how we practice trusting. It’s they way we remember whose are and who we are.  Sabbath says to us: you are accepted, just as you are. You belong already.  This world is held in God’s love.  So once a week power it all down, unplug and turn it off.  Don’t seek anything, perform anything, produce anything. Spend a day accepting being accepted. Receive God’s grace.
 
So we start now. Here.  We get back to practicing Sabbath, which is a way of saying, resting proactively, preemptively, intentionally and regularly. Even if, we stop.  No matter what, we stop.  In the midst of, despite, and nevertheless, we regularly, without excuse or worldly justification, stop.  Because more important than our doing is our being. 
 
We are called to join in God’s work of justice, healing and hope from our grounding in rest.  There will never not be work to do. But not by weary people strapped to a yoke of fear. Not from heavily burdened people, dragging a load of pressure to make up for lost time, caught up in cycles of worry and anxiety, guilt and shame for not doing enough, exhausted and utterly spent, but forcing themselves to rally anyway. We must turn off.  So that we can turn back on and tune back in.
 
We are being set free.  Always.  We are being saved. This world is being saved.  That’s what God does. This God always acts from despair to bring hope, from brokenness to bring wholeness, from impossibility to bring newness.  We get to be part of this.
 
And so perhaps our vignette today would be:
 
Some found themselves a year into a disorienting pandemic. A time filled with terror, worry, boredom and isolation. It took from them all normalcy, exposed to them the vast landscape of injustice and pain in their nation, opened up deep wells of grief, and left them suspended in ongoing unknown that went on, and on, and on.
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble 
and God delivered them from their distress
God met them in their exhaustion with grace, and gave them the gift of rest, returning them to trust. Jesus invited them to live in his life, his love in and for the world that is claimed by God, a life that begins in rest.
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
For God’s wonderful works to humankind.
For the One who made us for life, and joins us in this life, meets us in rest, and draws us ever more deeply into life. 
 
Amen.