SERMON: “I Will Not Leave You
Orphaned”
John 14:15-21
As we
celebrate these fifty days of Easter with joyous hosannas and ringing
alleluias, we benefit from hindsight. We anticipate the Day of Pentecost
and have the witness of the New Testament concerning the events which
followed. But what of Mary, John, Thomas, Peter, Mary Magdalene, and the
others in those confusing days following the Resurrection?
They had
experienced something miraculous, something that changed them forever.
Yet times were uncertain; many had called Jesus a crazy blasphemer. How
could they risk inciting the authorities by spreading the incredulous story of
a resurrection or by testifying to post-burial sightings of a man presumed
dead?
As we know from the Gospels, Jesus had tried to prepare his
followers for his death and its glorious aftermath. But in their
simplicity and humanity, perhaps they denied the implications of his words or
misinterpreted the message in an effort to protect themselves from the
eventuality of life without his presence and example. Had Jesus left
them behind to struggle with belief, questioning the meaning of their own
experiences? How were they to persevere and ultimately find purpose in
it all?
Huddled together, wondering what could possibly
happen next, there must’ve been long days and nights of utter
bewilderment. Had they witnessed this miracle only to be abandoned by
the one for whom they had given up everything? As time wore on,
undoubtedly they began to console one another by recalling the teacher's
words, words that had mystified them at the time of hearing. Now, in the
retelling, slowly they may have begun to remember how Jesus had prepared them
for what was to come. In their grief and uncertainty, perhaps they found
comfort in the master's promise: “I will not leave you orphaned.” [John
14:18]
But still they must’ve wondered. Will it be possible to
love and follow Jesus now that he has gone? We pose the same question:
Is it possible for us?
At times when it seems as if the living
presence of Christ has gone into hiding or when, heartbroken, we question why
bad things happen, we, too, struggle with issues of abandonment. How are
we to go on and ultimately make sense of it all? When the bedrock of our
faith undergoes a seismic shift, we may wonder if we will ever again stand on
the firm ground of belief.
It is in such desert places of the soul that
we, like the disciples, cling to the promise: “I will not leave you
orphaned.”
In March, as I was reflecting on this passage,
coincidentally, or perhaps not so coincidentally, we rented the movie God
Grew Tired of Us, a documentary about the Lost Boys of Sudan. This
true story speaks volumes about the plight of the orphaned and about man’s
inhumanity to man. But it also offers some compelling evidence of God’s
never-failing presence.
In 1987 the Muslim government of northern
Sudan, involved in a bloody civil war with the Christian south, ordered all
male children in the south to be killed or sterilized. Villages were
overrun and destroyed, their inhabitants the victims of wholesale
slaughter. Those boys who could, fled into the countryside, separated
from families, lost in unfamiliar territory, starving, disease-ridden and
haunted by the unspeakable horrors they had witnessed. Slowly, over
time, they found one another and came together in a seemingly unending line of
desolate, abandoned children. These boys, most between the ages of five
and ten, made their way across Africa to a United Nations refugee camp in
Ethiopia.
Later in 1991, because of violent political unrest in
Ethiopia, these same boys began another trek back through Sudan to Kenya where
aid organizations had set up a relief camp on the border. All in all,
the children who survived the marches walked over 1,000 miles. Of the
27,000 who left Ethiopia for Kenya, only 12,000 survived.
In the film,
one of the survivors, speaking of his experience and shaking his head sadly,
says, “No parents, no anybody to take care of us.”
During
the marches, in their desperate longing for human connection, these little
fellows gradually allied themselves into makeshift family groups–looking to
the older or taller boys as father figures. These family “patriarchs,”
most not yet in their teens, carried starving little ones in their arms for
mile after weary mile, cradled the emaciated and dying, and then, as they
could, buried the dead.
John, one of the now-grown survivors, speaks of
his experience: “It was as if it was the last day–as people in the Bible
say–that there will be a last day. It was as if it was the last day that
Jesus Christ will come–whatever on earth will be judged. That was my
imagination.
“I thought that God felt tired of people on earth
here. Felt tired of bad deeds, tired of the bad thing we are
doing. Yet God is watching. I thought God got tired of us.
He want to finish us. When I think of it back, it was so bad
anyways. You can even regret why you were born, why you were
born.”
These experiences heighten our understanding of the term
orphan. Where was God when their families were slaughtered in
front of them? When they marched, thirsty and starving, to an unknown
destination? When death became commonplace?
The movie focuses on
a group of young adults from the relief camp in Kenya, who were sponsored by
various religious organizations to further their education in the United
States in the hope they could return one day to help their
country. Commenting about this opportunity, one of them says: “Now
I wonder, I’m now again wearing clothes and feeling very happy, and so anyway,
everything has an end. Has an end. Even if there’s a problem in
Sudan, still maybe one time, one day, one minute, it will come to an
end. We really suffer. People have hope in me, so it will be bad
for me to fail them.”
Such a small light at the end of a very long,
dark tunnel.
“I will not leave you orphaned.” God had most
definitely not grown tired of them. In Sudan, for these boys,
God’s presence came through the efforts of aid workers, funding organizations
and the compassion of volunteers around the globe. It was evident in the
flicker of life that compelled them to march one more day and, then, yet one
more. It came very personally in their refusal to deny love as they
attached themselves to one another in their family groups. It shone in
their glowing eyes as they fondly addressed one another as “brother.”
Grace was present in the tears shed and in the restorative bond of shared
laughter. A spark of the sacred lived in each little boy. They
were not orphaned. God was with them all along–in each torturous step,
each broken heart, each glimmer of hope.
“I will not leave you
orphaned.” Some scholars translate this sentence as “I will not
leave you desolate” or “comfortless.”
Most of us have never literally
been orphaned, but which of us has not felt desolate or comfortless at one
time or another? In the darkness–grieving, anxious, hurting, alone–we
may whimper “Oh, God, where are you? Why can’t I find you?”
When
we lose the familiar, the dear, the beloved, we seem cast adrift in a sea of
doubt, questioning the truths we have always assumed would buoy us at such
times. This is the crucible of faith–what do we believe when the rubber
hits the road, when times are tougher than we ever imagined?
We learn
from the disciples, from the Sudanese orphans, and from our own experience,
that it is especially in the most difficult of circumstances that we find
God. Jesus assures us: “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 and reveal myself to them.” [John 14:21]
The message is
profound: So long as we love one another and the father loves us, we are not
orphans
We cannot expect God to work in our human time frame. We
are to live in love and maintain the long view. As the young survivor of
the march reminds us, “Everything has an end. Has an end.”
God
grant that we may keep his commandments, knowing that through love, we are
never left comfortless. We have a
father.
AMEN.
Laura
ShoffnerEaster 6, April 27,
2008Return to St.
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