July 16, 2006, Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Pslm 51; Acts 9:1-25; Mark 10:17-30
Last week we heard the moving letter Paul wrote to the Corinthians about
his weaknesses and hardships, his sufferings and sorrows. Paul boasted that these
made him a better minister than those who were stronger, more successful and less
touched by pain.
Paul said that on top of things like imprisonments and shipwrecks he also
had a thorn in his flesh, some affliction that apparently everyone knew about back
then. We don’t know if it was a bad habit or an addiction or some kind of physical
defect. All we know is that he prayed three times to Christ to take it away from
him. Then Christ answered, “My grace is sufficient for you; for my power is
made perfect in weakness.” So Paul boasted about his struggles, reasoning that
the weaker he was, the more Christ’s power showed through him as he overcame
his hardships and went on to do good works.
We can picture Paul singing what we have been singing for many weeks
now: “Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me. Melt me, mold me, fill me, use
me.” Paul understood exactly what it means to have the Spirit fall on you. It was
painfully clear to him. I wonder, though, as we sing it, is it as clear to us? Or do
we sing it thinking that it is a gentle, feel-good kind of hymn? If we do, we are
not feeling its full, knock-down, blinding meaning. Ultimately it is the most
comforting and joyous of hymns for the same reason that Paul could write, fresh
from a prison flogging, “Rejoice in the Lord always!” But it begins as a terrifying,
excruciating hymn, if you think about it.
Its central metaphor imagines us as solid blocks of metal—silver or gold or
perhaps something less precious. We are lumps of metal that have the shape of
our life as it is now, and we ask God to melt us. Do you know how hot a fire has
to be to melt even the softest metal? Hotter than hell. Hotter than the fire that
burned Joan of Arc at the stake. Hotter that any stove you have burned yourself
on, and how did that feel? Imagine how it would feel to be hot enough to melt
everything you are into a liquid that could be poured into a mold. Obviously you
would die. That is what this sweet, soft song is asking for. Melt me, pour me into
a mold in the form of a chalice, and then fill me and use me as a cup to serve
others.
What we are asking for is the painful annihilation of the self as we know it.
That is what it means to be melted and remolded. We hear this expressed in
today’s Psalm. It says, “Purge me…wash me and I shall be purer than snow….Let
the bones that you have crushed rejoice…A broken and contrite heart, O God, you
will not despise,” and, “Create in me a clean heart.”
The Psalm is talking about repentance, or what the early Christian writers
would call metanoia: a changing of the heart, mind and soul; a remaking of our
self, turning our focus away from our old ways and refocusing entirely on God and
the Spiritual Way.
Today’s hymns also talk about this melting. “Spirit of God, descend upon
my heart, wean it from earth.” The hymn we will sing after the sermon says, “My
richest gain I count but loss, And pour contempt on all my pride….All the vain
things that charm me most, I sacrifice…” Then the final hymn we will sing says,
“My will shall be no longer mine.” That is total annihilation of the self. And yet
paradoxically, the melting does not destroy the self. In fact, it fulfills it as nothing
else can.
“Melt me” is what happened to Saul. He did not ask for it, but the blinding
light, the unbearable fire that welded scales over his eyes changed him completely
from Saul into Paul. Total melting is also what Jesus asked of the young man who
came to him—that very, very good man who had obeyed the commandments and
tried so hard to be worthy of God, who came running to Jesus and got down on his
knees begging to know how to enter eternal life. He felt he would do anything to
enter the Sacred Way and live in God’s realm. But when Jesus told him to
sacrifice all the vain things that charmed him most, to let go of all his worldly
attachments so he could be free to follow where Jesus led, the man sobered and
saddened, and he turned away.
To be melted does not mean the same thing for everyone. It does not mean
we need to give all we own to the poor any more than it means we need to have
scales grow over our eyes. But it does mean this for everyone: we will not enter
eternal life, the Sacred Way, God’s realm, until we have let go of all our ego’s
attachments and ambitions, and let go of our old way of thinking and our self-will,
and placed them all in God’s hands to be remolded as God wills. This melting
will not be complete until we have been poured into a new mold and begun to cool
into our new creation.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta talked about this melting with another image.
She said, “This is the surrender: to accept to be cut to pieces, and yet every piece
belongs to God. You are free then.” Mother Teresa began as a very small, quiet,
shy and ordinary nun. At the age of 36 she was teaching in a high school for the
wealthy in Calcutta. Then on a retreat she heard a message from God calling her
to give up her sheltered and contented life and go out into the streets, following
Christ into the slums to serve him among the poorest of the poor. It took her two
years of melting, but by the time she was thirty-eight she had begun the ministry
God had remolded her to do. She described herself as “God’s pencil—a tiny bit of
pencil with which he writes what he likes.”
