Yes to the sun.

Yes to the mountains.

Yes to the smiles.

[Have congregation join on the YES.]

Yes to the road.

Yes to day.

Yes to your shirt.

Yes to the saints.

Yes to onions.

Yes to the moonlight.

Yes to a detour.

Yes to the floor.

Yes to your heartbeat.

 

Yes to give.

(Yes to tithing.

Yes to tithing. Okay, that’s not part of the poem. Sorry!)

Yes to give.

 

Yes to your heart.

Yes to give.

 

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Doesn’t Martin Miles’ quirky little poem, Yes, make you just want to throw up your arms like a winning Olympian and stretch your fingers to the sky? Next to LOVE, is there a better word in the English language? Is there a word you love more to hear?

When the letter comes from the college of your choice this month and you open it with trembling hands, don’t you wish they would skip all the pleasantries and just write a giant YES across the page? When you knelt down to ask your sweetheart to marry you and your heart was pounding a mile a minute, was there anything better in the world than to hear the one word yes fall from his lips? When the pregnancy test comes back positive, don’t you wish that instead of a color, you could just get the word in big block letters: YES!

Oh, if life could just be one big, constant, repetitive YES! Wouldn’t that be just great? Well, probably not.

A couple was married 70 years, and at their anniversary celebration the husband was asked the secret to their long marriage. I learned that whenever she wants something, if I always say yes, everything is fine.

Well, fine for her maybe, but my guess is that it isn’t always fine for him. And really not for them. YES and NO need each other. We only think it would be great if anyone and everyone only said YES to us. But that assumes we always know what’s good for us, doesn’t it?

Some years ago my sister-in-law, Zetta, visited with her son, who was about three or four at the time. Brandon went straight for the toy closet and started pulling out every toy in there, leaving a mess all over the house. His mother thought it was cute. Her sister, Kim, wife of George, supreme commander of allied forces in the Mason household, don’t you know?!, considered it an act of aggression that had to be stopped before the house became occupied territory. Brandon had to be taught boundaries. His mother started calling her sister Hitler for being so strict and mean. Eventually, though, Zetta crossed over to the Dark Side and joined the parental conspiracy against children doing whatever they please. And her kids are turning out just fine now.

There’s nothing worse than a spoiled brat who has never heard the word No. Some of the world’s greatest athletes suffer from this lack of negativity. They are so good at what they do from a young age that everyone makes excuses for them. Teachers and school administrators let them slide through without gaining the knowledge of books or the wisdom of discipline. Children of parents who just want the best for them sometimes develop an entitlement personality when their parents make sure they succeed by helping them too much. It’s always the teacher’s fault, that sort of thing. Kids need to learn to hear the word No and understand that some things in life have to be earned.

Some things. Respect, for one. Success, for another. Things like these live between the lively and ever-present but never-settled possibilities of Yes and No. But some things should not have to be earned. Love, for one. A feeling of belonging in the world, for another.

When the Apostle Paul writes to the church at Corinth, he takes a curious turn in dealing with a basic little matter. The Corinthians question whether Paul is good to his word because apparently he told them he was coming to see them at one point and didn’t show up. So they wonder what else they can’t count on. They figure him fickle.

Paul doesn’t go into a long explanation of why he didn’t make it. He probably had two sermons to prepare, a funeral in the middle, and nasty winter cold to boot. He was a preacher of sorts, after all. But he seizes the chance to talk to them about how his relationship to them is like God’s relationship to them. He says that God’s word to them is always Yes! That in Jesus Christ, all the promises of God amount to God’s Yes. He says in effect that the only No they will ever hear is the No that God says to allowing their sins to define God’s relationship to them. In other words, there is something deeper and more abiding in God’s relationship to us than anything we can or cannot do in response to it. It is God’s bedrock decision to love us to death in Jesus Christ in order to bring us to life in him. We do not stand in a neutral position before God—between Yes and No—because Jesus Christ stands between God and us. Jesus is the divine Yes-man!

