sermon – St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

Seasons of Creation #3 Wilderness: How do we think about, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle”?

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

The Rev. Barbara Hutchinson

Seasons of Creation #3: Wilderness

October 22, 2017

“God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” A common saying. Perhaps you’ve heard it many times in your life, or have even spoken it yourself. It’s a saying I’ve always pushed back against from a place deep within my gut, not necessarily understanding why, until I studied theology, and then I knew why. My image of God doesn’t include someone sitting upon a throne in heaven, dolling out bad things to people at opportune times, with the purpose of disrupting or destroying their lives, always attentive to the balance of good and evil in their lives at any particular moment, so people can be just on the edge of the good— or worse yet, bringing on the bad thing in life to selected people at the worst possible moments of their lives, just when they are starting to turn things around, or when they are spiraling downward.

My image of God is a flow of love, a source of desire for goodness for each part of the created world, a pull deep within each one of us for wholeness, and an inherent life-force reaching toward a rich and abundant life designed for everyone, lived within the healing embrace of Christ.

So how would I, how do you, reconcile this image of a God who looks at us through eyes of love, with the God conjured up in this popular saying that seems to imply God is actively involved in bringing bad things into our lives?

I’m not sure why we say, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” Do you? Maybe it’s because when our lives are hard, and we feel out of control, our deepest yearnings are for someone or something to be in control, and even this if implies that God hands out the hardness of our lives, we’re willing to attribute that to God, rather than to simply acknowledge that our lives are out of our control.

Or perhaps it is to give ourselves a spiritual pep-talk, to bolster our strength to get through whatever difficulty we are enduring. If God thinks we can do it, then, by God, we can!

Or maybe, because it’s the only way we can figure out how we can bring God into our deepest, darkest times. Maybe we so desperately want God to be a part of our lives during times which test us, that any type of participation we can attribute to God is good.

Now, maybe that’s the key – maybe behind that almost flippant statement that “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” is the deep desire that God be a part of the pain of our life.

Now, THAT’S something I can actually believe to be true! Who wouldn’t desperately want God to be a part of our lives’ struggles? The only people who wouldn’t are those who think God is incompetent, untrustworthy, or uncaring. But for those of us who can stretch our way into believing that God is to be trusted, then for us, the struggles we encounter can become transformational. For if God is within them, there is a chance for change. We can find that we can be changed for the better, we can come out the situation stronger, with a clearer sense of who we really are, what really matters to us, and what we are to do in this world, and we can imagine God’s involvement in the situation making a difference. The chance to change. That’s the invitation that is in the statement, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” If God is a part of it, of either drawing us into experiences that shatter us at our core, that break open the façade that we are in control of everything, or make us look at life from a new perspective, or if God merely “sits with us” in the pain, then there’s a chance for change, toward clarity of who we are and what we are to do in the world.

This is exactly what happened to Jesus as the Holy Spirit led him into the wilderness for a time of testing and temptation, as we heard in our gospel today. We understand Jesus not as something separate from us. Because of the incarnation, we can enter into what Jesus did, truly following him, not just honoring who he was. Our text today tells us that the Spirit draws us into times of testing, not because God desires Jesus to have hardship in his life, or us to have hardship in ours, but so that we can come out of the time of testing and temptation stronger, as Jesus did, in our sense of identity and purpose in the world.

There are no surprises in our gospel story today. We expect that Jesus will be able to resist the devil, who is often described as one who attacks, misleads, deceives, diverts, discredits or slanders. Jesus is God incarnate, so of course, we know, or at least want to believe, God’s power of goodness will be stronger than any temptation offered by the force of evil.

But what I think we often fail to see is the transformative power of the wilderness, the time when we feel stripped to the core, as Jesus was, for 40 days and 40 nights, for Jesus was changed through the experience, and therefore we can be also. Jesus comes out with a clearer sense of his identity and purpose, and he’s famished, not just physically, but spiritually, he is ravenous to begin his ministry. That’s the piece we are invited into. Every time we want to say, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle”, we are invited to look into the possibilities of this situation, for us to know what we care most about. If we don’t go into that place of self-reflection or exploration of how God desires us to be when we get to the other side, then, I believe, we’ve missed the point, and we’re stuck in a relationship with a God who purposefully doles out bad things in our lives, rather than a God who sits with us in them and draws us into new life. We must ask ourselves the poignant question, “What are we famished for?”

