Recent Sermon from Myers Park Baptist Church

Here are the last two words from the cross: "It is finished" and "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." They teach us how to live and how to die. The two are not unconnected. Nothing clears the mind like the jolt of mortality.

These two words correspond to two great movements of the soul. The first is the passionate and fierce dedication of one’s life to some great purpose beyond the self -- and to the completion of that mission, or as much as we can ever humanly complete our mission. The second movement of the soul is a letting go, a yielding of one’s life and work into God’s hands, trusting God with our life and with our death.

God has made us doers and makers along with God, partners in the work of creation and redemption. When we become makers and doers with God, we discover our calling, the reason we were made and set here. Dedication to this calling is one of the vital movements of the human spirit.

The other movement is the yielding of oneself, all we do, all we have, and all we are into the greater life of God, into hands better than ours.

With Jesus’ last two words we see both movements of the soul.

"It is finished." Here is Jesus’ last word in John’s gospel. The word means both "It is ended" and "It is completed." The second meaning has the greater force here. This is not the voice of pious resignation; it is the cry of victory-- the punctuation mark of a life dedicated to the doing of the will of the One who sent him. It is completed!

Then as John’s gospel records it, he "yielded up the spirit" ("gave up the ghost" in the old King James Version); he handed over his pneuma, spirit, life, breath. In John’s way of thought these were not taken from him; he yielded them up.

The Apostle Paul had this same sense at the end of his life when he wrote:

I am about to be offered up; the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith (2 Timothy 3:6-7).

It is finished, completed. Mission Accomplished!

There is rampant in our society what I would call the fallacy and tragedy of the "uncalled life."

Every life has the capacity to be a called life. We have only to listen, listen to our lives, listen to the life of God deep within us and all around.

The way of our contemporary society is the way of a fashionable cynicism, a smug insouciance, an enervating apatheia (no caring), a carefully cultivated indifference. We are dying of what the French call ennui, a jaded weariness of spirit. Will our world end, as T. S. Eliot prophesied, "not with a bang but a whimper"? Has not our world become what the poet Yeats prophesied in his poem, "The Second Coming"? In his words:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

In contrast, two of the most powerful forces at work in the world are spirituality and service. When combined, they are powerful dimensions of God’s redemption of the world.

When not combined? Spirituality without service is false spirituality -- a new-age narcissism, just another way of pleasuring oneself. Service without spirituality is the road to burnout and disillusion -- you trust in yourself or in others rather than in God. You are running on your own diminishing steam.

What is your mission in life? Everyone should have a mission statement, one sentence that says what you are up to in this world. "I was created and placed here for this . . . ." It is a combination of being and doing. It may change, but for this day, this season of your life, what is your mission statement?

Jesus had this overwhelming sense of mission, why he had been placed here and what he had been sent to do. At some point he recognized that his death on the cross would be part of that mission.

And he said to his disciples: If anyone would come after me, let them deny self, take up their cross and follow me. Bracing words.

Our cross is not the exact same as Jesus’, but it involves some generous, lavish expenditure of self. And it means a kind of death to certain things in our lives, not for death’s sake but for a greater kind of life.

Flannery O’Connor wrote an essay entitled "Vocation Implies Limitation": You choose this way, not that; this path, not that; You cannot do everything and be everything and have a vocation.

The poet Rilke advised the young writer, "Learn to love the difficult." It is in learning to love the difficult that we have breakthroughs in life. Vocation does not run from the difficult. It embraces it and learns to love it. It is the narrow way that leads to life.

Henry Moore, one of the twentieth-century’s great sculptors, was asked by poet Donald Hall, "Now that you are eighty, what would you say is the secret of life?"

He answered: "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to . . . . And the most important thing is -- it must be something you cannot possibly do."¹

Where do we find our vocation? Buechner says it is the meeting place of our greatest joy or hunger, on the one side, and the world’s greatest need on the other. We all can find someplace those meet.

Annie Dillard says to writers and to us all: "You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment."²

What astonishes you? What brings wonderment and joy? What absorbs and captivates you?

And where does this astonishment intersect with service? With some way of serving God and the world God loves?

On the cross Jesus cried, "I thirst," but his hunger and thirst were more than the physical craving for food and drink. "My food is to do the will of the One who sent me," he said (John 4:34). We live not by bread alone but by the story of God, the one God is writing with us. Jesus said:

I must do the work of the One who sent me, while it is still day (John 9:4).

Now the day is over. He has done the work he was made and sent here to do. Now the cry: "It is finished!"

The second word is Luke’s final word from the cross: "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." Abba, into thy hands. Jeremias says every time you see "pater,". Greek for "father," on Jesus’ lips, there is behind it his Aramaic Abba, the Hebrew child’s first word for Daddy, Poppa.

His life was imbued with what we could call the "Abba-experience," his sense of God’s loving presence, his unbroken trust in the goodness of God.

"Abba," he cried in joy as a boy romping through fields strewn with wild flowers.

"Abba" was whom he sought in the temple when twelve years old, so absorbed that he missed his family’s departure home from Jerusalem. He was about his "Abba’s" business.

"Abba," he taught us to pray, our Abba who art in heaven.

"Abba, I thank you," he prayed when he realized the tide had turned against him, when he knew his own people and the religious establishment had turned on him and that those who were following him were outcasts, sinners, women, children and assorted Gentiles.

"Abba," he cried in the garden, hoping to be spared the cross.

And now, on the cross he cries, "Abba, into thy hands I commit my spirit."

Does this contradict his other cry? "Eli, Eli lama sabachthani, My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?" Yes and no. It is the opposite human emotion. But to be human means to have opposite emotions. And to feel forsaken does not mean to be forsaken.

When Jesus says, "Into thy hands I commit my spirit," he is quoting Psalm 31:5.

In Psalm 31 the psalmist is beset by trouble:

In thee, O Lord, do I seek refuge
let me never be put to shame . . . .
I am the scorn of all my adversaries
a horror to my neighbors . . . .
I have become like a broken vessel.

In the midst of all this the psalmist says

Into thy hands I commit my spirit.

Into thy hands I commit my ruach, my breath, my spirit, my life.

It is a phrase to live by and to die by: O God, into thy hands I offer all I am and all I have and all I love.

It is the spiritual movement of "letting go." We say, O God, I take my sticky fingers off the controls and place my life in better hands than mine. It is what Catherine Marshall called "the prayer of relinquishment," which is what we all someday must pray about what is most dear to us.

I like John Ruskin’s words about an artist finishing a painting. He, she never does finish, not perfectly. It is finished by God, in God. "God alone can finish."

We do our best, then let it go.

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote these words about how our work, our lives fit in the larger scheme of things:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore we are saved by love.³

O God, we pray, I’ve done what I could. Finish this work. Into thy hands.

I have heard that this verse that Jesus quoted "Into thy hands I commit my spirit", was the nighttime prayer of Jewish boys and girls.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

Abba, into thy hands.

I do not know whether this is so. But could we go to sleep or wake from sleep with better words? Into thy hands I commit my spirit, my life, my efforts, all I have and all I love. Abba, into thy hands.

Here is faith at its most basic: We live and die, wake and sleep, love and work in the Lord, by the hand of the One who is making all things good.

Even our lives, even the cross.

¹Donald Hall, Life Work (Boston: Beaux Press, 1993) p. 54.
²The Writing Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1989) p. 68.
³Justice and Mercy (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), frontispiece.

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