Coming to Jesus

Acts 16:9-15

John 14:23-29

Today’s scripture is part of Jesus’ final speech to the disciples before his arrest and crucifixion.  It is a small part of a much longer speech in which he repeatedly says that if they love him they will follow him, love each other, do what he tells them to do.  He also repeatedly tells them that he is leaving them, and then he reassures them with promises that the Spirit will come to be with them.  Today I want to focus on this second part – Jesus’ telling the disciples that he is leaving and his reassurance about what is to come.  

Has there ever been a time in your life when you felt abandoned or left?  I imagine there have been times for all of us when we have felt that someone has left us.  If that someone is someone we cared about deeply, that loss, that abandonment can be devastating.  Sometimes those feelings of abandonment might not even seem logical to us, but still they come.  A loved one must leave on a work trip, or leave on a military deployment.  Or a person dies.  But even then, even when the loved one does not choose to go, it can still feel like abandonment when it actually happens.  We can still feel that we have been left, that they left us and as a result we can feel angry, hurt, devastated.

This feeling doesn’t just happen with people.  Have there been times when you have felt abandoned by God?  That God is somehow not there for a time when things are hard?  It is not sinful to feel that way.  As we will talk about when we do our series on the psalms, all of these feelings are normal and natural and acceptable to God, too. That’s why we have so many psalms that express these feelings.  They give us permission and words to express feelings of pain, of isolation, of abandonment, that are just plain normal at times.  Sometimes it is hard to feel God’s presence.  Sometimes God’s presence comes to us in different ways, ways we might not recognize as easily.  And I think that when we are feeling abandoned by a person or by people, it is especially easy to feel that it is actually God who has left us.  That somehow, if God really loved us, we would not have been left by the person we love, that they would have lived, or wouldn’t have gone away, or wouldn’t have moved or wouldn’t have rejected us.  And again, while that may not be logical, it is a very human experience.  It is very human to feel that it is God who has left when it is in fact a person whom we love who is no longer present with us in the same way.

I think about C.S. Lewis’ book, A grief Observed (New York: Seabury Press, 1976). C.S. Lewis, as many of you know, was a remarkable Christian author who wrote both novels such as the Narnia series as well as theological conversations such as “The Four Loves” and “Surprised by Joy”.  In 1945 he experienced the death of a close friend.  About this death he said, “The experience of loss (the greatest I have yet known) was wholly unlike what I should have expected.  We now verified for ourselves what so many bereaved people have reported; the ubiquitous presence of a dead man, as if he had ceased to meet us in particular places in order to meet us everywhere...” he continued, “No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying.  When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed.” 

But 15 years later, in 1960, his wife of very few years, Joy, died. And that experience was also unexpected for him - but in the complete opposite way. As he said in the journal he kept following her death, “After the death of a friend...I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about Joy. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero.” And in contrast to the experience of the presence of his friend’s death changing his faith for the better, after the death of his wife, his faith was tested beyond measure.  As he continued, “Go to (God) when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find?  A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.  After that, silence.  You may as well turn away.  The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.  There are no lights in the windows.  It might be an empty house...not that I am in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.  The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.  The conclusion I dread is not, ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but, ‘So this is what God’s really like.  Deceive yourself no longer.”

Deeply disturbing words of pain and despair from a deeply faithful man.  Have any of you ever felt that way?

God knows and understands this very human experience.  God expects and anticipates this very human experience.  It is for this reason that Jesus spends so much time telling his disciples what is to come and offering the reassurances he does.  Jesus is about to leave them, he is about to be crucified.  For all of our experiences of abandonment by friends or family, how much worse for those who knew Jesus?  Jesus was not only their friend, he was their Lord, their Savior, their God.  He taught them.  He fed them.  He cared for them.  He gave their lives new direction, new purpose, new meaning.  He opened up life for them, he touched them and connected them with God in a real, concrete, new way.  He became their all, their everything, their reason for being and living.  But now he tells them that he is leaving and asks them to be happy about it because he is going to God the Father.  He tries to add more reassurance.  He tells them he is sending the Spirit.  And he tells them he will send them off with his peace.  He tells them to not be afraid.  And he tells them to not let their hearts be troubled. 

