Sermon: Getting in the Flow of Gelassenheit
This is the third sermon in our series “Anabaptism at 500: Looking Back While Living Wholeheartedly into the Future.” It is based on Matthew 18:1-5.
When I graduated from high school my English teacher gave me a book of poetry that has been a constant in my life since then. “Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God.” One of the poems inspired the title of my first book, Widening the Circle – I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world – wrote Rilke. Two poems from the book were read at my wedding. Another poem inspired a song that I wrote and performed during my college years. This poem came to mind again as I reflect on the themes of this sermon.
I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children. This is one way to understand the concept of Gelassenheit that was central to the spirituality and discipleship of first generation Anabaptists. The concept predates the Anabaptist movement, originating with mystics a few centuries earlier including Meister Eckhart and the Beguines.
Mysticism generally speaking is understood as an unmediated connection with the Divine. A mystic (according to Brethren pastor Paul Grout) is someone who sees the Spirit in every aspect of creation. The focus of a mystic is intimate union with the Divine. It is not a stretch to say that some early Anabaptists were mystics, trusting that God was speaking directly to them through scripture discerned in community. Their actions flowed from a trust in God’s presence with them.
Gelassenheit had both internal and external aspects for the Anabaptists. It was an internal yielding to the Spirit of God – through repentance and baptism – which was practiced outwardly as discipleship among believers and furthermore included a willingness to forsake even their lives in the face of a world hostile to their beliefs.
This yieldedness reoriented Anabaptist communities away from the hierarchies and priorities of Christendom. Their connection to God did not require the mediation of a priest or pastor, thereby empowering them, through scripture study, to break with practices of infant baptism and military service. It also allowed for the flourishing of women’s spiritual gifts in the early movement.
For many Anabaptists in the first generation practicing Gelassenheit took material form as well. One not only yielded their will to God and the community, but also their possessions. An early Anabaptist leader, Gabriel Ascherham, fostered communitarian Anabaptist groups and wrote that “uniformity of practice should grow voluntarily out of oneness in spirit and Gelassenheit toward material things. It should not be solicited or extorted as a mandatory sacrifice.” His words indicate that he trusted if people were truly yielded to God that it would not be a struggle for them to give their possessions and property to the community.
Gelassenheit is releasing all that gets in the way of our love. This yieldedness creates a circle of free flowing love from oneself to God to neighbor that is ongoing. This union with the Divine and all things is the heart of mystical experience.
As Rilke writes, “May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”
What does this passage from Matthew 18, imploring us to welcome children, have to teach us about yieldedness to God’s will? There are two layers of interpretation I want to explore. The first has to do with the playfulness and innocence that our modern society associates with childhood.
The “Anabaptism at 500” resources for this Sunday describe childlike qualities such as trust, complete dependency, uncomplicated love, affection, wide-eyed wonder, constant learning and experimenting, and a playful aliveness to the world.
One of my favorite parts of our service is children’s time, where we get to experience the inquisitiveness, curiosity and clarity of our younger generation. Some of us adults might have memories from our own childhood illustrating these qualities – for example, I remember trying to walk on water on a large puddle on my street since I learned in Sunday School that Jesus could walk on water. I figured if Jesus could do it, then I could too since I also trusted God.
“What might it mean for us to yield, surrender, and entrust our lives to Jesus like children? How do we learn anew to let Jesus lead? What daily discipline might we practice to learn childlike trust?”
In a world that is filled with pain and violence, it is radical to not build walls around our hearts and remain curious and playful. It does indeed require trust in something greater than ourselves to not give up or numb out in the face of cruelty, genocide, and fear.
Our spiritual ancestors were in times no less dispiriting and violent, yet they did not back down from challenging the terrors of Christendom. Their yieldedness to God gave them courage and clarity that honestly perplexed their oppressors. How could they possibly sing in prison cells or on their way to execution? How could they imagine the peaceable kindom when threats of violence surrounded them? How could they freely share their possessions when they had to work incredibly hard for any amount of material comfort in their lives?
These questions bring me to the second layer of interpretation associated with the Matthew 18 passage. Let us consider the place of children in first century Palestine. Biblical scholar Ched Myers writes, “children represented the most powerless class. They were the ‘least of the least’ in the social order of antiquity, with neither status nor rights.”
By calling the child to him, Jesus was placing the most marginal and vulnerable in society at the center. He was saying, until you welcome the least among you, you have not welcomed me. His words also illuminate that the lived experience of many children today is a far cry from the romanticization of modern childhood. Many children experience abuse and abandonment in their families of origin or from supposedly trustworthy caregivers. Even in well-meaning families emotional and spiritual trauma is commonplace, often justified as a means of protecting the child from nefarious forces outside the family or religious community. I know I can share stories along those lines.
In his article “Experiencing the kingdom as a little child,” James Bailey cites the work of Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller, who writes about the dire consequences for a society when the violence done to children, often by their own parents, goes unattended. The pattern often involves parental violence against a child within the secrecy of the family circle, resulting in the dominated child’s inability to react in anger, and rationalization of the parent’s harmful action as motivated by the parent’s “good intention.”
This hurt child tends to repress the painful memory of the abuse, whether physical or verbal, so that only in adulthood does this person end up unconsciously discharging the stored-up rage on others who tend to be smaller and weaker. This results in what Miller labels as a “’vicious circle of contempt for those who are smaller and weaker,’ patterns of domination that are maintained and psychically enforced intergenerationally.” This vicious circle is in total contrast to Gelassenheit’s circle of free flowing love between ourselves, God, and neighbor.
The early Anabaptists took Jesus at his word when he said to love enemies and care for the vulnerable. The early Anabaptists, many of them peasants, had the experience of being dominated by those in power. Yielding to the Spirit freed them from this domination, empowering them to speak and live the truth even if it cost them their lives.
In his welcoming of the child Jesus is seeking to transform patterns of societal violence at the root. He is saying his followers must welcome and honor those without status to truly embody the kindom of God. To stand in solidarity with those denigrated by the vicious circle, we must yield to the Spirit, repenting of the ways we may also perpetuate harm. It is in this yielding that we open ourselves to the life-giving flow of love.
How might our world be different if the people (mostly men) with incredible amounts of power weren’t caught in vicious circles of contempt for those who are smaller and weaker? How would the history of the world be different if Jesus-followers had been faithful to this teaching throughout the centuries? How might our own discipleship be renewed by this teaching, breaking the vicious circle as we yield to the Spirit?
I believe the invitations to us are multiple. We are invited to continue yielding ourselves to the Spirit, including the call to repentance that Sheri preached about last week. In our yielding we trust that God will give us the courage and clarity we need, individually and collectively, to follow in the way of Jesus. We are invited to continue standing with those who are dehumanized in our world. We are invited to continue our healing work, recognizing that we may have experienced abuse and abandonment by those who were supposed to protect us, and in doing this healing work we root out its harm from continuing in the generations to come. And through it all, we are invited to the circle of free flowing love uniting us with God and all creation.
I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
Rainer maria rilke
I want to free what waits within us
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without our contriving.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what we do flow from us like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
We will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.