(From my sermon/homily/reflection Hope Episcopal Church Sunday, July 9)
If you follow my Facebook page, you will see that I post a lot of pictures, nature pictures, pictures of the Viera Wetlands and pictures, of course, taken here at Hope. Lately, primarily because of the mosquitoes, I’ve been taking a lot of beach pictures. I used to live a block from the beach and never went. Now it’s a fifteen minute drive and I try to make it out there every morning, just around sunrise.
I must say, out of all the sunrises I have seen, there is nothing quite so spiritually nourishing as watching the sun rise over the ocean.
I’ve been going to Hightower Beach Park and there is a local church group that will go some mornings and leave messages in the sand for the sunrise surfers and beach walkers. The other morning, the message read, “Believe and Repent,” which I thought was a little preachy. But the previous week, the message had simply been, “God is light.”
Imagine this scene: you walk out onto the boardwalk overlooking the beach and there is the sun, large and almost impossible to look at, casting its rays across the water and framing those words, “God is light,” from 1 John 1:5 which reads in part “…God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.”
So, I thought, well, fine, if other people can leave deeply meaningful messages in the sand, so can I, so I found this perfect quote from a poem by Mary Oliver and I took an old wooden cane I had purchased in Gatlinburg as a kid out to the beach one morning to write.
And here’s what I discovered … writing in the sand is hard.
First of all, you have to write in block letters, all caps. You have to shout in the sand. And suddenly I feel like I’m five years old again and the capital letter A is impossible to write, let alone a Q or W. Nothing can be written in one stroke. And of course I have chosen this mile long Mary Oliver quote and now I’m writing over my own footprints. And here the sand is wet and here it’s crumbly and my words are literally collapsing in on themselves.
And all the while people are walking past me and no one stops, no one looks at what I’m writing. Everyone just moves on past. Perhaps because struggling sand writers are not an uncommon thing.
It was easy to be discouraged and I found myself praying this: “All I want, God, is to leave a simple message in the sand, to make one person smile or pause, that’s all.”
But then I remembered what the great southern writer Flannery O’Connor wrote in her prayer journal while she was studying at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop.
“Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—“
In other words, this isn’t about me.
Flannery O’Connor worked on her prayer journal from 1946-1947. In 1952, she was diagnosed with Lupus. She was twenty-seven years old. After her diagnosis, she lived twelve more years and died at the age of thirty-nine. During those twelve years, she wrote more than two dozen short stories and two novels.
But it is her prayer journal, written well before her diagnosis that interests me the most. In her prayer journal, she is raw and completely honest. Over and over again, she tells God what she wants. In regards to “Hope,” she writes, “Dear God, About hope, I am somewhat at a loss. It is so easy to say I hope to—the tongue slides over it. I think perhaps hope can only be realized by contrasting it with despair. And I am too lazy to despair. Please don’t visit me with it, dear Lord, I would be so miserable.”
Over and over, she writes about her wants and I am struck by this idea: that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be selfish in prayer. Prayer breaks us down to our most basic needs. It revelatory. We cannot escape ourselves when we pray. All of us is laid bare before God. All our needs, all our wants, things that sometimes we have no words for … things that can only be described as the deepest of spiritual hungers.
Author Anne Lamott says, “Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy—all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves, or when we are just so sick and tired of being psychically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toward something. Or maybe, miraculously, we just release our grip, slightly.”
In today’s gospel reading we hear Jesus say the following, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”
I’ve always been of two minds when I hear these words from Jesus. On the one hand, I feel like Jesus has just asked anyone who is weary and heavy burdened to take a step forward, and here I come, with my hand raised, “Oh, yes, Lord, that’s me. I am weary and heavy burdened. I mean seriously. I am so tired.” And then of course I look around and I notice I’m not alone.
Wait, we’re all weary aren’t we?
So on the one hand I feel like here Jesus is acknowledging how hard life is, but then a second later, I think, “But wait, didn’t Jesus say his burden is light? Really? Because most days, let’s face it, it’s hard following Christ. Isn’t it? His burden does not seem light.”
Why is that? Think back on Anne Lamott’s words. When we pray, we must “release our grip, slightly.”
When we follow Jesus, we must set down all the things, the baggage if you will, that we have carried, sometimes all our lives, and not just kick them to the curb, or hide them under a napkin, but set them down at Jesus’ feet.
And sometimes that is the challenge of our lives. But Jesus himself is not the challenge. He is the one that presents the challenge to us. He is the one who dares us to follow him. Don’t you want to see where I’m going? he asks us.
I did, by the way, finish my Mary Oliver quote in the sand that day. The quote was this: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
“Come to me,” Jesus says.
Okay.
Amen.
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