March 2003

Psalm 55:16-22

There's a phrase I've heard that rings very true to me: God has all the help we need.

Which is to say that all the insight, all the power, all the strength, all the patience, all the anything that we really need is available to us. Indeed, God does have all the help that we need.

And to illustrate and amplify this, I'm going to tell a story that is my trademark story. On several occasions I have met people that don't recognize me, and then all of a sudden-- "Oh, oh, oh!" and they'll mention they'd heard that story.

It was a turning point for me. It happened on the 17th of July in the year 1983. I was on vacation on a little island in Maine. That was the first summer my younger son had a boat. He had allowed me to use his boat that day if I would pick him up from work that night. He was working a late shift at the Portland Yacht Club as a launch operator. If you know how yacht clubs work, people keep their boats on moorings and there is a boat service back and forth, usually piloted by teenagers like my son.

At eight-thirty I stepped out the back door of the cottage and stopped dead in my tracks. I was in the midst of the most unbelievably beautiful sunset I had ever seen or have seen since. It was extraordinary. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. The sun had gone over the White Mountains, eighty miles away, and we had the reflected glory of the color, and that night was gold. As we know, the water always reflects the color of the sky, and the sea of the bay that night was pure gold.

I couldn't wait to get into that golden sea. I ran to the beach, rowed out to the boat, started the engine and decided, "I'm going to take it all in, I'm going to be present for every second of this extraordinary time." I pressed the throttle forward just a little, and the boat started inching along. But I noticed the gold was ahead of me, so I went a little bit faster. Still the gold was ahead of me. I went a little faster, then faster and faster. The gold was ahead of me. I couldn't catch the gold.

Finally I was full throttle, going thirty-five miles an hour, skimming across that bay, trying to catch the gold, but no matter how fast I went I couldn't catch it. It was very unsettling. Then I did something I almost wished that I had not done. I looked behind me. The sky and sea were blue-black. Look ahead - gold. Black - gold - black.

I picked up my son, got back to the cottage and I told my wife of the experience. She said, "Arthur, that's interesting. I stood on the bank watching you go across the bay and thought, 'How lucky Arthur is to be in that golden sea.'" Then she said, "Arthur, you were completely surrounded by the gold and you didn't even know it."

And I learned two lessons that night.

In every moment of life, be it happy or sad, great or difficult, we are in the gold. The present is the only time we have and all the resources, everything that we need for living, is available to us. We're always in the gold.

The other lesson I learned by looking behind me and seeing the black water and sky. God in His great wisdom pulls the shade on the past and says, "Leave the past behind."

Be in the moment. Go forward, because you're in the gold. God has all the help that you need.

How can we get in the flow of God's spirit, insight, strength, and wisdom? One suggestion, which is the title of this sermon:

Trust God and let it go.

Trust God with your life. It's the greatest and most important thing that one can do, but it's one of the most difficult things a person can do.

We know what happened to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus was facing the most critical moments of His life, as He faced the possibility of death. His disciples weren't there for Him. The crowds that had applauded Him, where were they? Jesus was very lonely. It was a crisis night for Him.

He went to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. Much of the garden still exists today. There is a little plaque there with a saying attributed to Jesus. By itself this phrase has power. In the context of the Garden of Gethsemane, it is amazingly powerful. It says:

Father, I may not understand You, but I trust You.

Jesus trusted God with His life. He didn't get everything He wanted. Things didn't work out easily. There was pain and there was suffering and angst. But God was faithful, as God always is to the faithful, and Jesus was resurrected.

Whenever any human being trusts God there is a resurrection, because God takes us through it. We've got to trust.

In my own journey a number of years ago I went through what I call my "dark night of the soul," an extended period of loneliness, depression and confusion. When I was in this dark night I had a spiritual crisis, because I realized that I believed in God - there is a God; God created the earth - and all these wonderful things - but I didn't trust God with five minutes of my life. I was trying to manage my life by myself and I was mismanaging.

