Musings

Jul

08

Solo Dios Basta

A sermon preached at St. Peter’s Church, Port Chester, NY on Sunday, July 8th, 2018 (The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost)

Readings: Ezekiel 2:1-5; Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

On Friday, I returned home from Germany, where I spent two weeks visiting my family, and where the national motto may as well be: “be prepared.” I think the Boy Scouts got it from the Germans. Germans love organization, efficiency, precision, and being prepared for every eventuality. One day, my family and I went on a bike ride. My aunt wouldn’t let us leave the house until she had double and triple checked that everyone had enough water, snacks, band aids, tissues, sweaters, and rain jackets. It was 95 degrees out and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. But you never know when the weather might change suddenly, and God help you if you’re not prepared.

If the apocalypse comes, pray that you’re standing next to a German. They will have you covered.

So I laughed, hard, when I read today’s Gospel text while sitting in my aunt’s immaculate German kitchen, because this is just about the least German verse in the whole Bible. Jesus is effectively telling his disciples, “whatever you do, don’t prepare! Don’t bring an extra shirt, don’t bring money, don’t bring food, just go. Don’t waste precious time running “what if?” Scenarios in your head and worrying about a future that hasn’t happened yet. Trust God. Trust yourselves. Trust that you already have everything you need. Just go.”

I can feel my German relatives squirming from across the Atlantic.

But whether or not you share a neurotic cultural obsession with being prepared at every second, I’m willing to bet that this verse strikes a note of discomfort for all of us. Because, whether or not we are genetically predisposed to over-preparation, we like to feel like we’re in control of our own destiny. We like to know what’s going on. We like to feel like we have agency and power, not like we’re at the mercy of forces too great and too powerful for us to understand. And yet Jesus is very clear: take nothing. Make no plans. You are not in charge here. Go, and leave the rest up to God.

The truth is, no matter how expertly we prepare, we can never really know what awaits us on the path ahead. We can remember to bring an umbrella for 99 days, and the one day we forget is the day it pours. Preparation has its limits because life is random and messy and unpredictable. But there’s a concern here beyond the purely practical: When we plan every detail of our lives, when we schedule ourselves down to the last nanosecond, there is no room for God to surprise us. When our hands are so full of extra tunics, and money, and snacks, we have no way to accept the new life God is trying to give us. We have to empty our hands so that God can fill them. And that means letting go, not just of material possessions (though goodness knows they can get in the way), but of our preoccupation with being in control and our desire to micromanage the future.

I’m willing to bet that, had Jesus given the disciples an extra day to pack and prepare for their journey rather than simply sending them out as they were, they would have had a very difference experience. They would have gotten self-sufficient, maybe even arrogant. They would not have needed to rely so heavily on trust, on faith, on God – and so they wouldn’t have been able to heal as many people, or to communicate the grace and love of Jesus Christ as widely and as authentically as they evidently did.

It is precisely in those terrifying moments when we feel inadequate and unprepared that God can do amazing things through us. Last summer, I served as a supply priest at a Haitian congregation in the Bronx. There, they celebrate the Mass in French (which I speak) but preach in Haitian Creole (which I speak not a word of). I had been assured by the priest I was filling in for that I could preach in English and someone else could translate into Creole. So that is what I prepared.

Well. The Holy Spirit had other ideas. I arrived and discovered, 2 minutes before the service, that I was expected to preach IN FRENCH. I had never preached in French. I had not written a sermon in French. A large percentage of my stress dreams feature me getting up into a pulpit and realizing that I’ve written a sermon in the wrong language. This was my nightmare come true. I had 2 options: I could preach a sermon that no one would understand, or I could take a huge risk and pray that God would show up for me. I did the latter, because it seemed like exactly the kind of hare-brained scheme that Jesus so often puts us up to. I trusted that God would have my back.

And God did. I somehow, by grace alone, preached an intelligible sermon with only a few Spanish words thrown in by accident. The congregation was thrilled and promptly invited me back. And the thing is, if I’d been properly prepared, if I’d known ahead of time and obsessively practiced my French, I would have missed an astonishing opportunity to see God’s grace at work. When we let go of our need for control, when we get out of the way and let God be God, then amazing things start to happen. Healings. Reconciliations. Loaves and fishes. Linguistic pulpit miracles.

In times of uncertainty, when the road ahead is unclear and were not sure if we have the strength to make the journey – those are the times when we really need today’s Gospel. In times of transition and anxiety and impending change, that is when these words from our Lord can be a lifeline. When we need to remember, in the words of St. Teresa of Ávila, that God alone is sufficient – we don’t need a fancy education, or a foolproof strategy, or even a plan B. We don’t need to have everything figured out to follow Jesus. We just need to say yes and go. Exactly as we are. And trust that God will meet us. Because, even though we don’t know when or where or how exactly God will appear, God always, always shows up. Amen.