SUNDAY
SERMON – July 2, 2006
THE
SONG OF SURRENDER
MATTHEW
4:10
If I were a rich
man,
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
All day long I'd biddy biddy bum.
If I were a wealthy man.
I wouldn't have to work hard.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
If I were a biddy biddy rich,
Yidle-diddle-didle-didle man.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
All day long I'd biddy biddy bum.
If I were a wealthy man.
I wouldn't have to work hard.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
If I were a biddy biddy rich,
Yidle-diddle-didle-didle man.
It seems a relatively harmless temptation,
kind of cute. We may find ourselves
tempted from time to time to purchase a lottery ticket or to enjoy a little
race track betting – who would be hurt?
But, then Satan crosses a line and seals
his fate by pushing Jesus one step too far.
Satan offers to give Jesus all the “splendor” of the world; but he
attaches one condition to his promise - “All these I will give you, if you fall
down and worship me.” At this
suggestion, Jesus has had enough and finally dismisses his tormentor saying, “Away
with you, Satan!” (Matthew 4:10)
The thing that tipped the balance was
Satan’s condition that Jesus should “fall down” and “worship” him. The two Greek words here really mean the same
thing. They both refer to
prostration. Satan is asking Jesus to
bow down before him, to prostate himself.
To prostrate yourself before someone means to fall down before them,
touching your head to the ground at the person’s feet. Prostration is a universally recognized
gesture of surrender and subordination.
Satan understands something about human beings
that we often fail to comprehend. Satan
understands that human beings were created for surrender. As human beings we fulfill our destiny by
surrendering. This runs contrary to
everything we are ever taught. We
believe that we will fulfill our destiny by getting our way, by imposing our
will upon the universe, by making life turn out the way we want it to turn
out. But Satan understands that the path
to true humanity lies along the humiliating way of prostration. The problem of course is that Satan is
tempting Jesus to prostrate himself in the wrong direction.
Jesus sees through Satan’s deception
immediately and replies saying “It is written, ‘Worship (that is prostrate
yourself before) the Lord your God and serve only him.’” (Matthew 4:10) We are designed to find our true nature
through surrender but only through surrender to God. Surrender to God brings us into line with our
true nature. Surrender to God aligns us
with the heartbeat of the universe. It
enables us to become that which we were created to be.
The word both Jesus and Satan use to
describe this surrender is proskuneo; it is translated here as
“worship.” Our understanding of worship
is often backwards. We think we come to
worship as an expression of our faith.
We think we worship because we believe.
But, in fact, we worship in order to believe. Worship creates faith. Worship is practice in surrender. In the actions of our worship, we are
teaching ourselves the fundamental Christian discipline of surrender. Belief is hard, not because it doesn’t make
sense, or is not intellectually credible.
Belief is hard because we don’t practice it enough. So we come to church and enter into corporate
worship in order to learn surrender, to abandon ourselves to God, to open to
God’s Spirit, and to give back the gift of our lives to the Giver.
But corporate worship will only fulfill
this function in our lives, if it is supported by personal practice. It is not enough to go through the motions of
surrender Sunday by Sunday. If we pray
the prayers that are assigned, hear the Scriptures, sing the songs, and kneel
or stand at the altar rail and open our hands in an act of surrender to God but
then leave church with the intention of reasserting our will upon the world, we
might as well not have bothered. The surrender we practice in our formal act of
worship needs to be backed up by a living discipline of surrender to God
throughout our lives.
One of the essential practices in my life
that I believe helps me develop this discipline of surrender is the practice of
silent prayer. Particularly, for me, I
follow a discipline of prayer known as Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is a Christian form of
meditative prayer that has as its sole aim training in surrender. Thomas Keating, one of the pioneers of
Centering Prayer writes that, “Centering prayer is… the surrender of one’s
whole being to God.”[1]
Think about what happens whenever you try
to get quiet and remove the distractions, noise and clutter from your life for
even a moment. Almost immediately you
will find that your head is filled with a constant stream of thoughts. It never stops. The worries, anxieties, plans, doubts,
uncertainties, confusions of life all clamour for attention. Our minds are filled with a multitude of competing
voices each shouting for our attention. If you listen to what is going on
inside your head, you will notice that the noise in your head never shuts
off. There is never a moment of quiet,
never a moment when the incessant stream of thinking falls silent.
What is all this noise about?
It is usually all about the same
thing. The noise in our heads for the
most part centres around our desire to gain control of life. In most of our thinking we tend to obsess about
how we are going to make our lives work, how we are going to improve ourselves,
make ourselves better people, fix all the problems of our lives and even of the
world. We are always scheming, always
planning, always trying to figure out ways to get the insanity and chaos of
life under control. Our minds are filled
with all of our own little visions, aspirations, goals, hopes, and dreams.
