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Clyde Fant, a Baptist pastor, tells about a trip he once took with his grandfather, about how, when he was sixteen years old, he and his grandfather traveled together across the United States. Their trip began in New York, where his grandfather had landed as an immigrant many years before when he was a boy. They walked across Pennsylvania and on into the Midwest, finding work where they could and spending the night wherever someone would take them in. They slept in a dugout in Kansas and spent the night with an Indian chief in Oklahoma. They swam the White River and watched snakes fall from trees. And they worked for a time rebuilding a seawall in Galveston, the one that was washed away by the hurricane.
Fant says that his grandfather was going on this trip for the thousandth time, in his mind, since he first made the trip when he was sixteen. And Clyde was going for the first time, in his mind, because he had time to listen. And because his grandfather needed to make this trip again, and because he had no one else to take the trip with him, and because his grandmother was dead and the children had all grown up and moved away and his grandfather was lonely and needed Clyde to take the trip with him. And Clyde had time.
Fant told this story in a sermon about loneliness, about what a widespread and largely undiagnosed illness loneliness is. Loneliness, he explains, is not just the absence of people around oneself, or even the absence of friends, though friends are terribly important. And loneliness is not solitude, which can be therapeutic for the spirit. Loneliness is knowing things that are deeply meaningful to you which you feel, rightly or wrongly, you cannot communicate to others. Loneliness is knowing things that are deeply meaningful to you which you want to share, but which you can only hint at at best, because others do not know what you know and because, for the most part, you feel they do not care to know.
Carson McCullers knows what such loneliness is. In her fine novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter there are five characters, all bound together by life in a small Southern town. Each character is searching for what is most important to him; each wants to communicate to the others what is deeply meaningful to him, but no one hears or understands what the others hear.
There is a deaf-mute, who grieves because his only friend, also deaf and mute, has been taken from him and sent to an asylum. There is a political radical, who can get no one to share his urgency about economic justice. There is an old black doctor, who can find no one to share his urgency about racial justice. And there is a young girl, who has no one to understand her love of music or the pain of growing up.
But all the others are drawn to the deaf-mute, who is friendly to everyone and can read lips, and who seems to listen to the others. And, perhaps because he cannot talk, each of the others interprets his silence and smile as understanding. So all the others have found at least one person who seems to know and affirm what they hold important and meaningful, one person who seems to understand and care about what they understand and care about. Or at least they believe he does.
But actually he doesn’t. His silence is merely his way of being patient with them. He is simply grieving for his lost friend and does not wish to be impolite. And they are all shocked when, in his lonely grief, he commits suicide. And they are all alone again, each with his own heart’s lonely search.
Loneliness, John Milton observed, is “the first thing which God’s eye named not good.” God created the heavens and the earth, and when he was finished he looked at what he had created and saw that it was good. But God looked at the man he had created, and he saw that it was not good that the man should be alone. So he created woman to be a partner suitable for him, because, by himself, the man would be lonely. And ever since then, we human beings have searched for each other, and God searches for us, because, by ourselves, we are lonely and we need each other, because loneliness is “the first thing God’s eye named not good.”
Sin, in great part, is all the destructive things we human beings do that ensure our loneliness, all the destructive things that build walls between us and God and the destructive things that build walls among all of us, and secure our loneliness.
We do it in many ways in Fant’s recounting. The spirit of possessiveness is one. “It’s mine! It’s my tricycle, and you can’t ride it.” It’s one of the earliest things we learn in life, the difference between mine and thine. It’s my house, my car, my success, my life.
Closely related to possessiveness is the modern American idol of individualism, a supermarket mentality of shopping for what I want regardless of cost, whether in the grocery store or the automobile dealer or the church. A car for every person, no matter that the freeways are jammed already. A church that feeds me; what others might need is their business.
On the heels of possessiveness and individualism is the spirit of independence, or self-reliance. “That’s what made this country great! Don’t depend on others. To hell with others. You don’t need them anyway. You can do it yourself. Stand tall, keep a stiff upper lip, and go it alone.”
Tagging along with the others is the spirit of competitiveness. “The only thing that counts is winning, being number one! You’re in a race to see who can get to the top. Second place is for losers. You have to make the most of your own life, and if that means leaving behind people who have come to depend on you, well, that’s just too bad.”
