SWEET SURRENDER
Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt
FBC, July 13, 2008
Scripture: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
From time to time, when we sing a hymn that our particular hymnal has selected as one needing to have the words changed to fit modern sensibilities and/or a more progressive theological perspective, I am fascinated to watch myself, along with you, struggle with the new language. Do we sing the words that are printed on the page, or the words that are printed in our memories from childhood Sundays spent singing that hymn so often we came to know the words by heart? Which matters most, being faithful to the memory or being faithful to the spirit of inclusiveness? As a onetime English major, and a onetime Southern Baptist literalist, I find it difficult to go along with freely changing the words of another author, regardless of my motivation for making the changes. But I am also committed to being inclusive in my speech, and committed to a theological vision that cares more for compassion than blood sacrifice or judgment. So I get caught every time, and usually end up going in both directions at once, sometimes changing the words and sometimes not, sometimes singing the revised lyrics and sometimes singing what I remember the words used to be.
While the editors of our hymnal were not shy about changing words to Christmas carols (which I would probably have opted to leave intact, given the special status of such music, our love for traditions at Christmastime), I notice that the words to what may be the most beloved hymn of all churches in all times, Amazing Grace, have been left intact (at least as I remember the words from my childhood church). Such was not the case in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal I have used in congregations I previously served: the editors of that hymnal felt that one word in the first verse of the hymn, wretch, was simply too much to stomach, and changed it to read soul. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me” became “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a soul like me.” Quite a different feel, is it not? All of you are every bit as progressive in your theological understandings as the Unitarians I have known, so—how is it for you to sing of yourselves as being a wretch, desperately in need of saving grace? When in your lives have you been in circumstances where terming yourself a wretch would have been an accurate description? Are there days now, times in the course of your day, when you feel like a wretch? What is that like? And does saving grace come for you? From where? That this particular hymn, Amazing Grace, has such staying power in so many kinds of churches and situations, that it is usually one of the hymns selected in our 5th Sunday hymn sings here, suggests a universality in the experience of being a wretch in need of saving grace that no amount of liberal wordsmithing can quite erase. Yet aside from singing the hymn, liberals in general, including the people of this church, are not ones to talk readily about experiences of wretchedness and salvation—except when referring to others, people outside our walls, who need our hospitality and help.
You may know some of the story of the spiritual journey of the author of Amazing Grace, John Newton. It seems that Newton was a sailor in 18th century England who had a reputation, even among sailors, for being unusually profane and wild, without evidence of conscience or moral scruples. Along with his sailor’s duties, he ran a slave trade on the side for extra money. This reputation perhaps made Newton an easy choice one March afternoon when the ship on which Newton was working had been caught in a fierce Atlantic storm for more than a week. With its sails ripped and the wood on one side splintered, the ship seemed doomed to sink. All sailors were expected to work the pumps, trying to keep the vessel afloat. When Newton objected that he was too tired to pump any longer, he was tied to the helm for the task of holding the ship on its course. For the next ten hours Newton struggled at his task and pondered the realities of his life in expectation of imminent death. Like many individuals at such moments, Newton felt despair at the choices he had made, the little good he had done in his lifetime. He felt, somehow, that given another chance, he would follow a different course, one more life-giving than self-serving.
And unlike many individuals who forget such soul-searching once the immediate crisis is passed, Newton made good on his resolve: when the ship survived the storm and returned to port, he quit the sailor’s life, took a surveying job, renewed his marriage vows, and began regular church attendance. At the age of 39, he trained for the ministry. The hymn Amazing Grace was written for one of his services, and draws on the experience of those hours tied to the helm of a ship in a storm, when Newton examined his life course and found it beyond hope.
“Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me . . . .” One aphorism I learned in seminary about liberal congregations claimed that people who tend to be drawn to liberal churches either believe they are too good to be damned, or that God is too good to damn them. If we are too good to be damned, then of course we will likely never use the word wretch to describe ourselves and restrict it to the verse of the hymn. And if we believe that God is too good to damn us, then we will never believe that our lives will be anything but just dandy, and that our very survival will never be anything but assured. That is, we who believe we are too good to be damned, and believe that God is too good to damn us, will never accept the possibility that things could get pretty dire for us, that we might someday reach the end of our rope with no idea of where to go next. We will never despair, never hit bottom.
Yet if you are someone who has found yourself in a dire situation, if you have at some point reached the end of your rope, if you have felt utter despair or had a sense of having hit bottom, then you will sing Newton’s words as your own. For at such moments, the revelation may come that one does not always survive by exerting every effort, trying harder, summoning more willpower. When you have been at the helm of a sinking ship for ten hours, or had the experience of hitting bottom, then you know how survival can come not through effort, but through giving up, through release, through surrender.
