Pastor Tim Reardon preached last Sunday from 1 Cor 1:18-2:5. This is a passage on the message, or Word, of the cross. While, in the Gospels, Jesus tells his followers to pick up their crosses, here, Paul focuses on Jesus’s cross and how that changes us, saves us, reorders us, undoes us, nullifies our pretense and makes us into something new. While the message to pick up our crosses and follow behind Jesus is important, even central and defining, today we remember that we are not Jesus (you’re welcome if I just relieved you of that burden) and what the cross represents is not a confirmation of our own thoughts about justice, our own theology, but is rather a mystery, a mystery, like the wilderness, that calls into question everything we are and remakes us in Jesus.

Tim wanted to make a connection between this word of the cross and an old Anabaptist value, gelassenheit, yieldedness. It can also be translated as “serenity,” which hints at that certain “peacefulness” behind the notion. Here, there is this inherent tension, yieldedness involves letting go, letting go of our striving and toiling, as if in the words of Wendel Berry: The seed is in the ground. Now may we rest in hope while darkness does its work. Yet yieldedness does not come naturally but through cultivation, it is a seed that needs tending, that takes root in our being through practice.

Yieldedness is a practice and a habit that we cultivate whereby we learn to yield ourselves, our self-constructions, our wisdom and power to God in order to be transformed.
Yieldedness is not simply a personal reality, but it is a communal reality that is practiced and developed in community with God and our sisters, brothers, and siblings. Yieldedness requires an undoing, counteracting the ways we have been formed in a hyper-individualistic and consumer culture, by developing postures and habits of humility, patience, non-violent communication and making room for the other, even seeking the best for the other.

What yieldedness is not is submission or subjecting others to oppression, unjust authority, or abuse for the sake of “peace.” Yieldedness is not what the “strong” tell the “weak” to do. Our yieldedness is not to the powers and principalities but to the crucified God who nullifies the power and wisdom of the world, and this is not weakness, but the power of God.

Those of us who are more formed and enmeshed in the power and wisdom of the world will experience something different by yieldedness than those who have less power, but it is also wrong to assume that yieldedness is only for the strong. In fact, this is a bit patronizing. We all have agency, we are all called join in God’s mystery, we are all called to yield ourselves to the life shaping revelation of God, and it is in yieldedness that we are truly formed for justness.

Tim goes on to talk about Corinth, about how forgiveness fits in, and presence. And he asks us to think about how we will develop yieldedness in the coming season of Lent, to develop practices and habits of the Spirit, in an encounter with the deconstructing, nullifying, and rebuilding mystery of God.

Hear these words and more in the audio below.

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