Beloved of God,

Fall is a favorite season of mine. I love the colors, the crispness in the air, the golden light of late afternoon, the harvest moon.  And I am awed by the transformation that occurs as leaves let go of their homes in the sky and begin their new project of nourishing the soil.  In autumn the earth teaches us what it means to let go, to relinquish, to shed, to become empty and ready to be filled, a lesson we practice year after year, time and again.  As I watch the leaves turn and fall I’m reminded of a poem by Macrina Wiederkehr entitled, The Sacrament of Letting Go.[1]  Here are the opening lines:

Slowly she celebrated the sacrament of letting go.
First she surrendered her green,
then the orange, yellow, and red
finally she let go of her brown.
Shedding her last leaf…she began her vigil of trust.

We celebrate two sacraments in the Lutheran Christian tradition:  the sacraments of font and of table—Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.  But if we ever added a third, I would cast my vote for the Sacrament of Letting Go.  The earthly sign for this sacrament would be a red or golden leaf plucked up from the ground where it fell.  And the texts? There are many. We’ll be hearing two of them later this month, from Isaiah 53 and Mark 10. Isaiah 53 includes the fourth and final Servant Song from Isaiah’s corpus.  You’ll recognize the verses as coming from the section of Isaiah we hear particularly in Holy Week as we contemplate the passion of Jesus:

This Suffering Servant of whom Isaiah speaks knew the Sacrament of Letting Go.  The first Christians came to recognize in these verses the one they had come to call the Christ; the one of whom St. Paul spoke when he wrote: “Though he was in the form of God he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave…and being found in human form, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death.” (Phil. 2) 

In the 10^th chapter of Mark, after all the time they’ve spent with Jesus, all the teaching they’ve taken in, after all the miracles they’ve witnessed and experienced, we find James and John asking Jesus for special favors.  “Teacher,” they say as they sidle up to him, “we have something we want you to do for us. We’d like the places of highest honor beside you in glory—to sit on your right and on your left.”  While the gospels don’t contain stage directions, I readily imagine Jesus, after hearing their request, bowing his head, shaking it slowing, and sighing.  After all this time, they still didn’t get it!  So he tells all of them once more: 

Jesus asks them (us!) to learn the sacrament of letting go.  “You know how the world operates,” he tells them.  “But that’s not how we’re going to operate.”  Jesus takes the power-grabbing, top-down approach to authority and turns it on its head.  After 2000 years, the church still struggles mightily to embody the way of being that Jesus made so clear.

The hymn of Richard Gillard quoted above celebrates this call to servanthood which belongs to each one of us by virtue of our baptism.  The God who emptied himself to become one with us invites us to loosen our grip on our own agendas and yearning for power and to embrace the yoke of service each and every day of our lives. Like baptism, this letting go is a life-long sacrament.  We’re never done with it.  We are called to practice this sacrament as we send our children off into the world.  We are called to practice this sacrament as we begin a new job, or as we retire, or as we leave a home we’ve known for years and move to some place new.  We are called to practice this sacrament when, in various circumstances, for differing reasons, significant relationships in our lives can no longer be sustained.  We are called to practice this sacrament when death approaches, separating us from those we love.  No, we are never done with it, never done with letting go.  But neither are we alone.  For every step along the way, with every leaf that falls, every trembling fear, every ounce of pain and suffering, every gesture of relinquishment, we are companioned by the One who claims us in baptism, and whose promises are so secure death itself cannot put them asunder.

This month, as servants of the Servant, we’ll hit the pavement on the annual CROP Walk and write letters to congress advocating a Circle of Protection around the vulnerable poor.  We’ll hear from our youth how trips to the Yakima Reservation and other places have transformed their understanding of what it means to be a servant.  We’ll hear also how a congregation at the end of its life cycle dared to dream that by dying well it could become the seedbed for a transformed model of ministry—Luther’s Table.  (NOTE: Pastor/Developer Gretchen Mertes will be guest preacher here Oct. 21)

In autumn the trees teach us what it means to let go and become empty so we are ready to be filled.  And in doing so, perhaps they also teach us how we might embody servanthood in such a way that Jesus will smile instead of sigh.

With you on the way,

Pastor Erik

 [1] Macrina Wiederkehr, Seasons of Your Heart.  (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).