Jesus received the ministry of the woman who poured the ointment on him, received it graciously as a gift. Even though, yes, that money could have been used for the poor, there is also a time to give a gift and to receive a gift. And then Jesus gives a gift to his disciples, and in humility washes their feet, and they learn to receive. As we finish up talking about the spiritual disciplines, I want to try to redeem a word that has been part of the spiritual disciplines throughout the millenia of Christianity. The word is "submission." It's one of the traditional spiritual disciplines, and it's gotten a very bad rap over time, which is largely our fault because we have in various ways misused it. It's been used by people in power to hold down other people, telling them they need to be Christians and they need to submit.

What I want to suggest is that when we look at this very old discipline of the church and try to figure out what people ever saw in it, and how it's any help at all to our faith, that we think of it not in terms of submission and the baggage that we have associated with that word over time, but that we see it simply as receiving. We talked about giving last week, and this is the flip side -- being able to receive, which is really all submission is -- being able to graciously receive the various things that are given to us. That comes in a multitude of forms. We might receive actual gifts of money or possessions. We might receive words, compliments, advice. We might receive the authority of someone else. Christians throughout history have often put themselves under spiritual direction, a field that is starting to come back into its own today. It might come in receiving someone's time or energy as they give gifts to us.

We have trouble with giving in our lives. We also have a big problem with receiving, for some of us moreso. I've often said we have two great lessons to learn in life -- how to give and how to receive. And each of us tends to be better at one than the other. We all do a little bit of both, but personality-wise, we tend either more toward giving or more toward receiving. The object is to get those things in balance.

It's hard, especially for us as self-sufficient New Englanders, to receive anything at all. We want to either give to others or simply to just be self-sufficient in who we are and not need anybody outside of ourselves, either to give to or to receive from. I think it's absolutely critical to our faith that we learn to be able to receive. If we don't, first we're not going to be able to give. Those of you who give and give and give and never receive -- the well empties out. If the well isn't fed from a spring where you keep receiving, pretty soon you have nothing left to give out. In order to be a good giver, you have to be a good receiver, because you have to have that coming back into you.

It's also critical because if we don't receive, there are some who will never learn to give. I saw this when I was in a church in Atlanta when I was in seminary. In the church I was a part of, there was a young man who got a brain tumor, was ill, was not able to work, had to leave his job, and basically had nothing. He wasn't able to get out and exercise as he had been and he started putting on weight, which meant that he started to outgrow his clothes. Along comes winter time, and we see Steve in church, and he's coming in as it gets colder and colder in the only pair of clothes that still fit him -- a black t-shirt and some black jeans. That was all he had left, and people noticed that. There was a couple in the church that decided they wanted to help him. The husband was about the same size that Steve was now, and he had some clothes, and they went out and they bought some new clothes as well for Steve. Now you have to know, this couple never did things like this. They did not give to other people. They were never too sure if the person deserved it, or if they were going to take something and sell it for drugs, and they were always wary about giving to somebody. But here was somebody they knew. They knew the situation. They knew that here was somebody really in need. They could see him in the same clothes week after week, day after day. So they packed up a combination of the husband's good clothes and new clothes that they had bought, and they went to Steve's apartment. They presented them at the door, and he said, "I don't need your charity," and he shut the door.

I can tell you that that couple is not likely to reach out and give ever again. If he had only been able simply to say, "Thank you so much for thinking of me," and they could have seen him come in wearing some of the clothes that they had given, they would have realized the joy that it is to give and would have been more likely the next time to reach out and to give again. By his insisting that he didn't need charity and refusing to receive, he cut off the spiritual growth of somebody else who desperately needed to learn how to give. Our giving and receiving are all tied up together. If you have real trouble receiving from somebody else, think of it as a way to give. Think of it as a way to give somebody else an opportunity to learn how to give, and to learn what charity in the true Christian sense is really all about.

There's another reason that we need to learn how to receive, which I think is the most important of all. If we don't learn how to receive from other people, we are never ever going to learn to receive from God. We live out, in our human relationships with each other, our relationship with God. Our relationships with human beings and our relationship with God are tied. If we can't do something with a flesh and blood human being, chances are very slim that we're going to be able to do it with a spirit. God says this in I John -- "if you don't love the brother or sister who you have seen, don't go saying that you can love God who you haven't seen." Because that's harder. It's hard enough here in the flesh, but we work it out with each other so that it then becomes possible for us to open to the greater love and the greater gifts. God is the great giver. We need the gifts that God has to bestow on us. But how can we ever receive from God if we haven't ever been able to receive from one another?