So the walls between us grow. And despite God’s creation of us for each other and for himself, we are lonely. Deep inside us there are things that are profoundly important to us which we want to share, but because of the walls we have built we cannot communicate those important things, or at least we feel we cannot do so. Deep down we all have things that are meaningful to us which others do not know and which, for the most part, we do not sense they care to know. And so we hint, and we spar with each other, and we do not share the deepest parts of ourselves.
Pastors, like others, know the pain of such loneliness. In his book Who Needs God, Rabbi Harold Kushner confesses his. “I love the religious tradition out of which I come,” he says, “and I love the several hundred members of the congregation I serve. And the enduring frustration of my rabbinic [ministry] has been my inability to get my two loves to find and love each other.”
Kushner explains how religion is a cure for human loneliness. The word itself tells us that. “Religion,” from the same Latin root as the word “ligament.” It means “to bind together.” Religion is meant to bind us to the people around us. Like family. “Religion is not only a set of statements about God. Religion is also the community, the family through which we learn what it means to be human and by which we are reinforced in our efforts to do what we believe is right.”
True religion, Kushner adds, offers us community, the opportunity to love and to serve. It leads us to relate to each other, not as objects but as persons.
False religion teaches us to see others as objects. When we see other people merely as objects, they are there simply for what they can do for us. They are only objects for our use, the objects who shovel our walks, the objects who sell us a newspaper or satisfy our sexual urges. They can be easily replaced, and increasingly are, by vending machines or robots. It is a lonely way of living. There is no way to share what is meaningful with a vending machine or robot, with an object.
True religion leads us to what Martin Buber called “I-Thou” relationships. It calls us to see other people not as objects that are there to satisfy our needs or desires, but to see others as God sees them, to see them as persons who themselves have needs and desires that we can help meet and satisfy. True religion offers us the opportunity to respond to the needs and desires of others, an opportunity to respond lovingly to others in a way that creates relationships and, in doing so, replaces loneliness, our own loneliness and the loneliness of others, with bonds of companionship and love and with ways to share with each other those things that are deeply meaningful in our lives.
“[True religion] offers us a vision of the world where people no longer condemn themselves to loneliness by seeing all other people as rivals. It offers us a place to which we can bring our whole selves, not just that part of ourselves that we bring to our jobs and our hobbies. [True religion offers us] a place where we can encounter the whole selves of our neighbors in a way we cannot meet them anywhere else.” It calls us to love them the way we love ourselves. That’s the tradition Kushner loves.
But in life around him, he often sees something quite different. He sees a false religion that teaches us to try to use God, to try to push God’s buttons so that God will give us what we want, to try to bribe God with pious actions and flattering words. He sees a false religion that teaches us to go to church or synagogue only for what we can get out of it instead of for what we can add to it, a false religion that allows us to continue seeing each other as objects across the room rather than as a community we can be a living part of. He sees a false religion where love is measured by “what I can get from him or her,” rather than by how much more caring I can become in another’s presence, a false religion where worship is sometimes like the family of four he once saw in a fast-food establishment. There sat mother and father and two teenagers, all chewing on their hamburgers, “each listening to a transistor radio with a set of earphones on, not one of them saying a word to anyone else, each totally in his or her own world.”
No one knows the pain of loneliness more than Jesus. Today we travel with Jesus as he takes a trip he has taken before, in his mind and in his heart. Together with Jesus we walk with Joshua and our forefathers through the Red Sea, fleeing the arrows of Pharaoh. We struggle with our ancestors through the wilderness where we lose our way, and where the water is bitter and food scarce. We are rescued by the Lord who sends a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day to guide us, and who gives us water to drink and manna to eat. We are attacked by marauders and escape by the skin of our teeth only because the Lord intervenes in the nick of time. Finally we cross the Jordan into Canaan, into a land flowing with milk and honey.