Well, I was managing and messing, and then God, who always comes to us at a point of need, gave me what I needed. Just remember this about God - and you know from your own experience what I'm going to say now. When you're walking on a long journey and you come to a river too deep for you to walk or swim across, God always supplies the rowboat in some way.

God gave me a rowboat. The rowboat was a prayer, a prayer that had been around me for a long time, but I had not paid any attention to it. It's the Jesus Prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Make haste to help me.
Rescue me and save me.

And the bottom line is the focus of the prayer, the foundation, the strength, the power:

Do Your will in my life.

When I started praying this prayer over and over and over, thousands and thousands and thousands of times, it became like my breathing in and out. And I discovered something - there was no more faith crisis, because I found myself trusting God and my life began to straighten itself out. There was a mini-resurrection. When we dare enough to trust God with our lives, God takes us through and resurrects us.

Do you know anybody in Alcoholics Anonymous or any one of the twelve-step programs? That person is a resurrected person. You know how it works. You have a problem, you try to fix the problem yourself, but you mess it up. You keep saying, "I don't need help. I can take care of this." You don't have to be an alcoholic to do this.

You discover it's not getting any better and you can't handle it, and so you come to the insightful place of saying, "Look, this problem is greater than me. It has power over me." And then you realize, "There is a higher power, there is a power greater than me that can return me to my sanity. There is a God." And then you turn over as much of your life as you know you can to God, and God begins to take over.

God has all the help that any of us will ever need. When we trust God, God takes the next step with us.

What does Scripture say? The whole Bible is about this relationship, trusting God - God's intervention, God's interest, God's trying to embrace us and bring us to where God is.

In the 55th Psalm, 22nd verse,

Cast your burden upon the Lord, and the Lord will sustain you.

When we trust that - and you've trusted it before - it works.

And Jesus forever was talking about the kingdom of heaven being like a little child. What was He talking about? The little child trusts.

Evelyn Underhill, an English mystic, whom I have chosen as one of my spiritual mentors, said,

God's power is brought into action just when our action fails.

Trust God with your life. It will feel as if it's not easy. You may feel that you're not going to get what you really want. But keep on going. An amazing thing will happen when you pray, "Do Your will in my life," over and over again, and you just let it happen. You'll be surprised.

There's a cardiologist at New York - Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Artur Spokogny. There is an amazing story that he wrote that was included in a book called The Power of Kabbalah by Rabbi Yehuda Berg. It is what can happen when a man of faith trusts God.

Dr. Spokogny wrote:

A patient was rushed into the ER with a heart attack. He was conscious, but I was worried because his heart rate was terribly slow. I asked that he be taken to the lab, and his heart actually stopped twice on the way. As it turned out, his right coronary artery was completely blocked. We worked on him for about 30 minutes, but nothing was helping. Whatever we tried failed. I felt so helpless. My last option was to start meditating intensely upon a sequence of Hebrew letters used for healing.

I could feel something happening while I was visualizing them. Out of nowhere, the blocked artery opened! What was unexplainable was the massive blood clot in the artery. It should have prevented the artery from opening.

When the whole ordeal was over, there was absolutely no damage to the heart. Nothing. No evidence of a heart attack.

The patient told me that during this episode he dreamed he was trapped inside a computer monitor. All the doors were locked shut. Suddenly, he found the right sequence of letters for the password. It opened the doors and he escaped. The other doctors had no idea what happened. We discussed it but couldn't come up with an explanation. I was unwilling to tell them what I had done, so the mystery remained unsolved.

There's no guarantee that it's going to work out in the way we want it to work out, but when we are helpless, God takes over - rowboat, helicopter, airplane, whatever it is, it's supplied.

You are in the gold right now. Every resource you need for really living your life is available to you. Scripture tells us what to do: Cast your bread upon the water. It will be returned to you. Cast your burden upon the Lord, and the Lord will sustain you.

Jesus said,

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Let go, and let God. Trust God, and let it go. Let us pray.

Lord, for this wonderful opportunity we have to be connected with You, give us the courage of this moment and the daring and the abandon to trust You, just trust You. Lord, we look forward to that resurrection. In Christ's name we pray, AMEN.