February 24, 2008

Giving Up

Dana Ferguson
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Exodus 17:1–7
Psalm 95
Romans 5:1–11

“Is the Lord among us or not?”

Exodus 17:7b (NRSV)

Everlasting God, in whom we live and move and have our being:
You have made us for yourself,
so that our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
Give us purity of heart and strength of purpose,
that no selfish passion may hinder us from knowing your will,
no weakness keep us from doing it;
that in your light we may see clearly,
and in your service find perfect freedom;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Book of Common Worship
The Presbyterian Church (USA)

It’s that time of year and we find ourselves here again. It’s Lent and the people of God are in the wilderness. They’ve just escaped generations of slavery under the Egyptians and fled to the wilderness. I might imagine a solemn service of worship of thanksgiving at best or a big party at the very least. But what we find the Israelites doing is thrusting themselves into panic.

One might think it enough to have escaped the Egyptian imperial system that had given them neither dignity nor freedom, to have escaped that to come to a new land with the possibilities of independence and joy. But, you see, their guaranteed supports of life are missing: there is no water and they are plunged into crisis. They take their complaint straight to the top, to Moses, and cry out against the leader who delivered them to this new land. Moses tells them that it is God whom they are putting to the test even though Moses himself doesn’t believe it and the people don’t buy it. So they keep Moses’ feet to the fire and wonder if he intends to kill them, along with their children and cattle. And Moses gets pulled down the same road. He, along with the Israelites, has begun to notice that God of the exodus isn’t some great Santa Claus who supplies all the desires and yearnings of the people of Israel. It seems that during these long years when servitude had been exchanged for a meager yet steady supply of food and water, they had allowed themselves to enter a faith crisis. They land in the wilderness with a lean wilderness faith (Brueggemann, Cousar, Gaventa, and Newsome, Texts for Preaching, p. 201).

I suspect that if I were Moses, I’d have been ready to throw in the towel at that point, to give up. These people have suffered under slavery for generations and finally they have escaped. They don’t know exactly what is ahead, but they know what’s behind them. That alone would seem to be reason enough to simply pause and give thanks. But no, their faith has been shaken during these long years of servitude, and they are cantankerous

So Moses does what many leaders have a habit of doing: he kicks it upstairs. Moses listens to God, who doesn’t tell Moses how to deal with these people who have become desperate and believe they have been led into the desert to die. God tells Moses how to lead them: “Take the elders, and when you come to the rock at Horeb strike it.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m skeptical. A whole tribe of people are after me. They believe that their wives and children and cattle will die because I have led them into this land with no water. And God says, “Go find a stone.” A stone? A stone when you’re looking for water? “And strike it and water will come out.”

On the surface, this does sound like a ludicrous idea—to head for a stone when looking for water. But there is more in the statement than just meets the eye. When God commands Moses to go, there is also reassurance that God will be with him, that Moses and the elders will not travel alone. It is God who will work through the rod as it strikes. So Moses proceeds. They arrive at Horeb. He strikes the stone, and lo and behold there is water.

As I think of modern-day stories like that of the Israelites under bondage, there’s a story that comes to mind over and over. It’s that of a small town called Colorado City. It’s a place in Arizona where polygamy has been practiced for generations. Reporters tell us that the majority, if not all, of the women in this town have been sexually abused, many of them by the tender age of twelve and oftentimes by another family member, including their fathers. In recent years, we have heard more and more reports of women escaping this town, women who have certainly been given the basics for life, like the Israelites in imperialistic Egypt; many—well, basically the men of the town of Colorado City—would say the women have even been given a steady and good life. Even so, it is a life of servitude and abuse. Some women conjure up the ability to escape. Where they are going, they have no idea. For the most part they would have had no contacts on the outside; they have no job skills; they have no savings. They are journeying to their own wilderness.

Once they escape, many have discovered nonprofit agencies established to serve their specific needs—places that can offer them food, clothing, lodging, job training, and often most important to them, legal help. Some of these women have even obtained legal custody of their children—not an easy feat. It is their own version of striking a stone. They have no idea how they will provide for themselves, protect themselves, and there in the midst of their wilderness is a stone streaming forth with water. They are not alone. God travels with them.

Preacher Kimberly Long tells this story from Things Seen and Unseen at the beginning of one of her Lenten sermons. Entering church on Ash Wednesday, Nora Gallagher encounters a friend who quips, “Anne’s giving up drinking, Terri’s giving up chocolate, and I’m just giving up” (Journal for Preachers, Lent 2007, p. 9). In many ways, these women did give up: they gave up on the life that they were living—but not without grasping tightly to the hope in a new life. They were willing to allow their old life to die so that a new one might be born.

