Letting Go of Winning

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 20th Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

One of the paradoxes of the life of discipleship--training our beholding gaze on Jesus that we might come to resemble him a little more closely, that he might come and live his life in and through us--is it doesn’t operate according to the logic of how we approach most things.  In our radically individualistic culture where the self and its efforts are the center of everything, self-improvement is the name of the game. We start from the assumption that we’re lacking, or broken and apply some technique (a special diet, time on the treadmill, strategies for making each minute of our life more productive) and we look anxiously for results. We live by metrics and measurement--just another indicator of how deeply commodified and quantified everything has become: everything assigned a numeric value, plotted on a graph, and self-consciously assessed to make sure that it’s “trending upwards.” Angleus Silesius’ rose blooming “without a why”—borrowed from Eckhart and so beloved by Heidegger—literally does not compute.

We approach spirituality with the same kind of means-ends, technique-obsessed assumptions. We feel terrible and conclude that we need to “be more spiritual” or improve our spiritual life. If, along the way, we lower our blood pressure and our hypothyroidism is cured, so much the better. We think that spiritual practice is about doing it right, being a “good Christian,” performing our idea of what it means to be a disciple. We are rich in ideas of how things should be, and especially how we should be--more focussed, more loving, more generous, more spiritual, more peaceful. And we are rich in ideas about what we want to get rid of--our anger, our anxiety, our fear, our addictions. Our lives become a kind of pitched battle between propping up good bits and extirpating bad bits. Not much fun and no way to live. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The thing we miss is that this is decidedly not the picture that Jesus paints. He doesn’t cast his lot in with the winners, the success stories, the ones whose Fitbits light up with 10,000 steps a day. Jesus stands in solidarity with those whom Leonard Cohen calls the “beautiful losers”--the last, the least, the lost, and the dead. Lastness, leastness, lostness, and being dead as a doornail are the way into the Kingdom that is spread out before our eyes, but we don’t see it. And why don’t we see it? Because we think that we have to storm the Pearly Gates by our own efforts. We think that entering the Kingdom is about doing enough “good works” and compiling an impeccable resume (as long as they don’t check our references too thoroughly) to present to the gatekeepers.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t really want free, unmerited, undeserving grace poured over us. The oil of gladness is a little too unmanageable--it doesn’t just anoint our heads and our beards (if we have them) but it gets all over everything. We just had this shirt cleaned and pressed at the cleaners and now there’s Gilead Balm #2 all over it!  The trouble with grace, actually, is precisely that it is free and not the result of our efforts. I secretly want to know that I have something (grace) to show for my efforts, something that makes me stand out from the crowd, something to pin on my chest and lord over my neighbor. But, we can’t self-improve our way to grace and everything good in us is God’s work not ours.

It’s those pesky little snot-nosed children--those of no account who are a drag on the whole system, who live like that rose “without a why” and contribute nothing of cash value--who actually embody this. They receive the Kingdom. They don’t earn it. They don’t learn some new fangled techniques for how to pick the lock to the Kingdom. They realize that there is no door, no lock, and that the lock picking set doubles just as well for a set of toy soldiers to play with in the dirt. More fun too.

That’s part of what’s happening at the start of the parable of the Rich Young Man. This fellow is a roaring success in all areas of life. He is without a doubt a winner. He is in the running for Time’s Person of the Year. By all the usual metrics he’s got the world by the tail: fat wallet, beautiful family, child at an Ivy League school, nice home, fancy car, and a piece of land where he and his partner are building their dream home complete with plunge pool, ocean views, and two (two!) Miele dishwashers in the kitchen. And so he approaches Jesus with that same kind of mindset. Having proved himself such a success in other areas, it’s time in the second half of life to pay attention to things spiritual. That would fill out the picture nicely. A dash of spirituality, an aura of wisdom and holiness, as a final coup de grâce, as a little bow to tie it all together. 

