Throughout the period of Lent,
we did a sermon series called “Let’s Give It Up!” We looked at various feelings and attitudes
that we need to give up, not just for Lent, but for all of our lives if we’re
going to be the people God wants us to be.
But of course, this is Easter! Lent is over!
And of course, it is. But there’s
still one more thing I want to talk about in terms of giving things up. One thing we need to give up is loneliness.
And you say, but what does that have to do with
Easter? Easter is a day of celebration! Easter
is the tomb is empty! Easter is He is
risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Easter is a day of joy! What does
Easter have to do with loneliness?
That’s why I love the resurrection story from the gospel
of Mark. All the other gospels tell us
about Jesus appearing to the disciples and about some of the things he did and
said to them. And we’re going to talk
about that stuff in our next sermon series, “The After Party”, which starts
next week.
But Mark does
not have any of that. Mark leaves the
story just where we left it in our Bible reading today. Let me read the last verse again. “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out
and fled from the tomb. They said
nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.”
Mark does not tell us what happens next.
And that’s a reminder to us that the disciples did not know what was
going to happen next. In fact, the
disciples did not know that anything was going to happen next.
Imagine how
the disciples felt when Jesus died.
Sad. Disappointed. Confused.
Scared. All of those things. But I think they must have also felt very
lonely. Jesus had been their
leader. Jesus was the one who they’d
been counting on. Jesus had decided
where they were going to go and what they were going to do. Yes, they still had each other, but remember,
who the disciples were. They were a
really diverse group of people. They
came from all walks of life. Most of
them really had nothing in common with each other, other than their love for
Jesus. And now he was gone.
If Jesus had
not come back, I suspect they would’ve simply scattered. They’d have had nowhere to go, really. They could’ve tried to go back to their home
towns, back to their old ways of life, but they’d been gone for years. You ever try to go back to someplace or
something after you’ve been gone a while?
It’s never the same. Everything’s
changed. The buildings, the people, all
of it. There’s a reason we have the
saying “You can’t go home again.” They’d
have been at loose ends. Who could they
have talked to about all this? Who
would’ve understood all the things they’d been through with Jesus? There’d have been no one, no one who
understood and probably no one who cared anyway. I think the disciples would’ve felt very lost
and very alone. And I think that’s what
they were already feeling after Jesus died, when they did not know what, if
anything, was going to happen next.
Have you ever
felt that way? Have you ever felt lost
and alone? Have you ever felt like no
one understood and no one cared anyway?
Have you ever felt like you had nowhere to go and no one to turn to?
Now,
understand, I’m not talking about people who are alone by choice. There are people who like spending time by
themselves, and that’s fine. Nothing
wrong with it. In fact, when I’m talking
about feeling alone, I’m not necessarily talking about whether we have people
around us. We can be in the middle of a
huge crowd of people and still feel alone.
In fact, we can be surrounded by family and still feel alone. Feeling alone sometimes has nothing to do
with whether there are people around us.
Feeling alone means that we have no one we can really be honest
with. It means we have no one we can
really reveal ourselves to. It means we
feel like we have no one in our lives who will be there when we need them. When we’re talking about loneliness, we’re
talking about feeling that no one understands us and that no one wants to
understand us. It’s a feeling that no
one knows what we’re going through and no one would care if they did know. And it’s about as bad a feeling as there is.
So how do we
go about giving that feeling up? How do
we give up loneliness, not just for Lent, but for our lives?
Well, it’s not
easy. If it was easy, we’d do it. The temptation, when you’re preaching a
sermon, is to say “Pray about it. Ask
Jesus to come into your heart.” And I do
think that’s a good thing to do. But a
lot of times it’s just not that simple.
We can believe in God and pray for the Lord’s guidance and all that and
still feel really alone.
The thing is
that when we feel alone, it’s really hard to open ourselves up to anyone. We feel, again, like nobody would really care
anyway. And besides, we feel like everyone
else has their life pretty much together, and that we’re the only ones who are
struggling. When we feel alone, it feels
like a huge risk to open up to anyone and ask for help.
That’s why we
have a prayer emphasis on people who feel alone. That’s why I’ve asked you to not just pray
for people who feel alone, but to pray that God will help us help them. That’s why I’ve asked you to pray that God
will give us eyes that will see people who feel alone and hearts that want to
help. Because the only way people can
give up loneliness is if they find people who love them and care about
them. And the people who are supposed to
do that are the people in the church.
That’s one of the things Jesus was talking about when he told us to love
our neighbors as ourselves.
And I think
that’s one of the reasons Jesus appeared to the disciples. So that they would know that they were not
alone, that he was still with them. I’m
not saying that’s the only reason. The
resurrected Jesus needed to appear so people would know he had risen from the
dead, that it was not a case of his body being stolen or something. And it made sense that he would appear to his
followers. But I also think part of it
was so his disciples would know that they were not alone. The resurrected Jesus appeared to his
disciples so they would know he was still with them and he always would
be. Even if he could no longer be with
them physically, he would still be with them in spirit. The last words of Matthew’s gospel are, “I am
with you always, to the very end of the age.”
The disciples could give up their loneliness. They did not have to feel alone.
And that’s our
job, too—to help people give up their loneliness. To let people know they don’t have to feel
alone. It’s not an easy thing to
do. For one thing, no one is likely to
come up to us and say, “I feel alone”. If
anything, people try to hide their feelings of loneliness. We have to really pay attention. A lot of times, we have to be looking for
people who feel alone in order to see them.
And that
requires something of us. To help people
give up loneliness, we have to give up some things, too. We have to give up our time. We have to give up our focus on doing the
things we want to do. That’s not to say
the things we want to do are bad things, but we’ll have to give some of them up
if we’re going to help people give up loneliness. We have to give up our focus on ourselves and
turn our focus toward others. It is so
easy to fail at that. I do it all the
time.
But if we do
it, we’ll gain more than we give up.
We’ll gain all kinds of things.
We’ll gain friends. We’ll gain
the satisfaction of knowing we’ve helped someone. We’ll gain the joy of knowing we’re serving
God and doing God’s will. We’ll gain
love in our hearts. Sometimes, we even
gain the knowledge that we’ve brought someone to God. And if you’ve ever had any of those feelings, you know they are about
as good a feelings as there are.
Mark’s gospel
leaves the disciples feeling sad, disappointed, confused, scared, and lonely. But Jesus did not leave them that way. Jesus came back. He rose from the dead and appeared to the
disciples. And they knew they would
never have to be lonely again.
And neither do
we. If we all love each other and care
for each other the way God wants us to, if we all pray for God’s love to come
into our hearts, and if we are all willing to open our eyes and open our hearts
to see each other’s needs and to be there for each other, no one in our parish
will ever have to be lonely again. We
can all give up loneliness, not just for Lent, but for all our lives. If we do that, we will be loving our
neighbors the way Jesus told us to. I
don’t think there’s a better way we could honor the risen, living Jesus than
that.
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