11/7/19 “She Gave All” by Nancy Petty
Text: Luke 6:20-31; 21:1-4
All to Jesus I surrender,
All to Him I freely give.
I will ever love and trust Him
In His presence daily live.
I surrender all
I surrender all
All to Thee my blessed Saviour
I surrender all
That was one of the four quintessential invitational hymns sang in the small Southern Baptist Church that nurtured me into the family of faith. As the invitation was given, to either accept Jesus as your personal savior or, if needed, to rededicate your life to Jesus if you had strayed from the narrow path, the piano would begin to softly play one of four hymns: Just As I Am, I Have Decided to follow Jesus, Take My Life and Let It Be, or All to Jesus I Surrender.
As a fifth grader, I personally chose I Have Decided to follow Jesus as my moment of decision-making and walking the aisle hymn. And I must say, I have not regretted my choice. Daily, with great challenge, I make it my intention to follow Jesus. But no matter which of these great hymns was being sung—yes, they can be both great AND present questionable theology—the message was the same: to follow Jesus you had to give it all to him.
What does it mean to give your all to Jesus? That was the question I posed to my lectionary group this past Wednesday. After a moment, out of the silence like a phoenix rising from the ashes, a voice was heard: “Well, that’s one hell of a question.” We all laughed, relieved that one brave soul had spoken a word of truth. It was the statement needed to break the ice and begin the conversation.
With the weight of such a serious question lifted off our collective chest those of us raised in the church reminisced about the messages we received about giving one’s all to Jesus. Most of our stories had to do with idea that to give Jesus your all you had to go to some far away place as a missionary and suffer for Jesus while trying to win people to Christ by using the Romans Road to Salvation plan written and ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention. It was noted by several that the further you went into the jungles of Africa, the more of your all you were giving to Jesus. You were holding back a bit if you didn’t have to cross the Atlantic on a boat for 2 years that took you to a place where you would be exposed to some deadly disease carried by some insect you had never heard of. Karla, my wife who grew up in a Southern Baptist Church in Person County, said she can vividly remember praying desperately, “God please don’t send me to Africa, please don’t send me to Africa.” As a young Jesus devotee myself pledging my all, I resigned myself to China, where Lottie Moon the only woman Southern Baptist foreign missionary was doing her time giving her all.
While we might tell these stories now with new understanding, the messages in those Southern Baptist churches back when about giving your all to Jesus were very real. And for young people, and probably for older people, giving your all to Jesus came with cost; and often that cost was confusing at its best and dangerous at its worst. Deep in our hearts most of us knew we were not boarding the ship to China or Africa, even if we felt like we should. So we knew that giving our all would be second best at best. And for the few who did set out for the far distant land to take Jesus to the lost, giving our all meant giving our money to help them get there and then to fill out a prayer pledge card saying that we would pray for them daily. Which is exactly what I did when one of my best friends became a missionary to one of those far away places.
This kind of extreme thinking about what it means to give your all to Jesus didn’t originate in missionary land with the Southern Baptists. Well maybe the going away to far off places did. But the extreme thinking about what it means to give your all to Jesus came straight from the bible as it was taught in those Southern Baptist churches. If you want to follow me, deny yourself and take up your cross. If you want to follow me, sell all your possessions and give to the poor. Follow me and let the dead bury their own dead. And then stories like the one we have heard read from Luke this morning—the widow who, out of her poverty, gave her all, literally, when she put two small cooper coins in the treasury. Or Jesus’ follow up instructions to his famous sermon, as Luke records it: “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.”
I want to be very careful about just throwing shade on the Southern Baptists, or on any particular people of faith. I do believe, for the most part, that people do what they believe is right. And above all, I believe that the command that Jesus lays on his followers is to do something, and in that way, the Southern Baptist missionaries and missionary supporters were absolutely right. But I also want to call out a fundamental flaw for all of us humans – that of projecting our own needs, or own work, onto others.
As I’ve just read, Jesus was always telling us what WE needed to do. To deny ourselves. To sell our possessions. To give to the poor. To forgive. To give. All of those commands are things we are fully capable of doing right at home. In our own country, in our own towns, in our own neighborhoods, in our own families. And yet, many of our institutions focused on the need to “save lost souls.” Instead of transforming ourselves and our culture, we projected the need to be saved onto the souls of others. And in that respect, Christianity was more a tool of colonization than a tool of compassion, which would have been much closer to what Jesus was asking us to do. I want to be clear. Some of the most compassionate and Christ loving people I have ever known were Southern Baptist missionaries—Alan and Virginia Neely, Luther and Louise Copeland, one of my best friends growing up. And many of them would say that they were saved by the communities they served, not the other way around. This isn’t about individual fault or sin, this is about an institutional distraction that kept us all focused on what folks needed to do over there as a way to avoid doing our own work.
And so we are still left with the question, what does it means to give your all to Jesus. What is Jesus really trying to say to us about giving our all to him? Is it really about giving up all your money? About walking away from what you have? Honestly, I don’t think it is about the money. But it is about how much we care about the money. The fact that we won’t even consider that as an option ought to tell us something about how much of a hold that money and these belongings have on us. And I say this as one who you all know loves her belongings. But, again, it is not about the money itself. So what is it about?
Jesus was pushing us, in his teachings and in his commands to have the courage to know that we are not these masks we walk around in. We are not our titles. We are not our haircuts. We are not our beautiful houses. We are not our jobs. We are not even our families. Jesus was calling us to be brave enough to live more deeply into our true selves, our divine selves. Jesus was speaking to that tiny spark in all of us that was wonderfully and fearfully made. That spark of recognition that feels a tug when we see the divine in a sunrise, or a smile, or a last breath. Jesus was calling us to be more than and less than the brand of who we believe ourselves to be. And the only way to get to that true self, is to be willing to take the mask off, to lay down the illusions of ownership and control, and simply be a beloved child of God.
It is from that place of vulnerability and honesty that we are able to live the life of the beloved, and it is only as the beloved that we are truly able to give our all. As the beloved, we know the depths of God’s love for us, and from that experience of being loved, we know that no thing is as important as the beloved sitting next to us, or the beloved sitting behind this building. It is from this experience as God’s beloved that we can recognize the exact same richness of belovedness in the stranger and the ex-con and the foreigner. It is only from this place of belovedness that we are able to even begin contemplating giving our all to Jesus and to our neighbor.
Today is Harvest Sunday. I want you to consider your financial commitment to this church in terms of what you want us to do and to be in this world as we proclaim that all people—Muslim, Jew, Christian; gender defined and gender fluid; conservative and liberal; poor and rich—all are God’s beloved. Today is also All Saints Sunday. Consider, if you will, how the saints of this church gave their all to make sure those of sitting here today would inherit a Baptist church in the South whose unwavering and steadfast commitment is to a God who welcomes all—sinner and saint; gay, straight, bi, trans; black, brown and white; democrat and republican; documented and undocumented, with a rap sheet and without; believer and unbeliever—all are welcome to the table of love in this place.
On this Harvest/All Saints/communion Sunday the question before us is: How are we being challenge to give our all to Jesus?