Jesus knows he’s in the presence of a winner and so tempts him with the ordinary metrics of what holiness looks like--the law. Who in the world, except the most self-deluded knucklehead could confidently declare, after all, that he has kept the commandments since his birth? That’s just nuts. Completely bonkers. But somehow, by his accounting, that’s the case. “Oh dear,” Jesus thinks to himself. “You’re one of those! You were supposed to say something along the lines of what Paul will realize after I die and rise: No one can keep the law by their own efforts. It’s impossible and that’s precisely the point!” So Jesus looks at him lovingly. Winners always want to win on their own terms, and by their own efforts, and that’s why they always lose. Eventually all the accumulated possessions--worldly accomplishments or mountaintop experiences from the spiritual highlight reel--are revealed to be but dust, dew on the grass that’s gone by noon. “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” someone said somewhere.

It always comes back to accepting that we are accepted--just as we are. It always comes back to knowing that before we’ve moved a muscle, prettied up the picture, performed some technique to improve ourselves, been successful in the eyes of the world, we are beloved. Blessed. Anointed with oil. Fed ‘til we’re stuffed to the gills with God’s love for us. But accepting our acceptance comes with a cost: precisely one camel, or in today’s currency your big, fat, successful, winning self. Why do you call me ‘good’? By myself I can do nothing. The cost of admission is the camel of our addiction to going it alone. The camel of self-improvement and bootstrapping our way to the fiery hell of winning. The camel of I, me, mine at the center of everything. The camel of my perfect following of the law as if the Kingdom actually depended on my flawless execution. What part of “free” don’t we understand? Father Robert Capon, in his book on the parables titled Kingdom, Grace, Judgment puts it this way:

[I]n spite of Jesus’ clear insistence that no winner will ever ever do anything but lose--you and I go right on blithely trying to win. If it is not financial success that keeps us from the saving emptiness of Jesus on the cross, it is moral success, intellectual success, emotional success, or spiritual success. We simply will not lose; and without losing, we will never, ever, win.

So if it’s all about accepting our acceptance, which to our winning personalities appears a fate worse than death, how, exactly, do we go about putting this into practice? Well, it can’t be by our usual efforts. The way to contact, true, transformative encounter with the living presence of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, is not conducted by the usual means of outward pursuit. Our winning ways (by which we gain the world, but lose our lives) are developed to compensate for arriving at full self-conscious awareness as human beings without knowing ourselves to be loved unconditionally by God. Seeking affection and esteem, power and control, safety and security are all strategies we use to compensate for not experiencing God’s love. We set off for that far country to win the day… looking for the fulfillment that has been freely gifted to us as beloved children of God: the Shoeless Joe Prodigal Son searching for the pearl of great price already buried in the field of the heart, in the ground of his/our being. 

So we have, first, to stop. Call off the outward search, and come home to the one who has made his home in us. We have to become literate, schooled in the grammar of distraction: all the various ways we are tempted to look outside of ourselves for seedy substitutes for God’s perfect love. We have to become aware of the camel in the room--that it’s by something we do, accomplish, or acquire from outside that we will finally earn the love we are built for. That whole project needs to be seen through, deconstructed, left to topple over. Call it surrender, letting go, letting be, getting so fed up with trying hard to be a winner that you just throw in the towel, wave the white flag, and declare yourself a failure, a loser, at the whole rigged game of accumulating merit in order to earn grace. 

Whatever we call it, Jesus calls it spiritual poverty. “All we have to do,” writes Capon, “is… [to] let go of every effort to walk the easy road of winning--and upon that letting go, he will draw us home.” It’s impossible for human beings, but not for God. Why not stop and  let him be who he is for us? Why not set down the heavy suitcase of winning, earning, measuring and always falling short? Why not let the express elevator where every floor is numbered “Free Grace” carry us and our luggage to the penthouse built without hands? What have we got to lose but our winning ways we mistake for life?