I often speak of a cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction in our spiritual lives, the pulling apart of what is known or predictable or under our control, (the deconstruction part,) and the subsequent re-assembling of the pieces into something new – the reconstruction part. I believe God is the force behind both and that the two processes happen simultaneously. Which is to say, God doesn’t wait until things fall apart in our lives to begin to pay attention to us and then to imagine how to put them back together, in a new more life-giving way, but rather, the pulling apart and the reassembling happen at the same time. Our text today and our focus this Sunday on this wilderness time in our spiritual lives introduce to us a whole other step – that moment when we realize we want more, that we yearn for something that feels more complete; when our hearts are filled with a hope for a fullness we have only yet seen a glimpse of; when we imagine a better way of life, born from the ashes of what was. Christian living is a straining forward for what is yet to come, not what was.

These moments of yearning, of passion, of hope, are liminal times, when we can identify an anticipation of being changed into something new, when we know we will hardly recognize ourselves when we look back after this moment in time, that somehow the angst will be gone, the worry will disappear as the mist rises from the valley in the early morning, when something new will define who we are. Certain moments in my own life have this liminal quality, when I could anticipate a brand-new beginning — my wedding day, the days of my children’s births, when I became a mother, and which changed my life forever, when I had a greater clarity of my identity and purpose, or my ordination as a priest, when I suddenly realized what God had in mind for me all along. These are liminal times, when there has been a yearning for something new to embrace, when I have felt more aligned to God, when I have been aware that something even more spectacular than I could ever imagine awaited me. You have those moments too. They are awaiting you, because the God I believe in doles out pregnant opportunities to each one of us, all the time.

Jesus, in his time in the wilderness, learned a few important facts about himself and the God he was manifesting on our earth: God would satisfy his needs for what he was hungry for, God would keep him safe, and God’s view of domination and prestige was the reverse of the world’s – one of humility and servanthood.

Jesus, through his temptations, shows us that it is when our lives are difficult that we chose who we will be. Like Jesus, there will be times when we are hungry, when we are tempted to doubt God’s faithfulness, times when we are tempted to reach for power or align ourselves with those who do, so we can feel safe, rather than live and make decisions as Jesus did, as God’ servant.

And yet, there are important times when we will be famished like Jesus, when we will ask ourselves the questions Jesus did: “Who am I to be?” “What will matter most to me?” “What does God have in mind for me?” “Where am I starving to make a difference in the world?” These are such important questions for us to ask ourselves, for it is within these answers that the Kingdom of God will emerge.

Many of us know from real experience that it is through times of trial and tribulation, or even temptation, that there is an opportunity for us to become our best selves. Now my experience, when people are in a place of distress or testing, their first response is not always their best response. So sometimes, finding our real selves requires patience, of ourselves, or of others, to allow God to do God’s work. But God will do God’s work. I deeply believe this.

And walking through and out of wilderness does come down to trust that God is God, and we are not. We can trust God to do God’s part, which is always and forever loving us into wholeness. Then we need to ask ourselves if we are doing our part, are we being trustworthy to God, are we joining our imagination with God’s as to what we can do with our lives, and then are we boldly living that way. Our faithfulness means we can see into another’s person’s heart and find truth; that we can become a presence of healing balm in that raw and hurtful situation we see unfold before us; that we can release the power of love, the shalom or wholeness each of us yearn for with those we encounter.

So, in times of trial, we can see an invitation to perceive what God is already creating anew – that’s the reconstruction part – but we can also see an invitation to identify our own yearnings, and that’s the transformative part, when we do that reflective part in our soul, to see if our yearning is aligned with God’s, because that’s our ticket out of wilderness, aligning our purpose with God’s purpose for us, for then we can move onto River Sunday, when all becomes recreated and new.

