April 7, 2024
Second Sunday of Easter
Good morning, Seekers Family. I did not expect that I would be giving a sermon here again, yet here I am. Further proof that I do not see the future this is. The topic that I want to speak about and the scriptures I want to use are both Easter related, so when this date was open and just one week after Easter, I signed up. I am thinking that someone listening today needs to hear this message. In any event, I want to share it.
Resurrecting Faith is our current theme. My theme is a subset of that, how do we awaken spiritually and how can we establish conscious contact with God? My own spiritual awakening took place as a direct result of practicing a 12-step program. By the time I “hit bottom,” I was spiritually bankrupt. I had tried to fill the hole in my soul with alcohol and drugs. I did not understand that only God could fill it. Others try to fill their holes with a variety of mind-altering things also, like gambling, sex, shopping, watching tv, overwork, and so on. None of these things work. Only through utter defeat and surrender, an acceptance of my personal powerlessness, was I able to take my first steps toward liberation.
I had the usual roadblocks to faith: Indifference, fancied self-sufficiency, prejudice, and defiance. I had to reconsider or die. I needed humility, I needed reliance not defiance, I needed to conform my will to God’s will and quit telling God what their will should be. I needed an open mind to open the door to faith. I had to decide to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. This was a tough decision even though it was death versus faith. Yet it was self-will that was blocking me the entry of God. Having made the decision to seek God’s will and not my own, I found other things that were blocking me from God. Vengeful resentments, self-pity, and unwarranted pride blocked the entry of God as sis fear, shame, and self-loathing. A complete overhaul was necessary. It is like there were many things blocking the channel through which God’s love could flow to me. I understood the problem as like the current problem in the port of Baltimore. There were submerged issues clogging the way so nothing could flow in or out. I had to take inventory of which of my instincts had gotten out of control, confess to God and another human being the exact nature of my wrongs, forgive those who had hurt me, and seek to make amends to those I had hurt. I needed to pray and meditate daily as well as take a daily inventory of myself. As a result, I had a spiritual awakening. I received a daily reprieve of my disease contingent upon the maintenance of my spiritual condition. I became conscious of the presence of God in a way that I had never done before. The terrible loneliness was lifted as I became aware of God’s presence and had conscious contact with them. But we can interrupt this awareness and that brings me to today’s reflection.
The scripture that I have reflected on is found in both Matthew (Matt 27:45) and Mark (Mark 15:34) as well as foreshadowed in Psalm 22 (Psalm 22:1). Mathhew and Mark tell us that on the cross and dying, Jesus uttered the heart-wrenching cry “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is an astonishing cry and there is much to note about this. Let us look at this together.
First, notice that Jesus does not call God “father” as he usually does. His choice of words further emphasizes the distance he feels. He is all alone, or at least feeling all alone, when he faces his death. Yet, who among us has not felt this aloneness, this “dark night of the soul”? Why is he saying this? What is the meaning?
A little digression. I have often wondered how Jesus experienced emotions. I learned in recovery that emotions are part of being human. We cannot control our feelings or emotions, but we can control our actions. I have often wondered whether Jesus had all the emotions that humans have. In fact, the bible stories in which Jesus showed emotion are among my favorites. For example, when Jesus was a child, and he followed his own call to go to the temple in Jerusalem without telling Mary and Joseph what he was doing. He acted like a rebel rather than joining his parents in the return to Nazareth. Or when Jesus threw the moneychangers out of the temple, he was so mad. Or when he wept at the death of Lazarus. Jesus seemed most “human” to me when he felt what I sometimes feel.
Other people feel the same way about identifying with Jesus’ humanity. One recent example occurred for me involving my grandson. I talked to him about Jesus and my faith. My grandson has attended church several times. Yet, my grandson told me that he was attracted more by the Greek Gods than by Jesus. His reasoning? That the Greek Gods were clearly flawed, indulging their emotions just like us, while Jesus was perfect. He wanted a God with whom he could identify, not a perfect Being. Writing this sermon, I became aware that Jesus also had emotions like we do. Now to revisit this with my grandson
But I digress, back now to the sense of abandonment Jesus felt on the cross. Jesus felt all the “negative” emotions that man has I assume because he was betrayed, abandoned, excluded, mocked, physically abused, marginalized and so on.
