24th Sunday after Pentecost-The Rev. Melanie Lemburg
24th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 28A
November 15, 2020
A
few years ago, I read a blog post by the Quaker spiritual writer Parker
Palmer. Palmer was writing about his own
discernment work that he was doing as he move further into his 70’s. He had been pondering the question: “What do
I want to let go of, and what do I want to hold onto?” But, he realized that he
needed help in this discernment process, and so he assembled a group of trusted
friends whose work was not to answer the question for him but to help him see
the issue with a greater clarity. He writes,
“Their role was not to advise or ‘fix’ me, but to ask honest, open questions
and simply listen to me respond, giving me a chance to hear my own inner wisdom
more clearly.
He continues, “I emerged from that
little gathering with something more important than an answer. I emerged with a
better question. I’m no longer asking, ‘What do I want to let go of and what do
I want to hang onto?’ Instead I’m asking, ‘What do I
want to let go of and what do I want to give myself to?’”
Palmer concludes, “I now see that ‘hanging
on’ is a fearful, needy, and clinging way to be in the world. But looking for
what I want to give myself to transforms everything. It’s taking me to a place
where I find energy, abundance, trust, and new life.”[i]
There are many different ways we can
read Jesus’s parable for this Sunday of a harsh but generous master who gives
three servants three different astounding amounts of money.
For me, during this strange, fearful
season, it is helpful for me to use the parable as a lens for my own life, to
examine the places where I have been so fearful that I buried gifts and to
examine the places where I have stepped out in faith with bold daring to brave
a new venture through the gifts or resources God has given me. And truthfully, we are all a strange mix of
the fearful and the bold, the daring and the overly-cautious.
This is why Parker Palmer’s question is
helpful for me these days. It is a way
that I can look at my life through a different lens and seek to discern where I
am putting my energy and if there are better places, better ways to share my
energy, my attention, my time, my money, my resources.
“What do I want
to let go of and what do I want to give myself to?”
We can’t hold on to everything, and we
need to hold on to some things, to give ourselves whole-heartedly to God, to
each other, to causes greater than ourselves.
Your invitation this week is to spend some time in discernment with
Parker Palmer’s question: “What do I want to let go of and what do I want to
give myself to?” Are there things that
you have been holding on to that you can ask God to help you relinquish? Are there things you need to take up, to give
yourself to, that you can ask God to give you courage and daring to do?
I’m going to conclude with one my
favorite poems by Mary Oliver. It is
titled In Blackwater Woods.
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the
rich
fragrance of
cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and
floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever
learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this
and the black
river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will
ever know.
To live in this
world
you must be
able
to do three
things:
to love what is
mortal;
to hold it
against your bones
knowing
your own life
depends on it;
and, when the time
comes to let it go,
to let it go.[ii]
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