Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 05.05.13
Scripture Lesson: John 14:23-29
Be a non-anxious presence, they tell you in seminary.
Which is funny, because of all of the folks I know, few are more anxious and stressed out than pastors. They’re rushing from meeting to meeting, worried about their life-balance, and lamenting the sorry state of their sermon on Facebook at 11:47 pm on a Saturday night.
Being non-anxious is easier said than done, particularly in a culture that lives and breathes stress and tension. We do, of course. Anxiety is central to our society, woven into the very fabric of our life together.
Because being at ease and comfortable with ourselves simply won’t do. We need to be continually comparing ourselves to others, worrying that our house isn’t large enough or that we aren’t thin enough or that our smartphone didn’t do well enough on the SATs. We need to stay hungry and tense and uncertain, because that keeps us motivated.
A survey released this week by the National Journal revealed just how deeply that tension runs. Americans have legendarily been an optimistic people, driven and certain that their manifest destiny was to strive and succeed in a never-ending march of progress. We’re all can-do and stick-to-it, a nation of self-confident strivers and achievers.
But the last few years haven’t been quite so gentle to many of us, as the National Journal Heartland poll revealed. Mixed in with our hopefulness was an equal portion of gnawing doubt about our futures.
For most of us, there was worry. That great swath of the American middle class isn’t exactly brimming over with positive vibes about the future. A significant majority of us think we have less opportunity to get ahead than we did a generation ago, that there’s less job and financial security than there was a generation ago, and that we have to push harder to make ends meet.
Paying for college and having enough savings to weather a financial storm? The majority of folks surveyed viewed that as something that only the rich could manage.
The American Dream, increasingly, seems to involve us walking through a door and finding ourselves standing in front of Congress, where we have to deliver the State of the Union address, only we’re not prepared and we’re only wearing our tighty whiteys.
Us? Stressed? Really? Anyone see the picture of that girl from the Jamestown colony this last week? It’s pretty rare that archaeological news makes the headlines, but the discovery of her four hundred year old remains confirmed, for the first time, that early American colonists resorted to eating one another in times of crisis. Our stress would make sense if things with us were as they were in that colony during that Starving Time, that period between 1609 and 1610 when the first US colony went from a community of 500 to a community of 60.
Things are not anywhere near that bad. Hopefully. Although if you find anyone unusually interested in making sure you eat a few more donuts at the fellowship hour, I’d be a little careful.
This is strange, because by all rights, we should be happy. Here we’ve been blessed with a land that provides enough food to feed not just ourselves, but much of the rest of the world. There are more than enough homes out there for everyone. We have an abundance, a great overflowing cornucopia of possessions unmatched in human history, and yet we’re still afraid of what tomorrow will bring.
Nonetheless, we remain terrified of what might happen. We are so busy scrambling and holding on to what we have that we can forget to enjoy it. We are so worried about what tomorrow might bring that today itself becomes nothing.
As we move into the fourteenth chapter of John’s Gospel this morning, it is that fear that Jesus is challenging in his disciples. Things are coming to a close for John’s story of the life and teachings of Jesus, and they aren’t trending particularly well.
In the previous chapter, Jesus first washes the feet of his disciples, and then warns them that he is soon to be betrayed by one of them. It was at just about this moment that Judas Iscariot remembered he needed to get something at the store.
Beginning in chapter 13 verse 31, Jesus starts talking. It’s the beginning of what is called John’s Farewell Discourse, perhaps the biggest hunk of Jesus-teaching in the entire New Testament. It runs all the way through the end of chapter 17, as we’re presented with an extended expression of what Jesus views as most important to pass along to those who had gathered around him.
What he offers them, first and foremost, are words of comfort. Why? Because he has just told them that he expects to be betrayed, and that he will soon no longer be with them.
He does so in the obscure, circuitous language of this Gospel, with phrases like:
“On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them...”
“OK, wait, now, I’m in...and they who...and you...um....OK.” But in that whirl of concepts, the idea gets across. He is leaving.
So to calm the hearts of his disciples, Jesus speaks words of comfort to them. He also makes them a promise.
What he is promises them he calls the Advocate. It’s the promise that the message that he has offered them will never be separate from them, never distant. John’s Gospel, along with Luke, focuses on the presence of the Spirit.
In the face of all of the troubling, challenging, and nail-biting anxieties handed us by this world, we are reminded in this passage that what Jesus offers is different. Faith is different. It’s not grasping. It’s not feeling driven by anxiety over what you might have or not have. It’s not being driven by concern that you’re not meeting standards, or terror over losing something.
It’s a different thing altogether.
Grounded in the Spirit, faith guides us to approach everything around us differently. It guides us to view our interaction with the material things around us differently.
The world does give, here and there. Sometimes it gives in abundance, sometimes we find ourselves struggling to get by. Sometimes we have exactly that thing we want, but then what the world around us tells us is that that thing is not enough. We need more. We need what that other guy has, the newest, the shiniest, the latest and the best.
It’s not enough. It can never be. It is not meant to ever be enough.
And when that way of viewing things becomes the way we view people, our anxiety only deepens. We hold onto them, tightly and desperately. We approach relationships with a hunger...not a Jamestown hunger, hopefully...but a hunger nonetheless. Our fears, of being unloved, of being abandoned, of being
What the Spirit gives instead is comfort. Guided by God’s grace, we no longer view our possessions as something that drives us. Instead, we remember, as Christ taught in the Sermon on the Mount, that worry can devour us. Worry takes a potentially joyful moment and turns it sour. Worry turns us in on ourselves, and prevents us from either experiencing joy or sharing it. A heart guided by the Spirit finds joy not in grasping or controlling, but in giving and supporting.
But how does that work? Oh, sure, it’s good to say it, but the actual doing of it is sometimes beyond us. Our fear of loss is so strong.
And for the disciples, faced with the imminent absence of the human being they’d oriented their whole lives towards, that anxiety would have run deep. What will we do now?
What Jesus was reminding them, gently, was that the gift of the Spirit is not like other gifts. It isn’t a thing. It’s the presence of God’s own spirit, the creative and loving power that sustains and creates all things. If that is present in us, then we cannot lose anything or any one, any more than God can lose anything or anyone.
And with that knowledge, fear has no place in our hearts.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
No comments:
Post a Comment