The Challenge of Surrender

The Challenge of Surrender--October 24, 2018

“When Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, ‘You spirit that keeps this boy from speaking and hearing, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again!’ After crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, ‘He is dead.’ But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he was able to stand. When [Jesus] had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’ He said to them, ‘This kind can come out only through prayer.’” [Mark 9:25-29]

The hard thing is to surrender.  It is harder than acting heroic.  It is harder than trying to fix.  The hard thing, the really big challenge of Jesus, is to admit we cannot do things on our own, and that we need a power beyond our own.  You know... surrender.

Imagine you are in the kitchen cooking—let’s say you’re frying bacon—and the pan catches fire.  For a moment, you panic and think the first thing you learned about fires as a child:  throw water on it.  Well, of course, since it is a grease fire, it doesn’t extinguish the flames, but instead shoots up a ball of fire from the pan and now has spread the fire to the surrounding kitchen cabinets.  Your best attempt to put it out has not succeeded, even though you were only doing what you were taught in grade school to do to put out a fire… and even though you have probably put out other fires successfully in your life using water.  But this one is different somehow…

Meanwhile, someone else in the house has seen the fire and instantly called 9-1-1.  The firefighters come and put out the fire with no trouble at all, using fire extinguishers rather than plain water.  They are able to do what you had intended to do all along, but they did what you could not do.

Now, when you retell this story to friends and relatives later, would it be in any way accurate if you ended the story with, “And then I put the fire out by calling the fire department!”?  No, of course not.  Your calling the fire department is essentially an act of surrender—it is saying, “I cannot fix this on my own.”  It is a good kind of surrender, because frankly, your own attempts to put out the fire with a cup of water only made things worse.  But it is an act of surrender all the same—literally calling on someone else to do for you what you could not do.

Now, in hindsight, if someone asked you, “Why could you not put the fire out with water on your own?” you would probably answer something like, “This kind can be put out only by calling the fire department,” or “This kind can only be put out with a fire extinguisher.”

Well, Jesus says the same in the story in front of us. His disciples had tried to heal a boy possessed by a spirit on their own, but their best attempts worked as well as pouring water on a grease fire. When they hand the situation over to Jesus, he is able to cast the spirit out with no trouble. And when they ask why they couldn’t do what Jesus did, he replies cryptically, “This kind can come out only through prayer.”

Prayer, however, is really about surrender.  Praying is the spiritual equivalent of calling 9-1-1 rather than insisting you can fix this situation yourself and put that fire out with only your cup of water and sheer determination. To pray to God is literally to say, “I cannot fix this on my own.”  It is to invite God intentionally to act where God already was and is. 

But if prayer is like calling the fire department, then it’s not your accomplishment.  You don’t try to grab the credit from the fire department after they’ve just extinguished your flaming skillet by saying, “Sure, you all helped, but I had the bright idea to call you!” Prayer is not a technique we use to get what we want, and it is not a skill you can ever master.  It is calling on a big God who is able to do more than our feeble attempts can muster.  So when Jesus tells his disciples that this spirit can only be cast out with prayer, he is saying, “You can’t do this—not on your own.  This kind of situation requires calling the fire department.  This warrants calling 9-1-1.” 

When Jesus answers that the spirit can be cast out by prayer, he is not saying that there is some magic formula to make the demon come out, or that if you pray for a thing 700 times, that will be enough to make God grant your wishes.  The power is not in the praying, so much as it is in the God to whom we pray.  The power to put out your kitchen grease fire is not really in your phone call, but in the firefighters who have the right equipment to smother the flames.  And the power of our prayer is not in our words, but in the God who heals, who moves, who acts, who saves, as we call on him.

The challenge for us--from the greatest to the least of us--is to admit that there are things we cannot do, cannot fix, cannot force, and cannot accomplish by our sheer willpower.  The world around us never wants to admit that, because the loud voices in the world around associate that kind of honesty with "weakness."  But nothing could be farther from the truth.  Real strength is able to admit when we need help.  Real strength is able to say, "This is beyond my capacity, and I'm only making it worse if I pretend this is all under control."  Real strength is required for the hard work of surrender.

We may not think at first that this story of a demon being cast out has anything to do with our experience or daily lives. But on second thought, there are lots of times when we find ourselves making bigger messes of the grease fires in our lives, and discovering that all our efforts cannot make things better by ourselves. And when we do turn to God in prayer, half the time we give the credit to our praying—our words—rather than to the God we are praying to!  Jesus’ answer to us is quite often his answer to the disciples:  our only hope is prayer, which is to say, surrender, of our selves, our strengths, and our needs, to the living God.  It’s not about how much, how often, or how well we pray. It is entirely about the God to whom we pray.

The challenge on this day is whether we can swallow our damned pride long enough not to try and make ourselves the heroes, and instead to surrender to the God who can and does have the ability to work for good when our efforts fail.

Lord God, we surrender to you.  Come and act among us for life, help us get over ourselves and our need for credit and attention.