And so, what do you think?  Do all the reassurances make it all okay?  Does it work for Jesus that because he has said all of these words, the disciples are therefore at peace when he is killed and are happy for him to be with God?  Are they untroubled and unafraid when the crucifixion comes?  Do they “believe” because he has reassured them and laid out for them what is to come?  Well, as we talked about last week and as we can imagine in the aftermath of today’s reading….Not so much.

The truth is that we are connectional beings.  We are people to whom loving and being loved are as important and crucial as food, water, and even air.  Babies who are not held and touched die.  If they have no one to whom they form an early attachment, they struggle to connect normally to others throughout their lives.  We witness this with other creatures, too.  There was an experiment some time ago in which some monkeys were offered food and water, but no care at all, while other monkeys were given stuffed animals and even others were held and cuddled and comforted.  The monkeys who were just offered food and water languished and died.  The ones with the stuffed animals did better, but still could not relate to other creatures.  Only the monkeys who were offered care and cuddling thrived and became “normal” adult monkeys. 

There is also the story I shared with you two weeks ago of Owen and Mzee.  Owen was a baby hippopotamus who was a sole survivor of a terrible storm.  He was rescued and put in a reserve with a bunch of other animals.  Immediately upon being released into the animal refuge, he attached himself firmly and completely to a cranky old tortoise named Mzee who wanted nothing to do with Owen for the first 24 hours.  Owen followed Mzee around and cuddled up next to Mzee and Mzee tried again and again to walk away from Owen.  But after only about a day, Mzee somehow got it that the hippo needed him, and maybe Mzee discovered that he needed the hippo, too.  The two became completely inseparable, eating together, sleeping together.  Both thrived through that connection, through that attachment.  And we experience this sense of abandonment with our pets, too – even those who appear to not like each other “grieve” when another family pet dies. 

I’ve shared with you before the wonderful story of the difference between heaven and hell.  In hell, there is a big feast spread out on the table, but the people sitting at the table have no elbows.  They desperately try to feed themselves, but are unable to get the food to their mouths because they cannot bend their arms.  In heaven the picture at first glance looks very similar.  There is a big feast spread out on the table, and again the people sitting around the table have no elbows and are still unable to feed themselves.  The difference, though, is that at the table in heaven, everyone is feeding each other.  And while this story points out that it is only in caring for one another that we are fed, that it is only in caring for one another that we are truly and deeply fed, there is another message here, too, and that is about the importance, the necessity of community.  We picture heaven as a place where our loved ones who’ve passed are waiting for us, a place where we can connect with those we love and stay connected.  Where loss, death, abandonment are no more. 

            But in the mean time, we have to face it.  Every human relationship will end in its human form.  We will lose everyone in one way or another.  People move, people change, people have tragedies happen and ultimately everyone dies.  So whether we are doing the leaving or being left, in human form, we will lose everyone.  And each one can feel like abandonment.  I don’t want to just ignore that, or lighten it, or push it quickly aside.  Those feelings are real, and they deserve our attention, our care, our time.  I think about what C.S. Lewis also wrote about situations in which well-meaning friends could not tolerate his pain, and how much damage that inability to sit with his pain caused..  They couldn’t tolerate it, and so they tried to shove it away with trite quips.  His favorite was “Well, she will live forever in your memory.”  And he found this created nothing less than an intense rage within him as he struggled to grasp, daily, that she was no longer alive, no longer with him in a way that he could recognize while he was in the midst of his deepest grief.  To tell him that she would live in his memory did nothing for him but make him feel completely alone in his grief - in other words, it had exactly the opposite effect of what was undoubtedly intended.  It did not make him feel better.  It made him feel misunderstood, isolated, and alone.  I do not want to do that by rushing through the real and tangible feelings that we have as we grieve.

That being said, I am also called upon on Sunday mornings to deliver the Good News.  And the good news in this is huge.  First, we are reassured that death and separation are temporary.  No matter how it feels, no matter how bad it feels, we are connectional.  God created us this way and I believe God will return all of us to connection.  Also, even in this life, we have Jesus’ reassurances, which are not just about his leaving, but ours as well.  “My peace I leave you” Jesus says.  And “I will send the Spirit to be with you.”  That spirit is our advocate, our comforter, our companion when we are lonely and alone.  “Do not be afraid” he tells us.  For there is nothing to fear – God is with us.  And finally, “I am going away, AND I am coming back to you.”  The end is not the end.  Death is not the end.  Connection will continue.  God will continue.  Christ will and does continue.  And through Christ, we, too, continue in connection with God and with our loved ones.  Amen.