I will still bristle every time I hear someone take comfort in the statement, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle”, because it still conjures us in my mind an image of an old man in heaven, doling out good or bad things in our lives, like one may deal a deck of cards, some getting the wild cards that protect them from the natural occurrences of the game of life, while others deliberately getting the ones which make you lose your turn or start all over – but when I hear that phrase, for I am sure I will because it’s part of our popular, yet un-analyzed theology, I’ll say to that person, “Yes, that’s right – God has drawn you into, and is here with you, in this bad time, so how are you using this time to be clearer about who you are, stronger about what you are to do in the world, and deeper in your trust in God’s providence, as Jesus did, when he was drawn into the wilderness by the Spirit?

That’s right. And the point that is that it should leave you hungry – starving to trust God more, to know yourself more, to yearn to become more of what God has in mind for your life, and be clearer in what you are to be doing in this world. “How is that working for you?” I’d ask. For being Christian is not a passive stance of taking life as it comes, but one of finding the chance for change hidden in each adversity, discovering what we are famished for, discovering what wholeness we want to work toward that will make the world a better place, and for holding before us the glimpse of the fullness God is offering us that can become our beacon of hope. Amen.

Give us this day our daily bread.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

The Rev. Barbara Hutchinson

Proper 20 Year A: September 24, 2017

Give us this day our daily bread. These are familiar words we pray together every Sunday, right before the bread is broken in the Eucharistic prayer. Have you ever wondered why we pray these words at that particular moment? Right before Jesus’ body is broken so each and every one of us can receive and take within us the holy presence of Christ? Why does it matter to us that this particular prayer is on our hearts when the sunlight from the altar window shines upon the bread, which seems to glow with holiness as I break it apart, so we can each be fed with this sacred meal?

Give us this day our daily bread. We don’t say, “Give me this day MY daily bread” – this prayer sets us within a community. The prayer is spoken by all of us, for all of us. It draws us into a place of understanding that we are all equal – equal in God’s love, equal in our share of God’s abundance, equal in the blessing we take out into God’s world, God’s vineyard. One doesn’t get more if one has had an exceptionally faithful week of prayer, scripture study, and good deeds. Nor does one get less if one is kneeling at the rail for the first time in 20 years and had somehow forgotten about God all that time. It is this fact that makes the invitation to the Eucharist so appropriate and poignant, “So come, you who have much faith and you who have little, you who have been here often, and you who have not been for a long time or ever before, you who have tried to follow and all of us who have failed.”

Give us this day our daily bread. This prayer articulates the reality that in God’s eyes, through God’s grace, and with each other, we are equal to one another. This is the image God has of and for us: equality. What I receive and what each of you receives is the same, and it’s enough, for it contains a completeness that only God can give. Our yearnings to receive this nourishment may differ, but wherever we are, God meets us and gives us enough for that day.

The manna sent down by God to the Israelites in the wilderness was also God’s way of reminding these people that God will provide what they need, not more, not less, each day. Each person ate their fill, regardless of their position, leader or servant, regardless of the amount of work they did, whether they worked all day long or had little to do, regardless of their ability, whether they were able-bodied workers or disabled. They each received all that they needed. God was using the bread to fashion a people who were leaving a system of domination, wealth, and power to build a new way of life where all received what they needed. God used the daily bread offered to the wilderness wanderers to teach them each day. God is present to them each day, God will give them what they need, each day, God regards them as equal in their need and desires to provide for them. We can imagine that, regardless of how others perceived their worth, God wanted to teach them that since God would care for each one, that all are worth the same, all are beloved children of God, and therefore should be beloved to us.

Give us this day our daily bread. Jesus extends the use of bread to form people into a new way of being where all are cared for, when he stood on the hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee, took bread, blessed it, and broke it apart, for all of the 5000 men, women, and children gathered to eat. He didn’t serve just some, for example those who had been listening to him all day long, but he served all who came as the afternoon sun was setting – he served those who were paying attention the whole time and those who were not. Jesus used bread to show the truth that all people are valued, all people are equal in the sight of God.

