Courage: The Courage to Let Go
January 31, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
John 17:6-10, 15-19
John 17:6-10, 15-19:
I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you;for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours.All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.
Let’s join in prayer. O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel, and then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
I’m sad to share with you that my mother–in-law Joyce Wagner, Mrs. Boyd Wagner, passed away last evening at about 10 p.m. Many of you know Joyce, a marvelous artist, and you certainly know Boyd. He’s Pastor Emeritus here at St. Luke’s.
We had planned this sermon topic months ago, and it is a God-thing I suspect that the topic and this experience landed at the same time. On Thursday she was doing well and had a great week and was here in church on Sunday. She felt that maybe she had a hernia blockage on Thursday afternoon and went to the ER. It turned out to be something must worse than that. Over the weekend she deteriorated fairly rapidly and then yesterday afternoon through the incredible guidance of a marvelous nurse-practitioner at the hospital talked to the family through a difficult decision to discontinue treatment. And I asked Boyd, my father-in-law, about sharing this experience with you all, and he encouraged me to do so. It was indeed an intimate family time, but it really speaks to the topic today which is the courage it takes to let go.
That’s something that we face all through our lives. When you’re a parent and you have a child, you take them to kindergarten and you pack up their lunch and you give it to them. And you think, “Oh, oh, here they go!” And if you happen to be in a place where they ride the bus and they walk up those big bus steps and they seem so tiny – oh, man! It’s an interesting feeling because there’s both joy and excitement. You’re leaning forward into something, yet you’re afraid and yet you’re grieving. It’s very much like most transitions in our lives.
Do you have a teenager? Then that teenager you hand a car key when they’re 16. You’ve been teaching them. I will say that with each successive child we outsourced the teaching more and more. We learned, “I just can’t handle this!” But you give them the key, and you send them off, and you’re afraid not only for their driving but what they’re going to do when they get wherever they’re going. There are lots of fears.
You sit in a hospital waiting room while someone’s in surgery, and you’re afraid for someone you love. Your spouse has a difficult situation at work, and you know that they have that difficult situation, and you’re at home. You think, “Oh, my,” and you’re afraid for them. You have a sick feeling in your stomach because of what they’re going through.
Perhaps you have a spouse or family member who’s an alcoholic, or has another addiction. You want to save them, and you’re terrified for them. But you know you can’t save them. You wish you could, but you can’t. All through your life, all through your life there are times in which you have to have the courage to let go and trust God.
You look at the Scripture, and there are many examples of Jesus responding to the prayers of other people, for someone they love. For example, the friends who bring a paralyzed man on a pallet to Jesus. He’s been teaching and healing and because there are so many in the crowd they can’t get to him. So they climb up on the roof and lower the man down through the roof. The Scripture says, “And when he saw their faith” he said that the man was been healed. It’s not the man’s faith but their faith. Jesus responded to their prayers for someone they loved, a friend they loved.
The Canaanite woman brings her daughter to Jesus and says, “She’s been tormented by a demon.” And Jesus casts out a demon and heals her.
A man brings his son to Jesus and says, “He has had these seizures since he was a small child, and he foams at the mouth. I’m afraid it’s an evil spirit.” Jesus doesn’t say what it was, he just heals him. Jesus responds to the prayers of people for those they love.
We get to the end of Jesus’ life in the Gospel of John, and it’s a powerfully profound time. He celebrates the Last Supper with the disciples, and after that he begins to talk to them. In three chapters - John 13, 14, 15 and 16 - he pours out his heart to them. He reminds them of everything he’s taught them. He tells them how much he loves them.
Then in John 17 we have our Scripture for today, and he prays for them. It’s called the High Priestly Prayer. Remember, a prophet is one who speaks to the people on behalf of God; a priest was one who spoke to God on behalf of the people. So it’s called the High Priestly prayer. Jesus is praying for his disciples. He says, “I’m not going to be with them much longer. I pray for them.” The Scripture literally says, “And not only for them but for those who will come after.” That’s us. He prays for you and for me. The courage even of Jesus to let go. To give us – you and me – to God.
I thought we might look at this prayer and see what we might learn about how we find the courage to let go. There are three things I want to lift up – sort of basics. First Jesus blesses them – we’re called on to bless. Second, we pray for them, and third, we remember that they don’t belong to us. We give them to God.
So let’s take a look. He blesses them. That means all sorts of things, and I’m just going to scatter through some of the Scripture and let you see it. But to bless someone is to be God’s instrument in their lives, to love them, to encourage them, to protect them. To lift them up in every way. To fight for them, to be God’s agent in their lives – that’s what it means to be a blessing to someone. He blesses them.
Let me share some of the Scriptures and what they mean. One of them isn’t actually in yuor reading; it’s in the section we skipped. We shortened it for the sake of time, but listen to what he says in verse 12: “While I was with them I protected them in your name that you have given them. I guarded them.” So part of it is protecting them. When we’re with people at first we want to protect them. We take our children, and we bundle them into car seats, and we make them ride backwards for the first twenty years of their lives. Now the rules say that till they’re about 200 pounds they have to sit in a car seat facing backward. Poor children – I think their mines are going to be a mess, because they think the world goes this way.
