Learning to Ride

Learning to Ride

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

So, before we think about anything else this morning, I want you to remember what it was like to learn to ride a bike. Do you remember that day? There was the initial longing to learn, to be able to have that freedom that everyone else had. So, with a little help from a parent or an older sibling, we threw our leg up and over and plopped down on that seat and put our feet on the pedals.

The good news, at first, for most of us was…that we had training wheels. We were really going to have to mess up to fall over! Maybe we were the youngest in the family and the training wheels had seen better days and things were wobbly. I remember that being the case for me. In some ways, if that was the case, we were lucky because those wobbles gave us a chance to recognize the feelings that we were going to have to adjust to later: wobble and lean in the other direction and then repeat that, over and over again.

Eventually, we got cocky enough, or we were teased enough, or it was just announced to us that it was time to rid ourselves of the comfort of those training wheels. After all, we weren’t really riding a bike yet. Being the fastest person on training wheels wasn’t going to win any prizes. Out came the wrench. Off came those tiny wheels. Our mother or our father steadied the bike for us while almost universally the other parent stood a few feet away, thinking about what a bad idea this was. Then, the parent who steadied us ran beside us until they had the audacity to let go…

Then, we were on our own. Most of us probably tried to think our way to riding that bike at first. We developed our theory of riding: faster or slower; lean left or lean right; hit the brakes now. Generally, though, that “theory" was what led us to ride into the nearby bushes (or, in the case of one of my girls, the church dumpster). If we tried to think our way through the fine details of riding a bike, we couldn’t keep up. There had to be another way…

Which, of course, there was. That other way was to pay attention to what we were feeling. We had to trust that there were basic principles by which this bike riding thing worked: a proper speed; a way to turn, a time to brake and a time to speed up. It wasn’t going to do any good to be afraid before we ever got on the bike or panic once we got going. We needed to remind ourselves that, in truth, people do ride bikes and I’m just as capable as any other person: “I can do this!” Then, what I have to do is get a feel for how this works. I need to learn that riding a bike is about all the little micro adjustments that I make as I go: to that pothole ahead; to the curve that’s approaching; to the subtle feeling that I might be leaning too far left but that the right adjustment is to lean—just slightly—to the right. We achieve balance by listening to what we are feeling and making changes that are informed by those feelings. When we are a veteran bike rider, we hardly realize that we are even doing this.

When we get it, when to our utter amazement, we find ourselves gliding down the street on our own, we are ecstatic! Do you remember how exhilarating it was to really ride a bike on your own for the very first time. You were free! Your parents were the two shrinking dots back up the street who were waving to you as you sailed away. You and gravity had reached a truce.

Until you got a little full of yourself. It turns out that if you lean too hard into the ecstasy and the exhilaration of a bike ride, you start to lose track of what’s happening. You stop paying attention to what’s going on around you and blow a stop sign. You start paying attention to all the wrong things which in my case was the cute girl walking down the street who waved to me just before I sheared the side view mirror off that equally cute little sports car. (Was she waving or was she trying to warn me? I’ll never know…) Or, maybe you just get so full of yourself that you think, “I wonder what happens if I take my hands off the handlebars?”

Eventually, the transcendent, exhilarating experience of riding a bike gives way to the humiliation of crashing a bike. We get overconfident. We stop listening to what we feel. We forget to make the adjustments. We crash. Then, we wipe off our skinned knees and elbows, pick up our bike and renew our commitment to balance and to listening to what we feel.

As you may already suspect, my point this morning is not about riding bikes. In fact, I haven’t ridden one for years—not because I can’t anymore but because I don’t want to—not around here. I’m confident in my skills. However, I don’t think that I could experience the joy of riding in a place where there are so many dangers—too many cars; too many potential accidents. No, my point isn’t about riding. My point is about how central listening to what we feel is to maintaining balance, no matter what we are doing.