Was Jesus crying out based on emotion? Or was he having a “dark night of the soul”? I investigated and quickly ruled out the dark night hypothesis. Why? Because the dark night of the soul as used by the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, describes a passive purification of the spirit during mystical development. According to St. John, the dark night represents a transformative journey or passage through darkness toward a deeper understanding and union with the divine. Jesus is divine and did not need purification of the spirit. It must be something else that caused Jesus to cry out.
Perhaps Jesus felt a more ordinary variety of feeling the sudden absence of God. One personal example of feeling the sudden absence of God occurred for me following the presidential election of 2016. I went to bed thinking I would wake up to find that we had elected the first woman president. We had not. What had happened? Was God asleep? Where did he go?
Another example of when I felt that God had abandoned me occurred about 6 years ago. I was running on a track in Eugene, Oregon. I left the track having run several miles, only to trip and fall on my way to the parking lot. I had fallen before, but this time I did it “wrong” and broke my wrist. The pain was so intense that I passed out. After surgery, the pain was still so intense that I would wake up in the middle of the night crying. I did not use pain pills because I have an addictive personality and it was too risky. What was worse than the pain was that I felt as if God had abandoned me. I had been able to feel his closeness; but could no longer feel it. I asked God, why didn’t he protect me? Wasn’t I doing everything he wanted? How could he let this happen? Upon reflection, I was shocked by my own thinking. The God I was mad at was the God of my childhood. I had not let my understanding of God grow up. I was still thinking of a transactional God, one who rewards good and punishes bad directly. I was doing what Job’s friends did, assuming terrible things only happen to bad people. I do know better, but in that moment of intense pain and fear, I had reverted. Next, and much later, I realized that God had not left me at all, that I was locking God out. Again. I know that people push God away at a variety of times and for a variety of reasons. Often, the reason is fear. Once I quit pushing God away, I could again experience his closeness.
I have seen this same phenomenon in some of my AA sponsees. They share that they have a beef with God so they cannot believe in him anymore. A child died, the person they prayed would love them married someone else, or an incredibly good person got cancer, or some other terrible thing happened to them. How human we are when we want to blame someone and the only one we can blame is God. Like children, we expect that if we are good, we get good. If we are naughty, we get punished. When we grow up, we can see that things do not work like that. Random dreadful things happen to good and bad people alike. Rain falls on the just and the unjust.
Do humans always lock God out? I do not know. And I do not know what exactly Jesus was feeling when he cried out. He had plenty of pain and good reason to be fearful. I do believe that despite not knowing the details, we can deduce that Jesus was fully human. He felt that he was suffering alone and felt the pain of separation from God. Jesus understands our emotions from experience.
The very cry of Jesus was foreshadowed in Psalm 22. The Psalm begins with Jesus words yet a bit later in verse twenty-four it states” For he {God} has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.” This is hopeful. Jesus, a scholar of the scriptures, fulfilled the scriptures by his cry. This must be the reason for him to cry out as he had.
In the present times, is it not easy to feel that God has abandoned us? There is much darkness all around. Sometimes we need to remember that God does not abandon us, but we can sometimes lock him out. How many of our dark nights do we cause ourselves? I suspect that I am a long way from needing the experience of a dark night of the soul as I am not a mystic of St. John’s caliber. Rather, I am still one who occasionally locks God out.
I wonder if someone else here needs to reflect on why they do not feel God’s presence. Perhaps that person is me.? In any event, let me conclude with a prayer: Holy One, thank you for being near to us, even when we are unable to see or feel you. Please forgive us for the times that we locked you out. We need to know that we are not alone and that you are always faithful. Amen