We are like Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,”
carrying on a little dialogue in our heads about how we can get life to turn
out the way we want it to turn out. God,
“what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune?” And we scheme and
rationalize and try to figure out ways to convince life that it should go the
way we want. “If I were rich, I'd have
the time that I lack/ To sit in the synagogue and pray. / And maybe have a seat
by the Eastern wall./ And I'd discuss the holy books with the learned men,
several hours every day.” Richard Rohr
calls this “the calculating mind,” always trying to do a deal with life, always
trying to figure out the angles.
“Calculating mind” wants to know how things work so that it can work the
system to its best advantage. Our brains
are tireless in their pursuit of the goal of control.
What we do in Centering Prayer is we sit
down in silence with only one intention in our hearts. Our intention is to open to God and to
surrender all of the obsessions, plans, thoughts, and emotions of our lives to
God. Over and over in the twenty minute
prayer period that is prescribed for Centering Prayer, every time we become conscious
of our little monkey mind running around in circles, we use a small one or two
syllable word to express our intention to return to God, to give our lives back
to God, to let go of our obsessive need for control, and instead to consent to
God’s presence and action in our lives just as they are.
In Centering Prayer we are not trying to
empty ourselves – we couldn’t even if we tried. It is not possible to stop the
endless parade of busy thoughts in our minds.
We are not trying to create some peaceful state of bliss. We are simply practicing the central gesture
of Christian faith. We are practicing proskuneo
before God; we are prostrating ourselves before the Divine Reality at the
centre of all of life. We are exercising
the discipline of surrender, expressing our desire to worship nothing but God
known to us in the person of Jesus Christ.
In Centering Prayer we are training
ourselves to respond to life in a new way.
So often our instinctual response is to grasp, hold on, try to control,
try to be in charge. We want to fix
everything, to tidy up the mess so that we don’t have to feel the pain any
more. Our immediate reaction is so often
to fight back, to defend our own territory, to try to look after number one. We
instinctively approach life with resistance.
We enter situations and encounter other people from a braced position,
as if there is some malevolent force at work in the world that is out to get
us. In Centering Prayer we are patterning into our lives a whole new way of
being. We are learning a new response to the realities of life as we encounter
them. We are laying down a new road map for our lives. We are practicing taking up our cross and
following Jesus, letting go of absolutely everything else.
In this prayer practice we are telling
ourselves that there is nothing more important in our lives than simply being
in God’s presence. There are no
thoughts, or schemes, or plans, or strategies that are more important than
taking the place that Mary the sister of Lazarus took when she “sat at the
Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.” (Luke 10:39) This is the starting place for life. Everything in the Christian life begins here. We must start by sitting at Jesus’ feet.
Every day from Monday to Thursday in the
church where I work, we begin the day by sitting at Jesus’ feet. The staff and a few other individuals gather
in the church. At 8:30 a bell rings and
we sit for twenty minutes. After twenty
minutes, the bell rings again. Then we
get up and we go on with the business of our day. We don’t stay sitting in silence. We don’t hide from the world. But we know that we have started in the right
place. We have started by saying we want
to “Worship the Lord our God, and serve only him.” We have done the most important thing
first.
It is interesting that, in his response to
Satan, Jesus changes one of the words Satan uses. Satan tempts Jesus to pipto and proskuneo
him. These are really synonyms for fall
down, or prostrate yourself. Jesus keeps
the word proskuneo but in the Deuteronomy 6:13 passage that Jesus
quotes, the word pipto does not appear.
Instead, the second word is latreuo – “It is written, ‘Worship
(prostrate yourself to, surrender to) the Lord your God, and latreuo
(serve) him only.”
Whatever you prostrate yourself to you will
end up serving. That is why it is so
important to start everything by prostrating yourself to God. The only true service of God is the service
that emerges from surrender. We can only
truly serve God and live the life for which we were created when we have let go
of our agendas, laid down our needs, demands, wants, and desires.
This is the problem with Tevye’s cute
song. It is all his agenda, all his
longings, his desires, his plans. It is
not a song of surrender. It is a song of
the self. Teyve sings of his longing to make a big impression on the
world. He wants to be seen to be an
important man in the affairs of his village.
He wants to be envied and looked up to by others. He wants to live a
life of ease and comfort. This is the anthem of the noise in our heads, the
song of the ego. This is not a song of proskuneo
and it does not lead to latreuo of God.
We must learn to sing the song of
surrender. It doesn’t matter how we learn this song. We may learn the song of surrender through a
daily practice of Centering Prayer; we may learn it through bible study,
corporate worship, or deep conversational prayer with God. The important thing is that we have some
practice in our lives the only goal of which is to enable us to surrender our
agendas for life and open to an awareness deep in our beings that our only true
desire is to know the reality of God’s presence at the centre of our being.
It is the song of surrender that leads us
to fulfill our true human nature. The
song of surrender is the source of a life that is lived in service to God
rather than self. It doesn’t matter how
we learn to sing this song. It only
matters that the practice of surrender becomes our first and most instinctive
response to all of life. To surrender is
to “Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.”
© Christopher Page
[1] Thomas Keating Open Mind,
Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel
(New York: Continuum, 1994) p. 46
