Learning to Let Go
A Homily on John 9 and Psalm 23
by Griff Martin
March 22, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
So here is something I never planned to share with the congregation….. my personnel evaluation from last year. Each year the staff puts together a self evaluation and a look at what we want for the next year. Here is what I wrote for my pastoral goals in 2020:
“My word for next year is Steady. I want 2020 to be a steady year for First Austin without turbulence (we need this). I want to see us find a steady pace of growth, steady finances and lean into who we are becoming. For this to happen I have to have steady leadership and pastoral presence. I would like to see us be ahead of things, have better in reach with one another, further build our community and in general a stronger sense of trust in who we are and that we are where God has called us to be.”
And suddenly we find ourselves in a global pandemic that has shut down church.
It’s Anne Lamott who says that “If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.”
Because I think it’s very safe to say that none of us feel steady right now…
We are anxious about our own health or the health of our loved ones…
And we are worried about finances… Will our job pay us? How does this affect our retirement? Do we have enough in savings? And we are concerned about being in our house…
Some of us worried about being alone these 8 weeks and others worried about being trapped with what feels like 18 children in the house for even another day…
And we are concerned for all the plans we have made for the future and how they will play out now…
It’s a lot of unsteady right now.
And I don’t know about you, but I hate unsteady.
I hate not knowing what is next.
I hate not being in control.
I hate waiting.
And all of that tells me exactly where I would be found in the Gospel text you just heard Ross read. Now this is a really brilliant passage and I encourage you to go back and spend more time with it today. Try to read it as though you were directing a play, look at the 7 movements within it, the 7 scenes. There is so much in here to contemplate.
For instance if this were a normal Sunday I would probably have chosen to concentrate on how the blind man learns to see Jesus and the progression from this man called Jesus to the “one I believe in” and how that process involves a muddy mess and arguing with preachers and family and even the very absence of Jesus.
But this is not a normal Sunday.
This week I have been thinking about two persons in this story.
The first is the blind man himself.
Now this text picks up mid-story--things are already in action as the story begins. Jesus is traveling with the disciples and suddenly they see a blind man by the road. And he is sitting, he is waiting, he has surrendered control. Now this is often where beggars sit in Jesus’ day, by the road where they relied on the compassion of others and this blind man has to do the same. And I think that is one of the reasons why the blind man is there… I think he has heard of this miracle worker who is healing people and even though he knows nothing of Jesus, he knows Jesus travels on the road and heals people, so he gets to the best place of possibility he knows…
He sits in uncertainty by the road relying on the generosity and goodness of others and without control and he waits in the greatest place of possibility. And at the end of the story, he is the one who sees.
The other man is the neighbor who suddenly finds himself in a very different world than he ever expected, it’s a world that does not make sense anymore because the man who was always blind and who belonged on the side of the road is now walking around and is able to see. And suddenly the world that he thought was one way is another.
And he runs to the religious leaders to try to figure out what is going on and to find the certainty and control that made his world turn. And when they can’t figure it out together, they all go to the man’s parents to see how they make sense of this and when that won’t work they finally go to the man and when he can’t give them answers that fit in the very small world they have created, they throw him out.
Make sure and note that in this story, they never go to Jesus. It’s almost as if we instinctively know as human beings that going to Jesus is going to involve loss of control and surrender and mystery.
Two persons… One who surrenders to what is and puts himself in a place of uncertainty and waiting and the others who rely on the ways things have always been and what they know and busying themselves instead of sitting.
Two persons… One who finally, truly sees in the end and sees Jesus and the others who suddenly find themselves blind and unable to truly see.
This text asks a really important question for us… Is it more important to know enough that we can control things or can we surrender and yield enough so that we can regain sight? These are days where we are suddenly being thrown into a very complex and complicated graduate level class on surrender and letting go… and our choice is as always: to fight it or to finally let go and surrender.
We are starting to see the butterflies returning this spring. I am fascinated by the process of metamorphosis of butterflies. An egg is laid on a milkweed plant, this egg hatches into a caterpillar who will spend the next 10 days doing nothing but eating the milkweed plant until it’s time to start the process of metamorphosis. At which point it will build a cocoon, a chrysalises, and for two weeks it will appear nothing is happening but everything is happening. And then after 2 weeks a butterfly emerges.
Now this is an interesting fact about caterpillars, they don’t all surrender to the process of metamorphosis. Some of them resist and cling to their life as a caterpillar, not understanding all they could become if they let go and surrendered. Scientists have named this stage of clinging as diapause... To struggle to surrender and let go.
And if they get caught in this phase one of two things happens… Either they surrender much too late and don’t get to enjoy life as all they were created to be or they never surrender and die without becoming all they were created to be.
Two persons… One who surrenders to what is and puts himself in a place of uncertainty and waiting and the others who rely on the ways things have always been and what they know and busying themselves instead of sitting.
Two persons… One who finally truly sees in the end and sees Jesus and the others who suddenly find themselves blind and unable to truly see.
Things are unsteady.
We don’t know what is next.
We are not in control.
And we are doing a lot of waiting.
But here is the Gospel news, it’s often exactly there that Jesus shows up and offers the healing we all so badly need by just being there with us. If we can just let go and surrender and be there.
I pray that as a result of these days, these strange scary days… that in all of this, we make the space for Jesus to be present and as a result we see more than we have ever seen before. Perhaps these days can be used to become more, to become all we were created to be, beautiful free butterflies.
*artwork: Butterflies on Deep Blues and Greens by Lily Greenwood
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