This was the great insight of Martin Luther that gave rise to the Protestant Reformation. It’s not that the Roman Catholic Church had forsaken its commitment to this truth in theory; it’s that it had forgotten to live by in practice. But Luther had grown up in the church and somehow gotten the idea that God was like his stern father, only sterner. God’s demands for perfection were absolute. God is pure and righteous, altogether just. And so God cannot accept any unrighteousness, any imperfection, or else God would be unjust. But try as Luther might, he could never sense God’s favor and feared for his eternal soul night and day. He tried harder than anyone else to find peace with God. The breakthrough came when Luther realized that that was the very problem human beings could never solve for themselves. Peace with God is possible only if it begins with God. Peace with God is possible only because God wins the peace and gives it to us free and unmerited. Peace with God is possible not because we earn it but because God grants it in Jesus Christ. We cannot depend upon ourselves; we can only trust in Christ and find all the promises of God to be ours with him and through him.

St. Paul wants us to be clear that God is faithful—not fickle, not feckless— faithful. God’s attitude toward you is not Yes and No; it is always and only Yes.

Now, this does not mean that God approves of everything and anything we do. No, God grieves our sin and all the things that we do to harm ourselves or others. But our sin does not change God’s unconditional love for us in Jesus Christ. On the contrary, it only makes grace all the more amazing: that God would be faithful when we are faithless.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son illustrates this perfectly. The Father never considered his rebellious son to be anything but his son. When the boy left his father flat and went into the foreign country, he was still the father’s son. And when he returned, wanting to be a servant instead of a son, thinking he had given up the right to be a son, he found that his father had not given up his right to be his father. And that is what made all the difference in the end.

Listen, some of you have struggled your whole lives with whether you measure up. And you wrestle daily with whether that also extends to your relationship with God. I believe if you are concerned about it, you are probably not in as great a peril over it as someone who pays no mind to it at all. It is for all of us the same challenge, however: learning to let go of our need to be in charge of our lives, our need to control things, our need to make ourselves the issue.

A friend of mine called this week to tell me of his sister-in-law’s suicide. She was 70 years old, a retired mathematician who had the highest government clearance level apart from a presidential appointee. She had warned her family that she would someday take her life into her own hands, and sure enough, her suicide note declared that she did not like the prospect of living in a nursing home. She took control, and she took her life. She had no faith to rely upon. When her sister and her husband cleaned out her things, they took so many books to Half Price Books that they got over $200 in return. Now if you’ve ever done that, you know you are lucky to get $.75 for a nice volume. So you can guess how many books she had. But here’s the tragedy: not a Bible among them. For all her intellect, she could not find peace because she never let peace find her. She never allowed the Yes of God to settle in her soul. And she never did, because she never could or would relinquish control of her life to God.

Lindsey Jacobellis did not win the silver medal this week in the Women’s Snowboardcross so much as she lost the gold medal. The favorite for the gold, Lindsey pulled away from all competitors in the finals and was cruising home free for the finish line when she inexplicably decided to make herself the issue. Instead of the sport or the race being the thing, instead of keeping her focus and honoring the course right through the finish line, she decided to showboat on the second-to-last jump. When she did, she lost her balance on the landing and fell, allowing the second-place girl to pass her for the gold. She will forever live with that embarrassment. Now, truth be told, 20-year-old Lindsey can live with that embarrassment and learn from it. It’s only a sport; and, refreshingly, she seems to understand that.

But life is not a sport, and salvation is not about you, even if it concerns you. God grants you the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ so that you can be free from the anxiety of living and dying. You get to live with the full trust that God’s Yes is enough for you forever. And in the meantime, God grants you the presence of the Holy Spirit as a daily reminder of what is to come. It’s like having an Olympic medal hung round your neck under your clothes at the starting gate. You know what is coming when you finish the race—the public ceremony of having your anthem played. You do not have to wait until you die to experience God’s Yes; you can sense it deep within you even now when you let go and trust in the Lord with all your heart.

Karl Rahner died in 1984. He was one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20^th century. To renounce all is to gain all, he said. To descend is to rise; to die is to live. And this is the deepest truth of life with God that gives us the blessed assurance we so seek: the more you open your hand to God, the more God can fill it with grace. The more you open your heart to God, the more assurance God can pour into it.

Shortly before he died, Rahner penned a prayer that included these words: Then you will say the last word, the only word that abides and that no one ever forgets. Then, when all is silent in death and I have learned and suffered my last, then will begin the great silence in which you alone resound, you who are word from eternity to eternity. Then all human words will be dumb. … No human word, no image, and no concept will ever stand between me and you; you yourself will be the one joyful word of love and life that fills all the spheres of my soul. [Cited in Context (Feb. 2006, Part B): 5.]

That word above all earthly words is Jesus Christ. And in Jesus Christ that word of God to you and about you is always YES.