But it’s not just our children. I have to tell you that this experience over the weekend, between Thursday and Saturday, that as it became … even right after the very first scope when the doctor gave us that speech, “You know, she’s a very, very sick woman.” - Those are the words that doctors often use to tell you this could be life threatening. I won’t go into the specifics of who it was, but one of the nurses just immediately began to talk to us about dying and about those sorts of things. It made me mad. I was thinking, “We are not ready for that. We are not ready for that – come on! You know, the doctors haven’t said that there was nothing they could do. So come on!”
So she’s there, and she can’t make this decision herself. So we have to do it for her to protect her. That’s what you do. That’s what Jesus said, “When I had them I protected them.” Now he’s talking about protecting their spirits and their spirituality making sure they don’t go in kind of a wrong direction. But I think it’s much broader than that.
When we love people we want to protect them. This is more of what it means to bless. This is verse 8: “For the words that you gave to me I have given to them.” We teach them, we share our lives with them. Whether it’s our children, our spouse, our parents, we share what we’ve experienced and let God teach them through us.
One of the most profound experiences of my life came in a former church. I was leading a Bible study for women at 10 a.m. on a weekday morning. We met together for a long time and knew each other pretty well. There was a woman in the group who periodically, three or four times, would bring her mother. And her mother lived out of town but came in to the Houston area for treatment at M.D. Anderson. And her mother had cancer that was advancing. One day she brought her mother, and clearly her mother’s cancer was advanced at that point. She and her mother shared that her mother had just been to see her son, who would have been the brother of the woman in our Bible study. Her son was to be deployed to Iraq for a year, and she was convinced (and was correct) that she would never see him again. He was to be gone for a year, and over the next year she would pass away.
We asked her, “So did you talk about that? Was that the thing that nobody talked about?” And she said, “Oh, yes, we talked about it.” I asked, “What did you tell him?” And it was uncanny, because we were studying this section of the Gospel of John at the time. It was actually during the Lenten season. The things she said could have come right out of John 15. “What did you tell him?” we asked. “I told him that I loved him, and that more than anything I wanted him to have someone in his life that loved him and that he loved.” The bottom line is that she wanted him to get married.
Listen to these words from John 15: “As I loved you, so now you love one another. I love you, and I want you to have someone to love.” She said, “I want you to be really happy. When I pass away I don’t want you to grieve for long. I want you to be really happy.” Jesus says to his disciples on his way to the cross, “These things I have spoken to you, so my joy may be in you and your joy may be made full. You can live a life of joy, that’s what I want for you.”
She said to him, “Look, you don’t need me anymore. I’ve taught you everything. You know, I’ve taught you everything you need to know.” Jesus said and we just read this, “The words you have given to me [he’s praying to God] I have given to them.” So we share our hearts, our lives, and we let God use us to teach the people around us. That’s one of the ways we bless them.
There’s one more part here that was really profound for me. I really thought about it and wrestled with it a lot and its verse 19: “And for their sakes [he’s praying to God remember] I sanctify myself so they also may be sanctified in truth.” Now in the Gospel of John what Jesus is saying is that if they abide in me, they’ll be clothed in my righteousness and my sanctification. In other words he’s saying, “I want them to continue to abide in me and experience life through me.” But I think it’s more than that as I thought about it. Notice that even at this point Jesus is thinking, “I need to take care of keeping myself holy.”
Sometimes we think to ourselves, “I need to fix that person – to fix them.” When the truth is that we need to think about fixing ourselves. Even Jesus said, “Don’t worry about the speck in your neighbor’s eye when you have a log in your own.”
Maybe some of you have lived with someone who’s an alcoholic and you’ve gone to an Al-Anon or an Alateen meeting. And here’s what they’ll tell you: “When you try and fix them you’re participating in an incredibly dysfunctional family system. And what you need to do is to decide you’re going to live your life right and well.” And they’ll make their decisions, but you can’t be their rescuer or their persecutor. You need to live your life right and well. And, this is my language, “God’s love and life will reflect off of you to them. But don’t make your energy be about trying to fix them. You live your life strong and tall.”
You see, we realize at some point that even while we try and bless the people around us in every way we can, that there is a boundary. And we are not them. And there is a place where we reach the edge of our finitude and we can’t fix everything. So when they’re with us we bless them however we can. Then we realize we can’t fix everything, and what can we do then? Well, we pray for them. We pray for them. That’s what Jesus does here. This powerful prayer in John 17 is where he prays for the disciples and he prays for us.
Some people will say, “I don’t understand why we pray for others. What difference does it really make?” They’ll say, “I get it – praying for myself. Praying to God changes me, and I get stronger and better and all of that, but when I pray for someone else then how does that work?”
It’s not that sometimes I think we don’t understand it right. What we think is that somewhere up there there’s this God who’s saying, “I don’t think I’m going to work in John’s life unless Frank prays for me, and if Frank will pray for him then I’ll do it. But till that time I don’t think I’ll get involved.”