You could look at countless saints and prophets and see the same pattern.
Saul turned into Paul. The brand new kid of a minister turned into Martin Luther
King Jr. The small soft-spoken lawyer turned into the great Mahatma Gandhi. In
these and countless other cases people had to give up who they thought they were
and where they thought they were going, they had to be cut to pieces and hand
every piece over to God in order to be free to do what God called them to do.
Saints and prophets are extreme cases. It does not have to be all or nothing.
We can be partially melted and partially remolded, and that is better than none at
all. An artist can be blocked for years by fear of failure or by attachment to a
certain level of income, and all that self-concern may melt very slowly. She may
finally let go enough to paint part time, and then show one painting to a friend, and
then a year later show all her paintings to several friends, and it may be years more
before she takes the risk of painting half time and exhibiting widely. There may
be ways in which she still cannot melt, but every bit helps. It may be that we can
never completely melt until our death, but every bit that we do enables us to live
more truly in the Sacred Way.
As we melt, the molding process lets us feel the power that is being made
perfect in our weakness. At first this is the power to overcome what has held us
back or distorted our lives. Psalms 51 says to God, “You desire truth in the inward
being.” The false self is a big part of what God wants to melt. The true self is
what God wants to mold us into. This is crucial to realize. The false self forms in
us when we try to please or impress or conform to others’ judgments. God is not
like other human beings who might want to remold us according to their self-
interest, in violation of our own. God remolds us to be what our deepest, truest
self is made to be. Why? Because God is the name we give to the force that
created us in the first place. God is the force that burns off all that is false so that
we can become who we truly are. Unfortunately, this can be an extremely painful
and terrifying process, because nothing scares our false self like the prospect of
becoming true. We hold onto the illusions and attachments and old habits of our
false self for dear life. Melting is the death of our false self; molding is the birth
of the true.
Psalm 51 says, “You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me
wisdom in my secret heart.” As we let go of our old way of thinking, as we let our
old methods of problem-solving melt away, we learn to listen to our secret heart
where the Holy Spirit whispers the wisdom of our deepest truth. It is painful and
scary to let our dependence on rational intellect and old coping mechanisms go.
We have to trust in a Spirit we cannot see, feel or clearly hear. Learning to live by
this trust is part of the molding.
After we have suffered the pain of being melted and remolded into the
shape of our true self, then God begins to fill us. Then the bones that God had to
crush become healed and whole and they rejoice. A fire burns in us, as our hymn
says, but it is no longer the purging fire of destruction, it is a creative fire, the fire
of God’s love: “One Holy passion filling all my frame...My heart an alter and thy
love the flame.” We have a light within us, but now it does not blind us. Now our
eyes grow adjusted and we see the world anew in that light. It helps us see as God
sees, with compassion, with unconditional love for all creation, including our
enemies.
“Melt me, mold me, fill me,” and then the last stage is, “use me.” The
compassion with which God fills us inspires us to serve this world. Paul had his
work, Mother Teresa hers, Martin Luther King Jr. his, Gandhi his. Serving others
always results from God’s remolding and filling. It is the nature of the Sacred
Way to be always emptying and refilling and emptying again. The end result is
not that we become strong and our lives perfect in any conventional sense. If
anything, we feel weaker, but in our weakness Christ’s power is made perfect. If
anything, our lives become harder, but in our hardship we find Christ’s grace is
sufficient to get us through.
Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. We are all partly melted and remolded,
but we could all melt more. What would happen if you surrendered to that process
again in your life right now? What new acts of love might you do? What kind of
instrument of God’s peace might you become? What kind of world might take
shape around you if you let the Spirit in your secret heart guide and empower your
deepest, truest self?
There is only one way to find out, and that is to submit yourself to the first
step in the process. Submit yourself to the melting. It is not easy. That good,
young, rich man could not face it, at least not that day when he turned away from
Jesus. But until you hand your will over to God and let go of everything else and
redirect all your energy and attention to the Spirit, you will not know the full
miracle God created you to be.
How can we begin this next stage of our remolding? Pray. Let us pray in
silence, telling God if we are willing to be further melted and molded, filled and
used, and asking the Holy Spirit to guide and empower us to do what we need to
do to make this happen. Let us pray…
Sermon 07/16/2006