Thankfully many of us don’t have the dramatic stories of slavery and servitude in our present lives. And yet there are many things that we could allow to die in our lives that there might be new birth. This is just what the season of Lent is about. Giving up something. Giving up something not just to do it or as a test—seeing if we’re up for the journey. No, the Lent journey is about creation and recreation. The point is to allow us to focus on our lives of faith and the places where wholeness is missing. Now’s the time to think about that with which you have been struggling—a stuck relationship that seems to demand more than it gives; a career that provides an amazing salary but leaves you feeling empty at the end of the day; an ongoing dispute in which you are determined that the other will finally once and for all recognize they are wrong, you are right, and just say it.

Might it be time to give up on those? Might it be time for you to be found giving up on being right, letting that hope die so that you can focus on investing yourself in relationships that serve you and serve others? Might it be time for you to be found giving up on a career that brings you more emptiness and loneliness and let there be born a vocation to which you feel deeply called. Might it be time to give up on a relationship that hinders you from fully being and loving you and birth a new way of life that values you just for who you are?

These are not questions to be contemplated briefly, without a great amount of thought and prayer and conversation and support. But they are not ones to pass by during these precious moments of Lent when we’ve been invited to ponder how our own lives might claim new life.

There are times when those things upon which we should give up aren’t necessarily bad. They’re just keeping us from allowing new things to be born in our lives.

I received a Christmas card this year from an old friend. There she was with her wonderful two daughters. As I read about their joys of preschool and kindergarten, I remembered a conversation we’d had some years ago. She was sad. She’d had in her mind a picture for herself of the perfect family: a husband, a son with his dad’s eyes, a daughter with her smile, and two dogs. I suspected a picket fence was in there somewhere. But the dream wasn’t happening. After much sadness and anger and resentment, she’d decided to give it up, to let it die, to give up that version of it and to dream a new dream. She’d applied to China to become an adoptive parent. That happened successfully twice. And years later there was her Christmas card. The letter wasn’t one of those of only perfect children and glamorous travels. It included honest moments about the challenges of being a single parent and sole breadwinner. But, she concluded, she loved more than she would have ever imagined she could love anything her children and the family they had become.

Giving up. It isn’t always just throwing in the towel, deciding the road is too rough or the challenges too hard. Sometimes it is mustering all the courage you have to let something die, trusting in God to bring a new thing to life. It’s scary. It’s wilderness living. Not luxurious or glamorous living. But it’s faithfulness. It’s believing in a God who tells us to strike the stone trusting that God will be there with us, that never will we travel into that wilderness alone.

Now I want to be clear about something. I’m not telling to you quit your job tomorrow and give away everything you have and wait for God to do something new. That would fall not into the pages of faithfulness in my book but instead into the pages of coercion and demand. When Israel first begins to challenge Moses, they want guarantees. They issue defiant, demanding questions. In their minds, if God answers, God is present. If not, God is not present. They find themselves in a place where they are tempted to make God a means and not an end, to make God an appendage to Israel’s own self—in essence an act of idolatry. At the end of the day, such demands miss the whole point of the story of God and God’s people. The story is one of goodness—the goodness of a loving God and the hope and need for men and women to accept it (Texts for Preaching, p. 202).

So I’m not saying go out and carelessly shed yourself of everything in your life that might even hint at being burdensome. What I’m suggesting is this: Lent is the time to carefully and responsibly reflect upon our lives. To look into the dark corners and shake the dust around. Are there things there that are keeping you from new life? Lent is the time to think about how you might allow these to die all the while maintaining obligations you have to self and family care. It’s not a give-it-all-up-without-a-backup-plan season. It’s a give up with great care and thought and responsibility what needs to go.

I have often heard people say of someone who has long battled a debilitating disease, “She’s giving up.” I’m sure there are times when that is true. However, I want to offer that I think more often than not something else is going on—that instead of giving up, people make very important choices when their lives seem to be coming to an end. It’s a very different thing than giving up. I might call it trading up. Their dream or hope of returning to a life of health, or at least comfort and doing all or some of the things they once loved, simply isn’t going to happen. So they let go of that dream and take hold of another precious promise. They dream no longer of full health but of dignity and as much comfort during their last days until they come to the real promise. But first, they must let the dream of a former life die. They must let that hope die so that birth might happen. And so they do, and in time, the old life dies and they enter into a new life, a new life where there is pain and torment no more, where there is no weeping and no tears. They have died to life and to be born to eternal life.

That is the very crux of why we come to this place each year, year after year after year: to live again the story that tells us so strongly that before something new can be born, something old must die. Sometimes it happens incrementally in our life—a dying of happiness as we had defined it so that a new vision of happiness might live, the dying of an ineffective turmoil in our lives so that a new way of living in peace might be born. Whatever it is, these moments of death and rebirth happen over and over again in our lives, bringing us closer and closer to God’s intent in our life. They are why it’s important to walk these ways of Lent. And the final story.

The final trading up for a life of pure health and being whole—that’s what comes at the end of this wilderness, at the end of these forty days, when the tomb is rolled away and Jesus is no longer bound.

So come along. Come along for the rest of the journey as each of us determines just what in our own lives needs to be put in that tomb with Jesus and laid to rest.

All to God’s glory and honor and praise. Amen.