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Sunday, March 21, 2010
Loneliness
Fifth in the Series: Where is God When It Hurts?
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Mark 14:32 - 42 New Revised Standard Version
32 They went to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, "Sit here while I pray." 33 He took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be distressed and agitated. 34 And he said to them, "I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake." 35 And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. 36 He said, "Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want." 37 He came and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, "Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? 38 Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." 39 And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. 40 And once more he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy; and they did not know what to say to him. 41 He came a third time and said to them, "Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. 42 Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand."
Jesus of Nazareth knew what it felt like to be alone.
We just heard about his experience in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he died, but his experience of loneliness begins much earlier.
It begins when he is baptized by his cousin John and then is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days of discernment and prayer. Of course he may not have felt lonely-the Spirit who sent him there was with him-but he was, on one level, alone and dealing with important choices and temptations about exactly what his mission would be: miracle worker Messiah, warrior/hero Messiah, or magic worker Messiah, all roles he rejected.
After that discernment time, a sort of vision quest for God’s vision of his life, he took much time in solitary prayer over the next few years. He would get up early and go to be alone with God to listen and pray.
There must have been times, especially as Mark’s gospel tells us, when he looked at his friends and thought they must be so dense for not yet understanding him. Not understanding him even after three years with him. Those must have been times when he felt lonely.
During the week we call holy week, there are other times of loneliness. We heard the passage from Maundy Thursday, the Thursday night that he spends all night in anguished prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane with sweat falling like drops of blood. He has taken all of his friends there and has especially asked his three closest friends, Peter, James and John to come and be close to him, but they are too tired and they let him down on the loneliest night of his life.
He is arrested and taken across town to the house of Caiaphas, the High Priest, where he will stand trial. As he is waiting for the council to assemble, he is thrown into a dungeon, a holding cell below the floor. We go to that place each time we are in Jerusalem. It is a sobering and lonely place. We turn out the lights in the dungeon, and read a portion of Psalm 88 which probably came to mind for Jesus as he was waiting:
Lord, God of my salvation, let my prayer come before you
For my soul is full of troubles and my life draws near to sheol
I am counted among those who go down to the Pit
I am like those who have no help
Can it be that Jesus, the human Jesus, felt those feelings of loneliness and abandonment? What did he feel when he was hanging from the cross? Did he feel abandoned and alone? The gospel of Mark says that he did, and his last words in that gospel are the cry of loneliness and abandonment from Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have you forsaken and abandoned me?
That psalm ends up with an affirmation of faith in the presence of God, but it begins with a feeling of the absence of God.
Jesus of Nazareth knew what it was to be alone.
Can we remember not only the loneliness of Christ but the time of loneliness we have felt as well?
Liana Guerin will help us capture some of those feelings in a song called Irvine.
We all have felt alone and will feel alone. That feeling of loneliness is part of what it means to be human. I felt that last week when Keith Ferguson and Ken Goodwin previewed today’s theme by singing the Lennon McCartney song Eleanor Rigby. I got to hear it three times and I was deeply moved each time.
That song is one of thousands that has captured the human feeling of loneliness. You could have a lunch conversation for a while today just naming songs with loneliness as a theme. There would be some blues songs, some country western songs (probably could be not country western songs at all unless people felt lonely at times), some Elvis Songs like Heartbreak Hotel, and even other Beatles songs like Sergeant Pepper’s LONELY Hearts Club Band!
Lily Tomlin says it with some humor and pathos, After all, remember we are all in this—alone!
If we feel lonely and isolated for longer times, we can suffer some medical consequences from that. Psychologist James Lynch has written two books over the past twenty years about the medical consequences of chronic loneliness. He says people can die of a broken heart. He says that if we suffer from chronic loneliness, our blood pressure will change for the worse, our bodies will be more susceptible to illness, and we die sooner! His recent book about this is, A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness.
There are other stories in scripture about loneliness. We talked a couple of weeks ago about the prophet Elijah, the prophet that people mistake Jesus for, and the Hebrew prophet who is still expected at every Passover meal celebrated each year by our Jewish friends and neighbors. Each year they leave an empty chair and plate at the table for Elijah.
Elijah has just successfully been the instrument to defeat several hundred pagan prophets. God’s power has been shown 800 years or so before Jesus. He is on the run because his life is in danger and he goes to Mt. Sinai to hide in a cave, alone. There he tells God how lonely and depressed he feels; he is ready to give up. And God appears to him, not in the fire or in the earthquake or the tornado, but God appears in a still, small voice, in the sound of a crushed silence. And Elijah is comforted.
The second chapter of Genesis tells us that it is not good for humans to be alone. We are created to be in relationship. We need each other for life to be full and complete. We need friends and coworkers. We need each other.
Jesus says that when two or three are gathered together, he will be with us. Christ is always with us-Emmanuel (God with us), but we can especially see Christ in each other and there is really no such thing, John Wesley said, as a solitary Christian.
How do we help bridge the loneliness challenge? Last September, my father in law died and Judy’s mother is now alone after sixty nine years of marriage. She is lonely. Judy calls her every day; I do that once a week as well. Some days Judy’s conversation with her is her only conversation that day. Our church has care teams to reach out to people who are alone but there are still many who just need a friend and a caring voice on a regular basis. Our Stephen Ministry program is always available with caring and well trained lay care givers.
It is not good for these human beings to be alone, says the creator. Loneliness is the first thing declared bad in the book of Genesis. And part of our purpose as a community of faith, (community has the same root word as communion), is to be the hands and feet of Christ for each other.
I have taken the opportunity, a couple of times a week, to walk out on the construction site to pray, to see the progress and to greet and thank the construction workers. I have thanked them each time for their work, and recently two or three of them have said in response, thank you for letting us work! We need to hear the affirmation in that phrase when the unemployment rate in the construction industry is 25%!! So, together we are not only building a structure that will serve and touch and help thousands of people over the next hundred years, we are providing meaningful work for people who would not otherwise work. I find that humbling.
Something else happened to me on the construction site last Wednesday. I had a chance, for the first time ever, to stand on the floor of the new gathering area, the welcoming space, where we will greet each other as we enter the new building. Here is what I prayed for. I prayed that all the people who enter and walk in that space will feel community, communion, connection and belonging, the relationships that God intends for us, that God has created each of us for.
Let me ask you to think about a lonely time in your life. Can you still sense the spirit of God with you even in that difficult time, perhaps sense that through others? What does that mean for you as you think about others who may be lonely right now? Who do you think of who is alone and needs you and others to be the hands and heart and feet of Jesus Christ? What do you sense God leading you to do about that?