Saying YES and NO with Humilty

This week’s “reflection” immediately brought to mind U2’s break-through single, “With or Without You” from The Joshua Tree: See the stone set in your eye, see the thorn twist in your side: I wait for you. Sleight of hand and twist of fate, on a bed of nails she makes me wait: and I wait without you – with or without you, with or without you… I can’t live with or without you.

Some have seen St. Paul’s words of humility from II Corinthians 12:7 here: To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. I think Peterson’s The Message offers added depth to the way humility helps us both discern God’s presence in our everyday lives and trust it: Because of the extravagance of the revelation (given to me), and so I wouldn't get a big head, I was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations. Satan's angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty! At first I didn't think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that, and then he told me, my grace is enough; it's all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness.

No wonder Reinhold Niebuhr wrote what has become known as the Serenity Prayer back in those pre-WW II days when hubris, fear, humility and potential met in a paradoxical way: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Perhaps we face a similar kairos moment as Barak Obama ignites both the optimism of JFK and the ideology-bending success of the One Campaign (my paraphrase of NY Times’ columnist David Brooks) among more and more Americans. I know that an old and cynical friend from Tucson, who lived through events from Nasser’s nationalization of the banks in Egypt to doing business in apartheid in South Africa, tells me that something new is happening right now.

Could it be shades of Bob Dylan: “Something is going on all around you and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” Or the Eels: “God damn right it is a beautiful day?” Or dare I invoke U2 again where they claim Noah’s vision after the flood in “Beautiful Day” despite the wounds of this moment in time: You're on the road but you've got no destination – you’re in the mud, in the maze of her imagination; you love this town even if that doesn't ring true – you’ve been all over and it's been all over you. It's a beautiful day – don’t let it get away… Touch me, take me to that other place; teach me, Lord, I know I'm not a hopeless case. See the world in green and blue, see China right in front of you, see the canyons broken by clouds see the tuna fleets clearing the sea out, see the Bedouin fires at night, see the oil fields at first light – and see the bird with a leaf in her mouth after the flood all the colors came out! It is a beautiful day…?

Seems that way to me… here’s Sunday’s message:

When I was a young man – fresh out of seminary and serving my first church, I used to get tied up in knots about what people said about me – and I was especially wigged-out when church members would want me to fit my life into their emergencies. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not talking about authentic pastoral care – acts of compassion, calls in the middle of the night to the hospital or carefully talking someone through a midnight attempted suicide – that work is among the nearest and dearest to my heart and a real privilege. No, what I mean are those phone calls – or complaints after the fact – that come when you are already with someone else and the caller demands that you drop everything and come right away… to their parent’s hospital room or nursing home – their child’s drug rehabilitation or juvenile detention center – the waiting room of the local hospice or even the city jail or morgue. Sometimes people act like they are the center of the universe when they are anxious – and they get really angry when you don’t or can’t respond to them right away.

And I have to tell you that in my early days, these complaints used to make me crazy. Let’s face it, most ministers are people pleasers, right? We like to help and want others to be happy – we hate to see another in pain – so in my early days, if I couldn’t respond to even the most unreasonable demand, it cut me to the heart and made me physically ill. What’s worse, I was certain that I was failing both God and my congregation. That’s the reason why most young clergy leave the ministry within the first five years, you know? They can’t deal with the fact that they can’t solve everybody’s problems… so they leave. As one of my counselors told me after about 12 years of this: ok, we’ve now determined the wrong reason that called you into ministry; let’s see if we can figure out the right reasons for you to stay because pleasing people ain’t working any more, right?

So I began the hard work of personally learning how to say “yes” and “no” with humility – and it has saved my marriage, brought me closer to my children and God and restored my sense of humor. Not without lots of struggle and ugly mistakes – oh my god I am such slow learner – and not without my fair share of relapses. But with time, practice, lots of prayer and grace, I have begun to live into God’s “yes” for my life by telling some people “no.” This morning’s scripture puts it like this in Christ’s teaching to those who wanted to become disciples:

Don’t say anything you don’t mean: this counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, ‘I’ll pray for you’ and never doing it; or saying ‘God be with you’ when you don’t really mean it. And please remember this: you don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say “yes” and “no” for when you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.

Martin Copenhaver, of our sister congregation in Wellesley, has written that if we were to summarize the Christian gospel into one word it would have to be: YES! “The gospel is about God’s YES to us, first through creation – “Yes, it is good.” – then through covenant – “Yes I will walk with you: I will be your God and you will be my people.” – and then through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus – “Yes I have come to you so that you may have joy and your joy may be full… even to the end of the age.” He concludes by saying that “implied within this affirmation, however, is another word – the word NO – and one of the most important truths a Christian can learn is how and when to say YES and how and when to say NO.”

