Let go, let God
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Today we will spend our time talking about the phrase, “let go, let God.” When looking at this phrase I honestly believe the key is to finding a healthy middle ground. I have heard this phrase many times in my life and it was actually a very prominent one that I remember during my college years. I very distinctly remember having two small pieces of paper taped to my monitor in my room. One said ‘let go, let God’ and the other said, ‘put God in the center, and all will come together.’
So what does letting go and letting God look like? And what could the phrase be interpreted as when someone hears it? As I said, I have heard this phrase used many many times, and to be completely honest most of the time I have heard someone say it, it has been used to an extreme. There was this one person who used to share with me all the time the trials and hardships she was facing in her life and she would get flustered by them, and at the end of our conversation she would usually just through out this exact phrase. “Well, perhaps,” she would say, “I just need to let go, and let God, right?” And after interacting with her for a while I knew that her question was rhetorical and she wasn’t looking for an answer. She had already made up her mind that she was just going to give it up to God and hope and pray things got better.
This is where one extreme of this phrase can go. We get so frustrated with a situation in our lives that we convince ourselves that we need to just give everything up to God. Now let me qualify that, this isn’t always bad, because we should acknowledge our need for God, but when it becomes our answer for every difficult situation that we face we then it becomes an excuse. Well I can’t figure it out so I’m just going to give it up to God and whatever God decides will be the way it is. What if, though, we don’t feel we get an answer from God, or what if the problem gets worse because we’ve pushed it aside and ignored it? We can either just pray that it gets better and hope that God agrees, or we get so upset at God for not handling the situation that our relationship with God suffers or even breaks apart. We then resent God for not handling it the way we had hoped, while forgetting that we completely removed ourselves from the situation and being responsible for it all together.
Another way of thinking about this in an extreme way is that, if we ‘let go, let God’ then what we could be implying to ourselves or to others is that we are the problem and that we are simply an obstacle for what God is doing in the world. If I am the obstacle then I need to get out of the way of things, or maybe even everything, so that God can do what God is doing in the world. Maybe I’m the problem and I am nothing more than a stumbling block to myself and others. I will be fully transparent and honest with you that at times in my life I feel this way. I feel like I am more of a stumbling block than a help to what God is doing in this world, but we should never think that we are always that way. We see in Jesus’ own disciples them being both wise and foolish, with Peter, perhaps being both of those extremes within moments of each other. Peter is both praised as the rock of the church and then compared to Satan and a stumbling block for Jesus’ ministry. And we know that despite these ups and downs Peter both continued to rely on God and do the work he was called to do.
So by now you might be asking yourselves, then what is a healthy amount of letting go? While I can’t give you an exact formula, I can say perhaps instead of using the phrase let go, perhaps we should think of it in terms of inviting in. What are the things that I need to invite God into when I know that I am overwhelmed with life or a certain situation? The reason I say that is that, is that if we take a look at our reading from Isaiah today we see a God who promises to accompany the Israelites during this very difficult and stormy part of their identity. This part of Isaiah is set during the Babylonian Exile when Babylon conquered Israel and exiled them out of their land into different parts of the empire. This was a very difficult and tumultuous time for Israel and Isaiah is prophesying God’s promise to accompany them through it and the promise of a time when they will return to the land they were promised.
Look at what God says in these passages: God reminds them it was God who created them as people and as a nation. God then reminds them that they are God’s and that God will be with them and that God is their savior. God then tells them to not be afraid for God is with them. These are all words of hope, promise and accompaniment. Even in the midst of exile and sorrow God reminds them that God is with them the entire way, through the darkness of exile and God will walk with them and make a pathway for them as they wander through the desert back to their homeland. God promises to provide streams which will give life to the land and to the people.
God also reminds us not to dwell too much on the past, both the people of Israel and us today. Which I believe also helps us to understand what it is that we need to invite God into our lives and where perhaps we should have invited God in the past. I was reading the Teacher’s Bible Commentary and one of the things it said about this idea of the past and the new thing God is doing was this: “what he (Isaiah) was saying was that the past was meant to be a guide post and not a hitching post.” We should not be bound by our past but informed by it and guided by it so that we can see the ways that God helped us what he was saying was that the past was meant to be a guide post and not a hindrance to what happens next in our lives and as a community.
So what we need to do is to invite God to accompany us along our own personal journey as well as our journey as a community of believers. To not get so fed up with life that we see the past or ourselves as something that defines who we are now. To know that God is always doing a new thing in our lives and in this world and that we are called to go along with God on that journey, not to get out of the way. As I have said before, if we weren’t meant to be in this world and a part of it, then why has God spent all of God’s time and effort since God commissioned the first human to be God’s partner, trying to partner with us to make this world that unites people as well as heaven and earth together? We are not the obstacle, we are imbedded in the very essence of creation as the very vessels God chose to work through. Today I invite you to see yourself as a very integral part of God’s redemptive plan for this word, I want you to let other people know that they too are loved by God and a part of what God new thing God is doing. Sure we mess up and sure we get in the way sometimes, but so has every other person in the Bible, except Jesus. So don’t let go, instead invite God in, and let ourselves be invited into the new thing that God is doing in us, in this community, and in our world. Amen.