Come Tell Us What is Saving Your Life Now

Come Tell Us What is Saving Your Life Now
(Matthew 6.22-26, 33-34)
A meditation by Dave Shull
Spirit of Peace United Church of Christ
Sammamish, Washington
The 32^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – November 6, 2011

The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw – and knew I saw – all things in God and God in all things.
(Mechtild of Magdeburg)

Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest and a preaching professor. Groups all over the world invite her to come lecture and preach on all kinds of very important academic issues. A while back, she got a call from an old priest in Georgia who asked her to come talk to his congregation. When she asked what he wanted her to talk about, he said, “Come tell us what is saving your life now.”
(Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, HarperOne, 2009, p. xvii).

What a great thing to be asked to show each other. Come tell us what is saving your life now.

A second-century Christian named Irenaeus said the best way we praise God is by being fully alive. What makes you fully alive is what’s saving your life now. We often hear words like saving and salvation and think that means where we go when we die. But saving and salvation are all about how we live in this world, not the next
(Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, Harper San Francisco, 2003, p. 172).

What’s saving your life now is what calls out of you everything you have to give.

What’s saving your life now is what wakes you up so you don’t go through life on auto-pilot.

What’s saving your life now is what makes you fully alive.

Sometimes we assume to feel fully alive we have to climb a mountain or head for the coast or take a drug or run off to join a monastery. But what’s saving our lives now has to be something we can do every day. What is saving our lives now is whatever helps us trust “that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world”
(Taylor, p. xvii).

This morning, I’d like us to open ourselves to the wisdom of Jesus and two of his twelfth-century followers. And let their words wash over us, and awaken us to what is saving our lives now. Jesus said to his disciples, “Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have! Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.”
(Matthew 6.22-26,33-34, The Message Re-Mix © 2003 Eugene Peterson)

Eight hundred years ago, a Christian woman named Mechtild of Magdeburg wrote, The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw – and knew I saw – all things in God and God in all things.
(quoted in Taylor, p. 1).

A legend about St. Francis tells that he was hoeing his garden one afternoon when someone asked him to speculate on what he would do if he knew he was going to die that day.
"I would hoe my garden," he replied.
When I am faced with my death I would like to be so present to the task at hand that I would want to keep on with whatever happened to be my particular hoeing. To love is to be content with the present moment, open to its meaning, entering into its mystery
(Elizabeth O'Connor, Cry Pain, Cry Hope).

Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow.

The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw – and knew I saw – all things in God and God in all things.

If I knew I were going to die today, I would keep doing what I’m doing right now. I would hoe my garden.

Three simple statements that most of the time feel too hard for me to follow. What is saving my life now?

One thing that’s saving my life now is trying to move through the world with open hands. For most of my life, I’ve lived with closed and clenched and filled hands. Hands that tried to cling to the past. Hands that refused to let go of a dream that was never going to come true. But a dream I held onto anyway. Because I couldn’t imagine what my life would be life if it didn’t come true. I’ve filled my hands with things to keep me busy and distracted. So I wouldn’t have empty moments those uninvited voices filled the emptiness and told me I wasn’t very happy.

I used to fill my hands so I’d have an excuse for not doing things I was afraid would make me look foolish. I’d never really learned how to swing a baseball bat, or repair things. And I never learned to play soccer. I’m the only person I know who, no matter where they are on the field, every time they kick a soccer ball it goes out-of-bounds. Instead of swallowing my pride and asking people to teach me these things, whenever someone invited me to do something I was sure would humiliate me, I could always gesture toward my busy, filled hands and say, “I’d love to, but I’ve got all these things to do.” And my filled hands could keep me from having to hold the hand or put my arm around someone I didn’t want to have to love.

Going through my life with filled, closed, clinging-to-the-past hands is not saving. It only breeds fear and loneliness and boredom.

These days, I’m trying to go through my life with open hands. If all things are in God and God is in all things, and God is doing something right now, then my full hands will keep me from receiving what God wants to offer. And my full hands keep me from giving to another something they need.

The early Christians moved through the world with open hands. They practiced a truly radical hospitality. They believed every guest who came to their door had a gift someone in their community needed. A gift that could be saving for them. If they refused to welcome the guest, they were rejecting this gift. And it’s possible God wouldn’t send anyone else to them with that particular gift. By welcoming all guests as Jesus, they opened their hands to this life and gift God had sent them. They opened their hands to what was saving them.

A second thing that’s saving me now is trying to live so I can say with St. Francis that I was so content in whatever I was doing, that if death came at that point, I wouldn’t wish I’d been doing something else. He was so sure God was there while he was hoeing, he was so immersed in his hoeing, that he was perfectly content to die while he was hoeing.

I’d love to live with that kind trust that God was in everything I was doing. So I could be with God in everything I was doing.

I’ve been trying to practice this when I lead support groups at Recovery Café. At the beginning of the group, I always ask people to put their cell phones on vibrate. And to take them off the table. I ask them to do whatever they need to so they don’t have to get up and leave the room during the hour we are together. I tell them that, for this hour, each of us is the most important person in the world. Right now, there is no more important thing going on than us being together. I don’t use religious language, but when I am fully awake and fully alive, I know God is in each person around that table. God is in each story and each piece of feedback. And when God is present, there is no more important moment, no more important person.

Maybe what made Jesus, Mechtild of Magdeburg, and St. Francis different is that they knew God was with them always. They knew all things were in God and God was in all things. They knew they didn’t have to be afraid of the past or the future. They could pay attention fully to what God was doing in the present moment. What was saving them was knowing everyone and everything they came across was in God. Because they knew whatever happened, God was saying to them what God has always said to love and reassure her daughters and sons: I am here. Don’t be afraid. That’s what was saving them.

Come, tell us, what is saving you?