That just doesn’t make sense to me. That’s not the God I see in Scripture. Instead, I want you to think of it this way. Your prayers – our prayers – are tools God uses to work in someone else’s life.
God uses our resources, our money, our time, our energy, our words, our witness. God uses all of those things and uses our prayers. And when we pray, what we’re saying is, “God, I know that you’re a God of healing for this person, and I want to join in that work. I’m a part of it. Put me in, coach. Here I am. And my prayers are part of that impact we want you to make in the life of someone I love.”
The great 19^th century evangelist Dwight Moody was part of the holiness movement just before the Civil War. I love to read his sermons, they’re so powerful. None of you have heard these illustrations because he’s dead, so I can steal them without any compunction. He tells a story in a sermon about a young man who came to him at a rally where he was preaching. The man told him this story. He said that when he was a young man he was in trouble a lot, went in the wrong direction and did a lot of bad stuff. His father had died and his mother was incredibly worried about him. Finally she got him to sign up to go into the service. Now those of you who are parents that is not the only time that people have sent their kids to the service hoping that they’d get fixed. It doesn’t always work by the way. I’m not sure it’s the best alternative, but who knows?
So he went off to the service, and here’s the story Dwight Moody tells. The young man says to him. “When I was going away, my mother took out a watch and said, ‘My son, your father left this to me when he died. Take it and I want you to remember that every day at 12 o’clock your mother will be praying for you.’ Then she gave me her Bible, and marked our passages and put a few different references on the flyleaf. I took the watch and Bible just because my mother gave them to me. I never intended to read the Bible. I went off to Mexico, and one day on a long weary march I took out my watch. It was 12 o’clock. I had been gone four months, but I remembered that my mother at that hour was praying for me. At that very moment something inside me gave way. My life changed.”
I do believe that our prayers make a difference. God uses them. On Friday night as we were gathered around Joyce’s bed it was a holy time, I have to tell you lots of grief and worry and pain but a holy time. And at the end of the evening it was clearly time for all of us to go home at least for some of us to go home. Various people stayed through the night. So I’m Joyce’s pastor, so I thought I’d have a prayer. So we gathered and I prayed. I don’t remember what I said. But when I was done Boyd prayed for her, his wife. And it was so sweet. It wasn’t the prayer of a pastor or anything. He thanked God for her, he celebrated her, talked about how wonderful she was and thanked God for that. Then he prayed, “God bless her. Just bless her. You know, you just bless her.”
Two things struck me. One was that this was a couple who had clearly prayed for one another for a long, long time, fifty nine years actually, and prayed together for one another every single night. But I also realized that this was the prayer of a man who had reached the edge of the place where he couldn’t control anything. He was saying, “I can’t do anything. I can’t fix this. Joyce, if I could fix this for you I would, but I can’t. So I just fall on my knees and I pray for God to take care of you.” So that’s what happens. It’s not just for someone who dies. It’s that when we realize in our lives that there’s an edge to what we can do in the lives of others, people we love, when there’s an edge to that it becomes so clear. We fall on our knees and we pray for them, from the heart.
Here’s the last part of the Scripture I wanted to share with you. This is in the second half of verse 6: “They were yours, and you gave them to me and you have kept your word.” Then he brings up the same theme again in verse 9: “I am asking on their behalf. I’m not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those who you gave me, because they are yours.” Friends, the people we love – our friends, our children, our parents, our brothers and sisters all of them, they don’t belong to us. They belong to God. In our service of death of resurrection ritual, the one we use at a memorial service, we all join in something called the Commendation at the end. And we say these words together, “As first you gave [we say their name] to us so now we give him back to you. We recognize that he belongs to you.”
Here’s the most important part. As much as we loved them … gathered around Joyce’s bed the love in the room was palpable. You could touch it. As much as we love them God loves them even more, even more. Can you believe that? That’s almost impossible to comprehend. But as much as our human reflection of God’s love – because that’s what it is, that’s what the Scripture tells us. Love began with God. As much as we love them God loves them even more. And when we realize that it gives us the courage to let them go, to trust God with them.
I want to close with a poem from Kahlil Gibran, an Arabic poet. He’s written The Prophet, and many of you have read some of his readings. One of these is called “On Children” and it’s about children, but it’s more than just about children. It’s about all the people we love. It’s not just about children.
I’m going to read the first and last verses. “Your children are not your children, they are the sons and daughter of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and they are with you, and yet they do not belong to you. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite. He bends you with his might, that his arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness. For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so he also loves the bow that is stable.”
He loves the people we love but he also loves us – you and me. And because we know just how much he loves them, we’re able to let them go and trust him with them.
Let’s pray. Lord God, you know our love for others, the people around us, the people we love so much - children, friends, neighbors, parents, brothers, sisters, spouses. You know how much you love them and how much we want their lives to be just right. But remind us, God, that they don’t belong to us, they belong to you. And as much as we love them you love them still more. Thank you, God. In the name of Christ. Amen.