In receiving, I'm not talking about getting your pay, that you do something and you get a reward back, so you feel you deserved it. I'm talking about real gift giving, something that you haven't earned, because it's not a gift to get it if you've earned it. Then it's a wage. It's only a gift if it has nothing to do with whether you deserve it or not. It comes from the heart of the giver. We experience this to some degree at Christmas time, when we really want to give to others, to find something that they delight in. I remember how difficult it was when I was married, trying to find gifts for my in-laws. They had pretty much whatever they wanted, and they were very, very bad receivers. They did not want you to give gifts, and we were always trying to find some way that we could give because it was hard to find something that they could accept. I remember one year, we gave them just some very simple gifts. We had a good amount of money. It wasn't that we were poor. And we gave my father-in-law a briefcase and a scarf to my mother-in-law. We were staying at their house in Pennsylvania. They opened everything on Christmas morning and they said thank you. But when we went to leave their house, the briefcase and the scarf were there with our luggage. They said, "Take these back. You don't need to be spending your money on us." David was a professor in a university. He could afford a briefcase and a scarf. And it hurt. It hurt very much to have the gifts, when you try to find something that someone would like, not be received, even though in their giving it back they were trying to give us something and not have us spend money. They didn't mean to be hurtful. But when you don't receive gifts from somebody, it hurts. It hurts the giver.

We need to learn to be good receivers. How do you do that? I can't tell you the number of times that I have sat with someone in the hospital as their life, for one reason or another, is moving from being a giver to being a receiver. Maybe they're getting on in years and something has happened, and this is just the recognition that they're going to have to receive from someone from here on out. Or maybe it's just been an accident or some temporary reason that people who've always been out giving, giving, giving, have got to receive physical care, or maybe money, from other people. The struggles that go on! You can save yourself not all of the agony but a lot of it, if before you get to that point you can learn to simply accept the gifts that people want to give to you.

In my own life this was always a problem, and still is to a large degree. But I started by just being able to receive a compliment. How many times have you said to somebody, "That's a lovely dress." "Oh, this old thing?" they say. Or you say something nice about somebody and there are sixteen reasons why that isn't really true, or it was an accident. Maybe you do that yourself. That's a very simple place to be able to start, when someone gives you a compliment on something, simply to be able to sit back and say, "thank you." You may not say any more than that, but I know for me just being able to do that was a huge step. And then when you've got that mastered, you can move on and be more conscious of it in other things, and really be able to enjoy the gifts that people give.

Again, if you are a consummate giver, think of receiving as a gift. Think of receiving as the way that you give to somebody else the joy of giving, learning what that's all about, and how wonderful that can be. Gracious receiving is a gift. It would have been a great gift if my inlaws had been able to graciously receive presents that we gave. It would have made Christmas a whole lot more pleasant every year, if we didn't have to think through a gift that they were going to reject or not be able to have somehow. Think of these last two weeks in balance. All giving is not healthy. All receiving is not healthy. To the degree we have problems in one area or another, we'll find little neuroses kind of sitting around in our brains. Sometimes giving is used not as a gift but as a way of creating an obligation in somebody. We've all known people who've given for reasons like that. And receiving can be pure selfishness. We need to keep them in balance, and they do balance each other. If we can learn to receive as much as we give then our Christian lives can be in balance, and we can give as God directs us to give and receive the gifts that God has for us.

We see that kind of balance as Jesus says, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." For a long time I saw the great commandment, "Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself," as sort of a three-tiered hierarchy -- you love God first, then you love your neighbor, and here's self at the bottom. And I remember how revealing it was to me when I saw that wasn't the way it was. God's at the top, but it's like a triangle, and neighbor and self are equal and they balance each other. You love your neighbor as you love yourself. And this ties into giving and receiving, because some of us are much better at loving our neighbor, and we grind ourselves into the ground in the process. Some of us are much better at loving ourselves and our neighbor gets ignored. In either instance, the key is to keep them in balance. If we're loving our neighbor seven days out of the week, that's great. We don't need to love our neighbor less. We just need to love ourselves more. If we're giving to ourselves 24/7, we don't need to love ourselves less. We just need to love our neighbor just as much. Those two balance each other out. And when we take that commandment, we see it's not that God figures we are last, below everybody else, but all human beings come on an equal plane, and we balance each other as we go through the cycles of giving and receiving.

As we go through this week, we see the cycles of giving and receiving. On Thursday night, at our Maundy Thursday service, in addition to receiving communion and remembering the Last Supper and what Christ gave to us, we'll also do what he did that night and wash each other's feet. That's something that will be voluntary if you want to participate in that, but I invite you to think about it, to give and to receive in that act of washing one another's feet, even as Jesus did. To give and to receive. Jesus gave on the cross. We receive resurrected life. But we mustn't fool ourselves into thinking we can receive from God if we can't manage to receive from another human being. Because receiving from God is harder.

It's more unimagineable that the God of the universe wants to give me eternal life. I don't deserve that. I know that. If I hadn't ever had any practice in accepting a gift that I didn't really deserve, just because of the love of the giver who wanted to give it to me, it's going to be darn hard for me to imagine that the God of the universe really wants to give me something as precious as eternal life.

We've got to work it out with each other. We've got to give. We've got to receive. We've got to love our neighbor just as we love ourselves.

Amen.

© 2000, Anne Robertson

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