Lessons (click here for full text of the lessons):
   Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51; Hebrews 5:1-10; John 12:20-33

We work hard here. Not only in our lives outside of church – as wage earners and parents and students and caregivers and volunteers – but here, in this place.  We give of our time and energy and money to church projects, like the mulch sale and Bible study and opening the church for prayers for peace.  And we work hard on Sundays, at the liturgy, which literally means “the work done for the people.”  Each Sunday involves so many people: merry maids and lectors and intercessors and acolytes and child carers and hospitality crews and on and on.

And even if you’re not “working” on a Sunday, or you’re a guest who wanders through those doors to see what’s going on in here, there’s still a lot of things you have to do.  You have to kneel and stand at the right times.  You have to sing songs of praise even if you’re heart is breaking, and other times you have to go on about your “manifold sins and wickedness” when the rest of your life is looking pretty rosy.  Not only is there a certain way we do things in the Episcopal Church that takes more than a little getting used to, there’s the basic fact that we do so much. It’s good stuff, don’t get me wrong, but there is a lot of doing. 

I thought a lot this week about this tendency of ours because I had a choice to make.  Now to set the stage for this choice, I need to tell you that Pam and I try very hard to have Saturday be our Sabbath day. On that one day we don’t do anything we feel we have to do.  It’s a day for family and friends, of doing things that we enjoy and that are truly meaningful. No bill-paying, no house cleaning, and certainly no sermon-writing.

So if Saturday is Sabbath, and I work all Thursday and Friday at my other jobs, that means all the Sunday preparations – including the sermon – need to be done by Wednesday. And up until this week, I’d been able to make that deadline.  But this week a bunch of other responsibilities came up: a mother visiting, a wife sick, a boss out of town who needed me to work more hours to cover for him, some pastoral visits to make.  You know how it goes, I’m sure.  We’ve all been there – we have too much on our plate, and something has to give. So I was faced with a choice: Wing the sermon, or cut into the Sabbath.

It’s very tempting, I think, to focus on the responsibilities that have an immediate penalty if you don’t fulfill them.  If you don’t pay your bills on time, well, people come looking for you. If you don’t take the trash out, you can smell the difference.  And the stakes are even higher when other people are involved.  It’s one thing to put off doing the laundry for another couple of days, but it’s quite another to stand up in front of a bunch of people and preach a sermon that makes no sense.

But with truly meaningful activities there’s usually no immediate penalty for not doing them.  If you don’t get to spend quite as much time with your spouse or your child or your best friend as you wished you could, well, then, you’ll try to do better next time. They’ll understand, because we’re all busy, right?  Because it’s the big picture we’re worried about, not that one random Sabbath day that we were supposed to spend with family. What’s one day in the grand scheme of things?  We’ll make it up to them later, we tell them, and we tell ourselves.

This human tendency to focus on tasks rather than people, on the world’s deadlines instead of the gift of spending a day with our loved ones, on doing rather than being, has many causes. For one, it’s natural to want to do a good job.  We take a very healthy pride in that, and we’re judged on the basis of the work we do. It’s that way in the church, too, because services roll around every Sunday morning, regardless of what other things have popped up in the preceding week.  And while we talk about right priorities and balance, in the end there’s a job that needs to get done.  I can only imagine how the vestry would have responded in my job interview here if I’d said that I was gonna try real hard to prepare for church each week, but I couldn’t guarantee it, because I had other priorities in life.

It also stems from our desire to be in control of our lives. Sure, we seek balance, but we seek a balance of our own devising, on our own terms. We want to be able to say, “I’m going to spend so much time on this, and another few hours on that.”  We don’t like it when we have to make a choice between two legitimate responsibilities, and often we end up deferring to the world’s expectations when we make that decision. We do what has the least tangible consequences, and we ask the people we love to stand by us as we do. And so we’re able to continue to live under the delusion that we’re really in control.

That all hit home for me when I was in seminary. During a meeting with the academic dean, whom I knew only in passing, I found myself speaking of the state of my life, the challenges I was facing, and so on. My life was spinning out of control at the time, it seemed to me, and not only did I often find myself doing things I knew better than to do, most of the time I didn’t even know what the best thing to do was. Our conversation was equal parts school requirement, counseling session, and cry for help.

After I’d gone on at great length about what I was dealing with, the dean turned to the side and looked out the window, deep in thought.  And then in one of those pithy comments that might seem either obvious or not very helpful to the person speaking, but turns out to be life-altering for the person listening, he said to me, “You know, Bob, I think ‘control’ is antithetical to the religious life.” And I think he was absolutely right: control has no place in a life of faith, at least not from our end, because it’s God who’s in control, not us.

Finally, we act the way we do because on some very profound level that we may not admit even to ourselves, we think that we have to act like that in order for God to love us. Sure, there’s all this stuff in the Bible about God loving everyone with no strings attached, but can that really be true?  The world certainly doesn’t seem to work like that. The church doesn’t seem to, either, because it fully expects us to bring flowers or coffee cake, or vacuum the carpet, or read the intercessions when we said we would. The words are nice, but what would happen if we showed up unprepared, having done absolutely nothing in advance, and not ready to do much more in the service of standing and kneeling, singing and responding, and on and on. What would really happen if we just plopped down in a pew and didn’t do a single thing?

Today’s reading from Jeremiah speaks directly to that. In it God tells us that the Mosaic covenant is history. The covenant that said that God would do this and that as long we did such and such is gone. And in its place we have something much more simple, and abounding in grace.  “I will be their God, and they will be my people,” says the Lord. “I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

Notice that God doesn’t say anything about what we have to do. He doesn’t say we have to perform certain tasks in preparation for church, or even do certain things while we’re here, or even be here at all. We don’t have to meet deadlines or live up to our responsibilities.  There are no strings attached to this glorious new covenant, the same one that we celebrate each week in the Eucharistic Prayer: “This is my Blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” This is the covenant meant for all of us, if only we have the courage to let go of our expectations, to admit that we’re not in control, and trust in the loving God who makes promises with no strings attached and always comes through on them. 

All this was brought home to me this week through the book we read for Book Club.  It’s a rather disturbing novel called Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, about a modern-day Saul who goes to great lengths to discredit Jesus, only to come to some measure of faith, be overwhelmed by his own sin, and harm himself in misguided penance. At the very end of the novel, his landlady, who up to then had only been raising his rent and greedily trying to cheat him out of his disability checks, becomes his agent of grace.  And so, on his deathbed, a former foe of Christ hears the voice of grace from the lips of a sinner extraordinaire.  This is what she says to him, echoing Jeremiah:  “I’ve been waiting for you. And you needn’t pay any more rent but have it free here, any way you like, upstairs or down. Just however you want it and with me to wait on you, or if you want to go on somewhere, we’ll both go.” [1]

So God says to each of us. I am your God, and you are my people.  What you do is not as important as who you are.  Don’t worry about deadlines.  Don’t worry about being in control. You don’t need to do anything to be welcome in my house. Just be yourself, which is how I made you, which is miraculous, which is enough.

Oh, and by the way, in case you’re curious, our Sabbath remained holy this week, and I can only hope this sermon made sense.

[1] Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, in Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Library of America, 1988): 131.

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