Isaiah 61:1-11
December 11, 2011
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the
oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the
day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who
mourn in Zion— to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead
of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be
called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.
They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined
cities, the devastations of many generations. Strangers shall stand and feed
your flocks, foreigners shall till your land and dress your vines; but you
shall be called priests of the Lord, you shall be named ministers of our God;
you shall enjoy the wealth of the nations, and in their riches you shall glory.
Because their shame was double, and dishonor was proclaimed as their lot,
therefore they shall possess a double portion; everlasting joy shall be theirs.
For I the Lord love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing; I will faithfully
give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.
Their descendants shall be known among the nations, and their offspring among
the peoples; all who see them shall acknowledge that they are a people whom the
Lord has blessed.
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my
whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of
salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom
decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown
in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to
spring up before all the nations.
Some
of you many know this already, many may not, but I have the privilege of being
an adjunct faculty member at Pittsburgh Theological seminary, teaching classes
at the master and doctoral levels. In
the classes I teach, the grades are always based on a final, 20-25 page
paper. The requirements of my papers are
a bit different from most college or graduate school academic papers. Those are academic papers in which the
students must assert a theory or idea, and then cite material backing up their idea.
I ask my students to write a paper
reflecting on a time in their lives when they felt God clearly transforming
them in some way. They are still
academic papers because they have to apply what they’ve read and heard in
lectures on their reflections, but the heart of their papers is a transforming
experience of God.
As
a result, I get to read some truly inspiring and amazing papers. None was more inspiring than what Pastor
Sarah wrote in her paper (Sarah’s not her real name, but I did get permission
to share her story) for a class I did over the past year.
Sarah
is an associate pastor of a large church.
She wrote that on a grey October day a number of years ago she stood on
the front steps of her church pondering her fate. Looking down the street to the left she thought
to herself that if she started walking right then, in fifteen minutes she would
be in the emergency room of the city hospital, where she could then check
herself into the psychiatric ward.
Looking to her right, she saw her car and thought to herself she was
just a fifteen-minute ride from home, where a kitchen knife was waiting for
her, one that she could use take her own life.
Her husband was away for the weekend, so there would be no one there to
stop her. She stood on the step,
paralyzed, not knowing what to do.
She
thought about the hospital option, and realized that if she chose it she would
be committing career suicide. What
church would want a pastor suffering from mental problems? People expect their pastors to have it
together and to be free of problems. Who
wants a pastor with problems, especially a suicidal pastor?
On
the other hand, if she went home she would be committing physical suicide. It wouldn’t be too hard. She had already been a cutter for years. All it would mean is cutting deeper. If you don’t know what “cutting” is, it’s a
condition that many people have struggled with, especially teens and young
adults. The best understanding of it is
that people cut themselves with razors and knives in hidden places as a way of
creating a small crisis that they can handle, which takes their minds away from
large crises that they feel helpless against.
Sarah felt helpless against her large crisis, so cutting helped her deal
with it. But cutting was no longer
working.
Sarah’s
dark secret? She suffered from
perfectionism. She had been striving for
perfection her whole life. In high
school, college, and seminary she had always gotten top grades. In fact, she had won several awards in
seminary for her achievements. As an
associate pastor, she was constantly complimented on how hard she worked, how
much she devoted herself to the church, and how great she was. What they didn’t know was that to accomplish
all this she had to put in 80 to 90 hour weeks.
It didn’t matter that her husband kept pleading with her to take time
for their marriage, or at least for herself.
She was serving God, and that didn’t leave much time for anything
else.
Being
that perfect had a cost. The price she
was paying was the growing sense that she was a shell, a fraud, trying to make
up for her broken interior with a perfect exterior—perfect in behavior and
appearance. She felt hollow inside. She couldn’t pray to God or read the Bible
because she was just too busy. Prayer
was for people with time on their hands, and she was too busy cultivating an
ideal to pray.
As
she struggled on the steps, she caught something of a vision. For some reason she began to think about
Jesus suffering on the cross, and as she did she recognized that she was being
crucified, too. Jesus had been crucified
by the Romans and the Jews. She was
being crucified by her desire for perfection.
She had been serving a false god, and it was now all falling apart. She realized that she needed a resurrection,
a transformation into a whole new way of living. She walked to her car, and sitting behind the
wheel she wept. Amidst the tears were
prayers for God to help her find a new way, a way without perfection, but a way
of trust, compassion, and balance. She
could no longer live life the way she had, and she was giving to God her
imperfect “perfect” life, asking God to transform her.
The
next day she called the chaplain at the hospital and asked to meet with
him. Thus began a several year span in
which she met with him weekly, pouring out her heart and soul. Through this process she discovered a new way
of being a pastor, a person, and a wife.
She discovered that there was no perfection in ministry or life. Instead, there was a way of serving in which
we can become available to God in everything.
So instead of keeping detailed lists of everything she had to do, she
immersed herself in prayer. She’d come
to work, asking God, “What would you have me do today.” If she prayed and had a sense that this or
that person should be visited, that’s what she would do. She took time for herself and for her
marriage. She spent time praying and
reading. And slowly her life got better.
