24th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28 A 2020

24th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 28A November 15, 2020 A few years ago, I read a blog post by the Quaker spiritual writer Parker Palmer. Palmer was writing about his own discernment work that he was doing as he move further into his 70’s. He had been pondering the question: “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to hold onto?” But, he realized that he needed help in this discernment process, and so he assembled a group of trusted friends whose work was not to answer the question for him but to help him see the issue with a greater clarity. He writes, “Their role was not to advise or ‘fix’ me, but to ask honest, open questions and simply listen to me respond, giving me a chance to hear my own inner wisdom more clearly. He continues, “I emerged from that little gathering with something more important than an answer. I emerged with a better question. I’m no longer asking, ‘What do I want to let go of and what do I want to hang onto?’ Instead I’m asking, ‘What do I want to let go of and what do I want to give myself to?’” Palmer concludes, “I now see that ‘hanging on’ is a fearful, needy, and clinging way to be in the world. But looking for what I want to give myself to transforms everything. It’s taking me to a place where I find energy, abundance, trust, and new life.”i There are many different ways we can read Jesus’s parable for this Sunday of a harsh but generous master who gives three servants three different astounding amounts of money. For me, during this strange, fearful season, it is helpful for me to use the parable as a lens for my own life, to examine the places where I have been so fearful that I buried gifts and to examine the places where I have stepped out in faith with bold daring to brave a new venture through the gifts or resources God has given me. And truthfully, we are all a strange mix of the fearful and the bold, the daring and the overly-cautious. This is why Parker Palmer’s question is helpful for me these days. It is a way that I can look at my life through a different lens and seek to discern where I am putting my energy and if there are better places, better ways to share my energy, my attention, my time, my money, my resources. “What do I want to let go of and what do I want to give myself to?” We can’t hold on to everything, and we need to hold on to some things, to give ourselves whole-heartedly to God, to each other, to causes greater than ourselves. Your invitation this week is to spend some time in discernment with Parker Palmer’s question: “What do I want to let go of and what do I want to give myself to?” Are there things that you have been holding on to that you can ask God to help you relinquish? Are there things you need to take up, to give yourself to, that you can ask God to give you courage and daring to do? I’m going to conclude with one my favorite poems by Mary Oliver. It is titled In Blackwater Woods. Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.ii i. https://onbeing.org/blog/the-choice-of-hanging-on-or-giving-to/ ii. Oliver, Mary. American Primitive. Back Bay Books: 1983.