It’s the “equal” part that we push up against in today’s parable of the laborers in the vineyard. It just doesn’t seem fair. We feel as though a mistake has been made. Surely, each worker should not be equal in the pay owed them, for they didn’t all work the same amount. We can feel the outrage of the workers chosen early in the morning and believe it is justified. We might momentarily imagine the joy that the last-hired felt when they realized that they too would have what they needed to feed their families that evening, and feel good about that, but then the cynical part of us often surfaces, and we play out the parable just a bit more, and imagine the other group of laborers, who, though by the time they arrived at the vineyard the work day was over, they too got paid for a full day’s work, and then we’d imagine a different song in the hearts of the last-hired workers whose joy and gratitude may quickly turn to outcries of “It’s not fair!”

Give us this day our daily bread is prayer that everyone is equal in their deservedness and worthiness, regardless of their ability, capacity, or number of hours worked for the kingdom and that everyone will be given what they need. God wishes fullness for each one of them, and for each of us. God is fashioning a new people, us, who understand this deep truth of God’s love and generosity. If this parable triggered a negative response in you, this may be an invitation to see what needs to be loosened up within your soul that allows you to value fairness more than equality for all people and God’s desire for all people to have what they need.

Give us this day our daily bread is God’s way of fashioning us as a people who have love and compassion in our hearts, especially for those who have been told by society that they are not equal, they are not of the same value as those who are younger, stronger, able-bodied, smarter, richer, of the preferred gender or sexual orientation, or any other distinction which has placed them on the wrong side. Think about the people who stood at in the market place and had been passed over, time and time again throughout the day. We probably all remember times when we weren’t chosen for something, whether it was in elementary school and we were chosen last for the volleyball team, or whether it was in our adulthood and we weren’t chosen for a job, even though we were more than qualified for it. It is likely that the experience of those hired at the eleventh hour was desperation, discouragement, or having a hard time holding on to hope. For not being chosen is terribly difficult for our souls, our sense of self-worth, our sense of well-being. When we have the energy, passion, and desire for leading productive lives and no one lets us do that, when we don’t feel equally cared for, we can begin to question God’s love for us. But our parable reminds us that, always and forever, we are equal in God’s love to everyone else, and God will give us all that we need this day.

This parable is not actually about judgment or justice. It is about goodness. Payment is made not on what is deserved, nor even on what is needed, but on what the One who is good gives. This is what the kingdom of God looks like: bringing forth the goodness of God, the One who gives only good, the One who provides for all, the One who loves all. The Kingdom of Heaven is God’s overwhelming generosity, God’s compassion for those who are beyond hope, discouraged, last in line, or at the bottom of all the advantages and opportunities. It may not be fair in human standards, but it is good and it is of God. The now present Kingdom of God Jesus inaugurated is about the equitable distribution of our resources to all the people of God.

Our prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread” is what shines the light in our hearts, and which allows us to receive the abundant grace of God through the body and blood of Christ that gives us all that we need, that sends us out into the vineyard of God’s kingdom, here and now, to do God’s work.

This prayer is what led our young people and adults to pick up trash in the Middle Spring Creek yesterday, so that, by our work, our streams will be cleaner, our watershed healthier, and this will allow someone further down the stream to live more abundantly, whether it’s the oystermen in the Chesapeake Bay who can work fruitfully all day to bring home the daily bread for their families, or by freeing the stream of debris, we can care for the natural habitats of local fish and animals, who can now thrive and our ecosystem can be more alive.

You may be aware that our Eucharistic service has two main parts: The Ministry of the Word, when we hear and break open the Word of God, and the Ministry of the Table, when we break open the saving love of Jesus, in the expectation that we will be changed and made new. And the reason for the yearning of that transformation is so we can be sent out into the world, with these words, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” When we come forward to receive the Eucharist, we are being chosen by God, we are being brought into the vineyard, we are being sustained as the Israelites were in the wilderness, with something that isn’t fancy or luxurious, but merely basis sustenance, and it is also all that we need. And then our work is to go and find all the laborers not chosen, the laborers who no one will employ, the laborers who feel themselves unworthy, the laborers whose hopes are dashed, whose minds are flooded with worries about how to feed their families that evening, and to say “come, let me bring to you what is good”, and to offer them the same joy given to the laborers who arrived late in the day, in knowing that they too will have all they need, when they come into the vineyard. What we have received is a gift, and that gift is intended equally for all. Amen.