Along
with this new approach, she noticed that she was working less but accomplishing
more. She discovered that when she was more balanced and grounded in God, it
seemed like God was working through her.
Her ministry was no longer just her own.
She was letting God work through her, and it made all the difference in
the world. As long as she was in charge,
she was crushed by her burdens, but when she let God be in charge, her burdens
lightened incredibly and her life became a joy.
Pastor
Sarah discovered that when we truly place our lives in God’s hands, things work
out and God makes us better. She
discovered the very message that Isaiah was preaching in our passage: trust God,
put yourself and your burdens into God’s hands, and things will work out for
the better.
Unfortunately
we all excel at holding onto our struggles, or at least at putting them into
God’s hands and then taking them back by keeping a tether tied to them so that
as we walk away we can pull them back along with us. The great Quaker writer, Hannah Whitall
Smith, wrote about our struggle to give God our burdens. She said that we are like a man walking from
town to town, carrying a heavy burden.
And God is like another man, who pulls up in a large, horse-drawn cart,
saying to him, “Oh, your burden looks so heavy, and you seem so tired. Would you like me to give you a ride to the
next town?” The man accepts, gratefully,
and climbs into the cart. But the burden
remains on his back. The driver says,
“Why don’t you place your burden in the back of the cart?” And the burdened man says, “Oh no, it’s
enough that you are willing to give me a ride.
You don’t have to carry my burden, too.”
This
is how we are with so much of life. We
have all sorts of small and large burdens we’re willing to talk with God about,
but when it comes to giving them to God we hold back. I think one reason that
we have such a hard time giving God our burdens is that we don’t think we know
how. Too many people assume that giving
God our burdens means sitting back and doing nothing. That’s not what it means
at all. Giving God our burdens means
giving God the anxiety we hold over issues we face, asking God to help us in
knowing what to do about our burdens, trying our best to listen for God’s
guidance, and then following what we sense God is calling us to do, doing the
best we can.
My
guidance for giving God our burdens comes from Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust
in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insights. In all your ways acknowledge God and God will
make straight your paths.” What this
passage is saying is that giving God our burdens means giving God the anxiety
we hold toward our burdens, and then trying to get our thinking in line with
God. The point, though, is not
necessarily being perfect in figuring out what God wants. God cares much more about our intentions that
about our actual actions. What I mean is
that God cares much more that we want to follow God’s will than about how well
we actually follow God’s will. If our
heart is in the right place, and we’re really
trying to rely on God’s insights, then God will make our paths straight, even if what we are doing isn’t really what
God wants. In other words, God makes
straight our paths based on the depth of our desire and intent, not on the
merits of our actions.
The
whole idea of placing our burdens in God’s hands is central to Isaiah. He didn’t just want to limit it to burdens. Isaiah called on people to ground all of
their thinking in God. The people of his age had a hard time doing that, and
little has changed since then. We have a
hard time grounding our thinking in God, and one of the main reasons is that we
have a hard time building a foundation to our thinking that is actually
grounded in what God wants.
I
don’t think I understood what building a God foundation to our thinking before
studying with Adrian van Kaam. He had a
model for understanding our thinking that was brilliant. He said that much of our thinking is like a
pyramid in which we place certain ideologies, philosophies, and theologies at
the foundation that influence all the others built on top of them. What we place at the foundation will then
influence and trickle through all of our other thoughts. For example, if we place being conservative
or liberal at the foundation, then our Christianity will become either
conservative or liberal first, Christian second. This is true for every kind of
Christianity. Whatever adjective we
place before our Christian faith demonstrates what’s at our foundations,
whether that be Evangelical, Pentecostal, Catholic, Presbyterian, or any
other. So, if we are a “liberal”
Christian, or an “Evangelical” Christian, it means that we are liberal or
Evangelical first, Christian second. The
result is that sometimes we act in ways that aren’t truly Christian because
we’ve lost our connection with an authentic Christianity. We’re trying to be liberal or evangelical,
not Christian.
A
lot of Christians don’t really place their Christianity at their foundations at
all. They are Republican or Democrats first, conservative or liberal second,
and Christian way down the line. When
that happens, their Christian faith becomes extremely limited because they can
only see Christianity from a narrow perspective as it reflects only Republican,
conservative, or Democratic, liberal thought, with a smattering of Christian.
Van
Kaam taught is that if we are truly to follow God’s guidance and thinking, we
have to start by placing our Christian faith at our foundations, and let that
influence everything else. This is hard
for many of us to do because we are something else at our foundations. But this is what Isaiah was calling for: to
place God, especially our understanding of God from our deepest faith
tradition, at our foundation so that this will help us to hear God and
understand God’s will.
Pastor
Sarah did something very similar. She
had been placing a certain kind of perfectionism and work ethic at her
foundations, but in that moment on the steps, in becoming open to God, she
placed her faith at her foundation. And
it changed the whole way she say everything in her life. It transformed her. Because she did this, God accepted her
burdens and slowly made everything all right.
As
we close, I want you to reflect on some questions: What do you do with your burdens? Do you give them to God or hold onto them
tightly? What’s the foundation of your
thinking? Is it God, or is it something
else?
Amen.
