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 Shoffner
Easter 6, April 27, 2008
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