I would add… “with humility” because this side of glory, my friends, all of us only see as through a glass darkly as St. Paul told us. “Later we shall see face to face, but for now… we’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist…so until our completeness we have three things to keep us on track: trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly and love extravagantly.” As I get it, humility is one of the ways we can make those commitments real, so let’s talk about practicing yes and no with humility, ok?

Paul tells us that there are three commitments – or practices – that will help us mature into humility: trusting God, cultivating hope and loving others extravagantly. And the prayer that has helped me most in my quest to trust God is the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen.

It is no wonder that AA and other 12 Step groups have found such solace and wisdom in this prayer: it states in the clearest language possible that we can’t fix other people, we can only attend to ourselves and there are always aspects of our lives and the world that we can never make right so we have to learn how to accept them. Acceptance, it would seem, is key to trusting God; indeed, acceptance of life as it is, in all its joys and sorrows, seems to be part of how we say YES and NO with humility. Yes, I love my parents and can never cure them of their addictions no matter how hard I try all at the same time. Yes, I am a brother in faith to the President, united in Christian love with him even though I profoundly disagree with many of his decisions and yearn for a new commitment to peace and justice. Yes I weep and mourn over those I have lost through death while at the same time rejoicing that their suffering has now ended and they have gone home to the Lord.

Are you with me here? Embracing the reality that I cannot change some things no matter how broken they are – and at the same time owning that with courage there are changes I can make – is the pathway to serenity. Peace. Sanity – for at least one day at a time – for this is what it means to trust God: not affirming this or that doctrinal truth, but choosing to live each day as if God were in control and we were not. That is, saying YES and NO to reality with humility.

Now I don’t know about you, but this was something I had to learn – and practice over and over again – because it just didn’t come naturally to me. What do you mean ACCEPT that there are things I cannot change? I work in a church where people constantly ask me to help them change their lives? Or rescue them from their suffering or help them avoid the consequences of their mistakes? I live in America, for God’s sake, where my television is constantly advising me that if I just buy this cereal – or that deodorant – or this one special car not only will I change into a sexy, attractive man – with a younger and sexier wife – but I will have a happier and sexier family in a better and sexier America. What do you mean ACCEPT that there are things I cannot change?

The second insight into saying YES and NO with humility is practice – discipline – learning to trust that God is big enough and loving enough to handle and manage our mistakes, because if we are ever going to mature in acceptance, we are going to make mistakes. William Willimon, once the Dean of the Duke University Chapel and now a Bishop for the United Methodist Church, once met with a group of incoming students who wanted to talk about premarital sex.

In a word, they wanted to know why he advised them against being sexually active before marriage. So he told them, ‘In the grand scheme of things, having sex before marriage is not the most important ethical issue you will ever face. But it will give you practice in saying NO. You may make some mistakes in this realm – and they will hurt you – so we in the church teach that if you can learn to say NO to something like sex, then maybe you’ll be better prepared to say NO when you are asked to sacrifice your integrity for some corporation’s profits or when you are asked to fight in some unjust war. It takes practice to learn how to say NO – and sex seems as good a place as any to start.

I think those are good words. No judgment, right? No condemnation for those of us who have made some sexual mistakes in our time – and let’s face it – we have. Just the testimony of a humble elder who has learned from his own mistakes who wants to share the value of learning how to say YES and NO: the second insight is that this trust and humility takes practice. Do you remember what the old guy said to the young violinist who was lost in NYC and asked, “Can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?” Practice, my dear, practice.

Which leads me to the third insight: humor – it is an integral part of humility – especially the ability to laugh at ourselves. I can’t imagine how many times St. Paul had to laugh at himself and his life – and how hard it was for him at first – before he didn’t take himself too seriously. I know it has taken me all my life and I’ve still got a ways to go, too. Nevertheless, I am coming to see how valuable it is to growing in Christ’s spirit to be able to laugh at myself so that I can learn from my mistakes.

So let me leave you with this – and I ask your forgiveness in advance – because it is the story of a pastor who was just too full of himself. Struggling to make ends meet on the salary of his small church, this pastor became livid one day when he confronted his wife with the receipt for a $250 dress she had bought. "How could you do this?!" he shouted in self-righteous indignation. “You know we have to pinch every penny! What were you thinking?” "Well,” his wife said, “I was outside the store looking at the dress in the window when all of a sudden I found myself trying it on," she explained. "It was like Satan was whispering in my ear, 'You look fabulous in that dress. Buy it!'" "Well," the pastor snorted as only a person of the cloth can, "You know how I deal with that kind of temptation? I say, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!'" To which his wife replied: "I did. Really! But then he said, 'It looks fabulous from back here, too, so… I bought it!'"

This is the good news for today for those who have ears to hear.