by Dr. Lani Wilson

While the popular hymn “I Surrender All” suggests surrender to God as an act of submission, the broader theology of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross—at least as I teach it to members of my congregation who gathers for worship— claims that we surrender to a savior who first gave up his life for us. This is a mutual relationship of love and self-giving. But that spiritual surrender, or that release of our personal defenses before God, still occurs in the presence of others who, through their relational cues and collective care, create an environment for surrender to happen.
Sonia Walters (2014). I Surrender All: Subverting Cruelty of Capitalist Optimism with Affective Expressions of Worship. Pastoral Psychology, 63(5/6), 749-761. doi:10.1007/s11089-014-0606-4,  p. 759.

A 2014 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which looked at factors like parental income, education, and family structure, shows a similar pattern: Many black Americans not only fail to move up, but show an increased likelihood of backsliding. According to the study, “In recent decades, blacks have experienced substantially less upward intergenerational mobility and substantially more downward intergenerational mobility than whites.” The greater probability of slipping back applies to blacks across income groups. According to the Fed study, about 60 percent of black children whose parents had income that fell into the top 50 percent of the distribution saw their own income fall into the bottom half during adulthood. This type of downward slide was common for only 36 percent of white children.

Gillian B. White, “How Black Middle-Class Kids Become Poor Adults.” The Atlantic, January 9, 2015

Yet Luke stresses that financial sacrifice is fundamental to Christian discipleship. Jesus urges not just the rich ruler but all of his disciples to sell their possessions and care for the poor—in return for treasure in heaven. Many of us today wonder whether Jesus’ words apply to all Christians or only to the disciples, those leaders of the early church. Peter wondered the same (v. 41). While Jesus may have meant it especially for leaders, the principle applies to any of us entrusted with resources that we can use to care for others (vv. 42–48).
Craig Keener & Jill De Haan, When Jesus Wanted All My Money, Christianity Today, 59(4), 46-50.

They come to church on Sunday with knowing nods and eye-rolls about their busy days and their exhaustion, as if this is the way it must be. Their investment in activity and exhaustion appears to be fulfilling what Berlant calls “the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of the attachment in the first place” (p. 25). The good life takes its toll inwardly as more and more aspects of that cluster of ideals need to be perpetuated or maintained. However, perhaps because they have outwardly met the American dream, no members of the professional class in my congregation come to our healing services.
Ibid., Walters, 759.

In Jesus’ day, most people owned few possessions. In rural areas, many people worked and lived as serfs on the land of the wealthy. In urban areas, many of them lived in rickety tenements located downwind from sewers. Only a small proportion of people were wealthy, and their property was serviced by slaves and paid workers. Estimates suggest that at any given time, more than half the Roman Empire was at risk of starvation. Luke’s world was not too much different from ours: Today half the global population lives on less than $2.50 a day and 400 million people lack access to safe drinking water. While giving up possessions was not a foreign practice in Luke’s day, it certainly wasn’t the norm. Only some marginal philosophic sects and Jewish monks who lived in the wilderness near the Dead Sea actually demanded the sacrifice of possessions. Most people, like most people today, would have found Jesus’ words frighteningly difficult. They had either too much—or too little—to give away.
Ibid., Keener & De Haan.

The history of affect is a history of secularization, where religious feeling has been transferred to sanctioned forms of feeling within the home, the family, and the marketplace. The family rather than the religious community has become the locus for religious feeling. The personal kingdom of the home and hearth have come to replace the feeling of connection to God. In the public sphere, religious feeling and sentimentalism have been transferred to the goals of humanism. Cvetovich notes the gendered aspects of this sentimentalism; as women were permitted into the public sphere for abolition or temperance movements, gendered affect was permitted in the public sphere if it imbued religious feeling into the spiritual good promised by humanistic goals. If there has been such an affective shift away from religion, what happens when we return affective experience to the site of worship? I believe when we are vulnerable with others in intense experiences of worship, the normative ideals of private and public spaces that represent the good life are interrupted. As Berlant says, it is always a risk to let someone in, to insist on a pacing different from the efforts and incoherencies towards the good life. In a world that has secularized religious feeling, we are practicing something useless when we enter into affective worship. It produces nothing. Nor is it the site we consider central to the constitution of the contemporary capitalist self.
Ibid., Walters, 756.

Trade it in for a small window and look out. That is where surrender is. We surrender to the ministry of Jesus the Christ because He had the power to sacrifice His life for us. Such a mystery, but that’s what and Who lives in “affective worship”: The Mystery that is The Nazarene. Walters calls it the “mutual relationship of love and self-giving” in describing our relationship to Jesus the Christ. I might disagree with the word “mutual” since that implies equanimity on both parts, and we are in no way equal with The Christ. However, He did die for us to live. He sacrificed His life and we surrender to Him because of that love He had for us in that act. We have no power to sacrifice: All we can do is surrender.

As with any other moment of encounter, worship does not guarantee transformation. Christian worship and the discourses and practices that surround a community’s common life can co-opt and reinforce cruel cultural discourses such as racism, classism, and sexism. They can also preach a gospel of the good life, or call financial gains a blessing, or confuse patriotism for one’s country with faith in God, thus channeling the discourses of the good life into the mouth of God. But in a post-Christian culture, because worship and church life is no longer the dominant site for the constitution of the self, participation in worship can also present the possibility of discourses and practices that compete against a culturally dominant or normative version of the self. The church community interrupts the story of production with the possibility of an alternative identity not based on promises of what the individual can achieve or produce….For Ghent, the term surrender “has nothing to do with hoisting a white flag; in fact, rather than carrying a connotation of defeat, the term will convey a quality of liberation and expansion of the self as a corollary to the letting down of defensive barriers” (p. 213). Thus, Ghent emphasizes the difference between submission as a power relation and surrender as a positive and personally powerful act of vulnerability and openness.
Ibid., 759.

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