Friday, August 5, 2022
The Rev. Rob Stevens
Listening to the Pain & Feeling the Love
In the past few weeks, I have listened to no fewer than five people express how desperately they want to “belong.” I listened to a teenager who wondered if life would ever get any easier. His words linger in my heart, “Will I ever have really close friends again?” I listened to a young mother through her tears as she struggled to find a place that she felt safe and cared for as she sobbed, “I just don’t fit in.” I listened as a woman wrestled with how much life and her church had changed. “Do we have to change everything she asked.” And the deeper unspoken question hangs in the air, “If we change will there still be a place for me?” I listened to a recently retired CEO wonder if he would ever belong in the new community that he had chosen for his retirement as he lamented, “It doesn’t have to be this hard to belong.” It is the central theme of our lives after the basics like food, shelter, clothing are present. Where do I fit in? Where do I belong? What and where is my home? This is the core. It is also an opportunity for goodness. I am beginning to see that what binds us together is not our belief, not our good deeds, not our shared experiences of transcendence, but rather what binds us together, what all humankind has in common is….pain. Now you may be saying, “Wow Rob, that is uplifting, can’t wait to hear your next sermon.” But I encourage you to come a bit deeper with me. The stories above came from VERY different people. Yet, all of them have a deep desire and a deep pain. They have a deep desire to belong, in essence to be loved. AND, they all have a shared experience of pain when that connection, that love was absent. Now they share a common fear that the experience of that most wonderful reality of belonging and being loved will never return.
The challenge and the hope are the same. Will we listen? Will we share? Will we let other’s bear our burdens? Or will we continue in the race to death with the three-year-old mentality that, “I can do it by myself!” The meaning and the hope of the Gospel in general and life at St. John’s is that we are not alone. God is with us.
The question that haunts me is, “Are we willing to be loved?” Can we receive in our souls the possibility that we are lovable? Truly believing this is the ultimate stumbling block for our lives and loves. Whenever I say, “you are the beloved child of God” to someone the “Yes, but…” is already on their lips and more importantly on their hearts. Let’s try it.
I am telling you right here and right now as your Rector and as a fellow human being that YOU are the beloved child of God and NOTHING you do, say or feel can ever separate you from that Love…can you receive this information? Can you let it be so?
The incredibly great news is that we have a place, an emerging community of faith that has the opportunity to live like we are loved and lovable. A place where we can share our pain in healthy ways because we know that each and everyone of us shares that pain. We have an opportunity to be the goodness in the world that God sees in us. Notice that I did not say that we have the opportunity to “do” the goodness, but rather we have the opportunity to “be” goodness. Henri Nouwen writes about this difference well,
“In every respect, Jesus’ life was a failure. Success had left him, popularity dwindled, and all his power was gone. Still, few lives have been so fruitful…The real question before our death, then is not how much can I still accomplish or how much influence can I still exert, but how can I live so that I can continue to be fruitful when I am no longer here? That question shifts our attention from doing to being. Our doing brings success, but our being bears fruit.”
Let us listen with our whole being.
Let us love indiscriminately and without fear, and
Please God, give us the courage and grace to be the community that You have called us to be.