Saying Yes

Scriptures: 1John 3:1-3; John 21:15-19

It has occurred to me that this is a morning when I really don’t need to say very much, or rather when I need not to say very much. It’s a full morning already, in more ways than one, and in a certain sense I feel like any words of mine will be superfluous given everything else that is going on this morning. On the other hand, the rest of our service today leads me to want to say at least a few words. Let me begin with some words that may not seem to have much to do with anything.

In my sophomore year in college I signed up for a course in the Religion Department: “Introduction to the Bible”. That was a long time ago, so I’m not sure I remember quite why I did that. It was definitely not because I saw it as the first step in my preparation for ministry. It was more likely out of some sense that it would be good for me…to know something about the Bible, which I’m sure I felt completely ignorant of in spite of whatever lessons I had had in Sunday school.

What I do remember much better is the effect that course had on me. It was liberating. It was taught by a young man, a Baptist minister from Germany complete with a heavy German accent that made him sound profound, partly because of Eurocentric prejudices that assumed German accents were intelligent accents and partly because it was hard to understand what he was saying. Though he was a minister, he seemed rather impatient with the students who wanted to testify to their belief in the Bible and seemed much more interested in the questions the heathens in the class, like myself, were asking. And if that wasn’t entirely true, he was at least skillful enough to leave me with that impression. He let me know that questions about the Bible were ok. It seems like a simple thing, but I am telling you it was liberating.

It was also liberating to have someone who dealt with the Bible as a human book, or rather not as a single book but as collections of writing, to learn that there are poetry and stories, and some of the poetry is beautiful and some of the stories are juicy, that there are different versions of history and different ideas about theology, that some of the writers are concerned about how to worship God and others are concerned about what to believe about God and others about personal morality and others about public policy, that some writers in the Bible believe that when terrible things happen it is a punishment for sin, and other writers do not believe that and seem bewildered by why some things happen the way they do. It was liberating for me to feel that the Biblical writers were more like me than I had thought and to know that there was such a richness in the Biblical writings, that what I am supposed to do is use my mind to try to understand the Bible, not just mindlessly accept, or mindlessly reject the Bible as a whole. The class liberated me from my preconceptions of the Bible as a book that is obscure or authoritarian or both. It freed me to read the Bible with much more of an open mind and open heart.

That class was a turning point for me in my relationship to the Bible, and to Christianity for that matter. But it was not the last turning point. As freeing as it may be to know that you can ask questions of the Bible, as freeing as it may be to know that the Bible can be studied and analyzed and explored as opposed to just bowed down to, at the end of all the studying and exploring and analyzing is…not much. A little bit like an unassembled jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces just lying there. For me, as important as it had been for me to learn things about the Bible and to demystify the Bible and make it more human and more accessible, as important as all that was, it also was important that it become more than an object of study and that it become also a source of faith. For me there also needed to be some process of embracing the Bible, a kind of saying yes to it, not in the sense of bowing down (there is such a thing as Bibliolatry: worshiping the Bible in place of worshiping God), and not in the sense of agreeing with everything you find there, and not in the sense of losing your mind when you read the Bible, but nevertheless a kind of saying yes that allows the Bible to become something more than a collection of ancient writings and that makes it something that is less “out there” and more “in here”..

I can’t tell you as clearly when that process began for me the way I can tell you about the class I took in college. I am not going to tell you that process needs to take place for everyone. I will tell you that process was even more important for me than the one that made the Bible more human for me. And it continues, because shaping a faith that includes the Bible or is even based on the Bible is something that is ongoing and that happens over a lifetime and that is much more involved and more difficult but also more lively and life-giving than getting good at analytical skills. My Christian faith, for others it may happen other ways, began to take shape as the Bible became not just an object of study but a friend and a source of nourishment.

I don’t know if all of that makes any sense to you. It may be that I’m the only one who knows what I’m talking about, and if that’s the case, I apologize. But let me go on to an entirely different example, but one that at least in my mind makes the same kind of point. I hear people say all the time that they wished they were better at saying “no” when people ask them to do something: go somewhere, attend this or that, join a group, serve on a board, chair a committee, whatever it may be. For some people learning to say no is a difficult but important lesson to learn. It’s so easy to say yes. We’re flattered to be asked. We genuinely want to be of help if we can be. We don’t want to let a friend down or make someone else’s life more difficult. We think what we’re being asked to do might actually be fun. All sorts of good reasons to say yes to things. Until we come to where we have said yes too often, find ourselves over-extended, aren’t doing any of the things we’ve said yes to as well as we’d like, are stressing ourselves out and seem to have forgotten how to say no. Then, of course, it becomes important to recover our ability to say no.

Partly that’s to restore balance and sanity, but there’s an even more important reason. When we say yes often and routinely and automatically, we end up saying yes to lots of things that maybe aren’t really all that important to us. The reason that we need to learn to say no is not really to make ourselves less busy, to give ourselves more free time, to think that if we had a few less things to do a wave of serenity would just magically descend on us and wrap us all up nice and cozy. We learn to say no not for its own sake, not so that we have less to do really, but so that there is room in our lives for what we really need to say yes to. And if we don’t know what that is exactly, there needs to be room in our lives for us to be thinking about it, reflecting on it, praying about it. For busy people and not so busy people, for those with too much to do and those with not enough to do, our need is the same to have something we are called to, not something to keep us busy but something we need to do, not something someone else would like us to do, but that we need to do. For all of us, our real need is not to be able to say no better but to be able to say yes to something from the heart.

Forest and Amber started me thinking in these directions this morning. Their saying yes to the invitation to see their life as a journey of faith and to the invitation to be part of a Christian community, and our saying yes to them, receiving them into the Christian community and into this Christian community, led me to think about the need I have not only to question and analyze and explore and consider, and not only to say no, or maybe, or I’ll think about it, but in the end to say yes. And thinking in these directions led me back to the scripture where Peter says yes to Jesus, three times says yes to Jesus, and says yes in very much the same spirit that we say all our most important yeses.

Peter could not have known what his saying yes would mean. He didn’t know exactly what he was saying yes to. Jesus told him as much, said that if he said yes now, he would eventually be led into places that he did not choose to go, concluded with another invitation that carried with it no guarantees, just the invitation, “follow me”. Peter didn’t know what might follow for him from saying yes. In that sense he didn’t know exactly what he was saying yes to. He did know it was a yes he had to say, that came from somewhere deep inside.

The yeses we say that are important don’t offer us guarantees or knowledge as to what of happiness or hardship may lie ahead. Nevertheless we say yes. The important yeses we say do not imply that we agree with whatever it is we say yes to. No one of sound mind and body would say yes to everything about the Christian faith and the Christian church, yet sometimes, nevertheless, people do say yes to the Christian faith and the Christian community. In so doing, people may think they are saying yes to God, or yes to Jesus, but as Jesus reminded Peter, three times reminded Peter, if we are saying yes to him, we are saying yes also to one another. Amen.

Jim Bundy
May1, 2005