Today’s scripture reading, the familiar parable of the seeds sown on varied soils, tends to be interpreted as a parable about evangelism, the efficacy of preaching the gospel, and how to understand the different results of such preaching, with those results attributed to the readiness of hearers of gospel preaching to truly receive the message. While such an interpretation makes sense, I wonder what insight might come from an interpretation that assumes each of the responses, symbolized by the different soils, exists inside each of us. There is a part of me, much like the stony ground, that is resistant and well-defended against any new idea that comes along, gospel or whatever, because I assume I already know all there is to know and have grown hardened in the arrogance of that attitude. I know what I think, and that’s it. Another part of me, akin to the soil where weeds take over, is quick to give in to the inevitable anxiety and doubt that come whenever someone suggests that maybe, just maybe, I do not know everything and maybe, just maybe, need to make some changes. Man, do the weeds grow fast when I hear that message! As for the soil in which the seeds never were able to really take root because birds came along and snatched them up—that soil in me tends to take the form of being easily discouraged when the new better improved fantastic results I expected from some change I did make are not forthcoming, and I abandon course for some other quick fix. And finally, gratefully, there is a part of me that does hear the saving message, does take it in, absorb it, give it a chance to take root and grow. But this only happens insofar as I am willing to give up, to surrender.
Let’s do a survey here: how many of you have had the experience of meeting an obstacle of some sort in a course of action or project, and working your way through it? How many of you have had the experience of meeting an obstacle and, when you realized you could not work your way through it, reversed direction or went around it? And how many of you have had the experience of meeting an obstacle that you could neither avoid, run around, or work through, and yet you still managed to get through it—but not as the result of your own efforts? How many of you have had the experience of meeting an obstacle that you could not avoid, run around, work through, or come up with any way to manage it, and so had to give up your plans?
All the major religious traditions include in their teachings of desirable traits some discussion of surrender. Though presented in differeing ways, the core idea is constant in the traditions: in addition to learning perseverance and determination, humans also seem to need to learn that at times it is best to yield, to give up, to release control, to abandon oneself to a power or forces beyond the individual self, to God. In our own Christian tradition, Jesus both teaches the wisdom of surrender—surrender to the possibility of transformation, surrender to an enemy, surrender to the needs of a neighbor, surrender to the mysterious, loving call of God—and models it in his own willingness to make the ultimate surrender of his life to accomplish his mission. It also seems constant, in the varied religious traditions, to regard learning to surrender as a most difficult lesson; perseverance is apparently an easier trait to cultivate than its opposite trait of yielding. And the reason for this difficulty in learning how and when to surrender is not hard to find: I am reluctant to surrender because I am not at all convinced that anyone or anything else can be trusted to take over from me. Rather, I am pretty sure that if I am not running the show, the show will come to a screeching halt. And while this is a mindset common to pastors (have you noticed how we require everything that happens in church to run through us, to have our blessing?), I see it in all of us, individually and collectively. Right now our church is especially struggling with the challenge of surrender, whether we can some of our individual autonomy for the good of the whole, whether we can surrender individual, diverse perspectives for a shared collective vision, whether we can surrender our comfort level with one way of doing church for a new, very different way of doing church, whether we can surrender our fondness for being the renegade congregation standing in opposition to others for the possibility of relationship with those others, whether we can surrender the certainty of who and what we have been as a church for the uncertainty of the church we may yet become.
Remember the party game in which you were supposed to close your eyes and fall backwards, hoping that your friends would catch you before you hit the floor? I have played that game in many life situations, only to have experiences of falling and not being caught, of hitting the floor so hard that I can barely get up, if I get up at all. A few such experiences, and the notion of surrender becomes positively dangerous. Yet, dangerous or not, all the religious traditions, especially our own, persist in their teachings: we must learn to persevere, and we must also learn to surrender, to let go. As Jesus observes elsewhere in the gospel of John, in another analogy of seeds and growth, that unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it remains along, nothing more than a seed; but if it dies, it can bring forth abundant growth.
My experience with Baptists of various kinds leads me to conclude that we are not, on the whole, particularly skilled at surrendering—nor are we fond of the notion in theory, nor do we give it much lip service. We Baptists have seen too many instances of the harm that comes in religious traditions when individuals give up their autonomy, their critical distance, and take orders from so-called authorities. Given the choice between yielding or standing fast, surrendering to another or standing apart, Baptists will seldom come down on the side of surrender. This pattern makes us a contentious people, in our churches and in our community, sometimes accomplishing great good—and sometimes making it impossible for anything to get done.
With the upcoming national elections and the seriousness of the issues at stake in those elections, issues of war and peace, of economic viability, of poverty and healthy, reflection on when we stand fast, when we yield, and why, seems timely. That reflection is also timely for our church, as we face significant choices about what kind of church we want to be and whether we negotiate the transitions that face us peacefully, or declare war over them. In all this, how do we balance our love for our own opinions with our commitment to the communities in which we participate. How do we support our communities, both nationally and congregationally, when we disagree with the will of that community? How do we maintain our autonomy with the call to surrender?
“Amazing grace! How sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” As we take up our positions at the helm of our community ships, charged with the task of providing guidance in stormy seas, may we have the clarity to steer a good course. May we have the courage of our convictions. May we know when to hold fast, and when to yield. May we discover a mysterious presence, the presence of the Spirit, in all our actions, supporting and correcting and guiding and magnifying and transforming our individual efforts into results greater and wiser than we could ever find on our own. And may we learn to surrender, again and again, to the grace that is ever present.