Feelings get a bad name in life. Feelings are what people dump on us when they’ve started therapy, right? Feelings are what other people make us feel, right? Feelings are just the noise in this life that makes it hard to think or that makes us automatically do dumb things, right? Here’s the thing: I don’t believe any of that. As I’ve mentioned recently, our job in life isn’t to feel what everyone else around us feels—to join in the panic or the anger or the frustration of the moment. No! Our job is to find a way to be present but not overwhelmed by what’s going on. If we can be a non-anxious presence, then what we get to do is listen to what we are feeling. And why does that matter? Our feelings matter because they are feedback. They are clues to what the adjustments that we need to make to live in a balanced way in response to what’s actually going on around us. They are clues about how to “keep the bike upright and heading in the right direction.”

There are lots of steps involved in learning to listen to those feelings. We do have to let go of all the judgements that we might want to make about what a bad person that we must be for feeling what we are feeling at all. We have to learn the subtleties and nuances and the names of all the things that we can feel. Most of us work with an 8 crayon box mindset when it comes to naming feelings: “I’m angry;” “I’m sad;” and other primary “colors.” Part of what we have to learn is that feelings really come in a 256 crayon box, that anger includes frustration and annoyance and rage and a whole lot of other “shades” and that the differences matter. We have to learn not only to name what we feel but we need to own the fact that sometimes we feel 16 things at the same time. We have to make peace with the fact that we can feel conflicting things. Aren’t you familiar in your life with “bittersweet?”

What I suggested to you last week is that the basic feeling in a life of faith—the underlying “pedal tone” or what some people call “affect” is gratitude. The fact that I’m alive and get to live this day at all is a gift. That’s the joy that precedes getting on the bike. It’s also the joy that we rediscover over and over again as we ride the bike (or work our way through a day) if we are making the right adjustments. The goal—and we should never forget it—is to find joy in the journey, after all.

When it comes to the life of faith, our text this morning gives us a major clue about which feelings are central. In fact, I would almost say that they are as basic as leaning right and leaning left on a bike. The two feelings that are paired together when we are in balance are exhilaration or transcendence or wholeness (you can decide which name works best for you) and humility. Let me explain…

Let’s boil it down. The good news is that God loves you, that God is with you every step of the way, that nothing in this life can separate you from the love of God. If you just hear that good news and you allow yourself to just get carried away by it then you will eventually think that the reason that God loves you is that you are special. You will think that maybe God loves you more than whoever you think is less special than you. You will begin to get full of yourself to the point where you will “take your hands off the handlebars” in some moment of your life because, well, that’s just how great and competent and amazing you are. And then you will wipe out spectacularly.

When you dust yourself off, you will feel shame. In fact, you might have friends or family members or maybe even a pastor who point out how shameful your “crash” really was. Here’s the thing: don’t listen to them. Listen to what you are feeling in that moment because that feeling is one of your points of connection to God. God didn’t make you crash. You didn’t crash because you were an awful person. You crashed because you stopped listening to what you were feeling and making the right adjustments.

The essential pair of things to feel and hold in tension and constantly use to make adjustments are exhilaration and humility. We have to listen to both. It is an incredible thing that God loves us. However, that’s not really a statement about how incredible any of us are. It’s a statement about how incredible and loving and forgiving God is. When life is working, when the balance is there, when I am feeling whole for a little while, we know it because what we feel is humbled. What we know is that none of this would be happening without the grace and love of God. It’s not about me!

Our ancestors in faith struggled to be able to remember that the only reason that they made it out of slavery and across the parted Red Sea and through the wilderness and into the Promised Land was because God led them and they followed. So, they told the story to themselves to remind themselves of how important humility is. Before they ate anything grown in that land, they offered their sacrifice to God who made the whole thing possible. And then, they wiped out spectacularly again and again, by forgetting about God. We still wipe out every time we forget about God, too—not because God is punishing us but because balance and making the little adjustments and remaining humble are what faith is all about.