In his mind and in his heart, Jesus listens again to Joshua’s great speech as Joshua recounts our journey together. Jesus hears Joshua remind the people how it was the Lord who had brought them out of slavery and led them into freedom in Canaan, how the Lord had displayed great signs before their eyes and guarded them in the wilderness, and how the Lord drove out before them the Amorites and all the peoples who would block their way. And once again we hear Joshua say, “Now you must make a choice. Are you going to serve the Lord, who has been your salvation, your food, and your very life? Or will you serve these other gods the world makes available to you?” And Jesus hears the people say, “We will serve the Lord.”
But they don’t. And, in his mind and in his heart, Jesus continues the journey on the other side of the Jordan. He remembers how, even in the Promised Land, we forgot the Lord and did not follow him, and how we served alien gods. And he recalls all the bitterness and pain and grief that came from it. Once again he hears us cry out in our loneliness. He watches us depart into lonely exile in Babylon where we are cut off from each other and God, and from the land God had given us. And once again Jesus hears us cry out for the Lord not to desert us the way we deserted him.
And, in his mind, Jesus remembers that we have all just traveled together on this present trip to the Sea of Galilee where, just a few days ago, he fed us with bread and fish when we were hungry. And we all ate and were satisfied. And he speaks to us at Capernaum today and tells us that the bread we really need is bread that endures for life. And once again he tells us that he is the bread of life, he himself, and again he offers us his body and blood for our journey. He will always be with us to feed and sustain us, he says, just as the Lord fed and sustained us in the wilderness, if only we will receive him.
And, in his mind, Jesus again sees us recoil in horror. He hears us murmur and grumble about what he is saying, and he watches us turn away and begin to leave, just as we turned away from the Lord in Canaan.
And as Jesus tells his disciples about the bread of heaven, his mind also races forward to the trip he will be taking later, after he leaves Capernaum. In his mind, he and his disciples, and all the people, enter Jerusalem. And there he watches as, once again, we all fall away when it becomes clear that he is heading not to the seat of power, but toward the hill of crucifixion, to Calvary. And, alone, he walks up the hill. And he crosses the Jordan of the Cross, alone, hoping the people he loves will follow him into the land of freedom and life.
And here today in Capernaum, as he takes this trip for the thousandth time in his mind, Jesus asks us, “Will you also go away? Will you come and search with me for truth and life? Will you come with me into the community of people who love each other, and who live to serve each other and, if necessary, to die for one another? Or will you go away again to other gods, to the gods of the Amorites and Perizzites, to the gods of magic and fantasy? Will you go away again to the false gods of individualism and competitiveness and possessiveness, to the loneliness of life with alien gods who do not satisfy? And Jesus hears Peter echo the words of the people in Joshua’s day, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We will stick with you.”
But Jesus fears that they have ears but do not hear, that they have eyes but do not see. He knows that when he speaks to them about the bread of life which can sustain them across the Jordan of the Cross, Peter and the disciples are thinking about bread for their stomachs, about the miracles he performed, about false religions and the loneliness of life lived for self, about gods that do not satisfy.
They do not hear, because they do not want to hear, what is most deeply important to Jesus -- that he wants to heal their loneliness, that he wants to give himself, that he wants to share with them the truth about real life, that he wants to feed them food that will endure so they can walk the way of love and companionship God created them for.
“You don’t need miracles,” he says. “What you need is each other, and your Father. I come to bring you the life he created you for, so that you can feed the world. I pour out my blood for you, so that you may live and pour out yours for each other.”
But life such as that pointed to things they did not care for. It points to concern for others, and to thoughtfulness and sacrifice. So we begin to go away and to leave Jesus alone, alone with the knowledge of what was most deeply meaningful to him, alone with his truth.
My God, my God, am I to make this journey all alone! Jesus was the loneliest person who ever lived because he knew the truth about life and about God, a truth he wanted urgently to share with those around him, but which, for the most part, those around him did not want to know.
And in the end, they all abandoned him. All but One. All but the One who raised him to life, the One who never uses us to meet his own needs but who is always there to comfort, to strengthen, to feed, to love, and to build up. He is the God of sacrificial love who promises to heal our loneliness by giving us himself and each other, if only, when we come to his Table today, we will take the earphones out of our ears and share the companionship the meal is meant to be.
Like the trip Clyde Fant took with his grandfather, Jesus’ trip is a trip we can share, if we want to. And he asks again today, “Will you come with me? Or will you also go away, alone?”
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |