6th Sunday of Easter
John 14:15-21
May 29, 2011
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
Alone. Is there a more frightening word in the English language? I don’t mean the kind of alone that is a welcome relief to me, an introvert, after Annual Conference—four days of being confined in a closed space with twelve hundred of my closest friends!
I mean the kind of alone that we don’t choose. The kind of alone that tears a chunk out of our lives and out of our hearts and leaves us bleeding. The kind of alone that looms over us and we know that it isn’t going to end. That kind of alone.
We are hard-wired to dread this kind of aloneness. Thanks to our over-sized brains we are born long before we can do anything at all for ourselves. We can suck and we can cry and that’s about it. We are absolutely dependent on other people to meet every need for survival. Without other people we would die. Period. We are hard-wired to find being alone very anxious-making.
It’s not that there aren’t people who have faced down that anxiety. Chuck Noland, Tom Hanks character in Cast Away, found himself marooned on an island in the South Pacific. He had to figure out how to survive using only what was already on the island, the flotsam that had washed up on the island, and his own wits. He was entirely alone. Well, he was technically alone, but in reality not quite. You may remember that he had a volleyball named Wilson who became his one companion.
Sigmund Freud told a story about his grandson Ernst who was then about a year and a half old. When his mother was gone from the house, Ernst would play a game which Freud called “Fort/da.” Ernst had a length of string tied to an empty spool. He would throw it out of sight over the edge of his bed and say, “ooooo,” which Freud understood to be “fort,” German for “gone.” Then he would pull on the string until the spool was back in sight and announce, “da!” German for “there it is!” Freud theorized that Ernst was using this game to rehearse his mother’s going away and return, that he had “transferred” (a favorite word of Freud’s) his anxiety over his mother’s absence to the spool. Maybe so. And maybe the “peek-a-boo” game that we play with toddlers is like that. Young children who would not survive actual abandonment can turn it into a game with a happy ending. Maybe so.
In the ancient world abandonment was no game. In the ruthlessly competitive world of ancient society, a person’s survival depended primarily on their family connections. To lose those connections was a disaster. The word “orphaned” in our reading, refers to someone who has lost these connections. Incidentally, the Greek word orphanos is where we got our word “orphan.” Oddly, for us who are accustomed of thinking of orphans as children, in Greek it can mean either a child whose parents have died, or an adult whose children have died. Either way, an orphan is alone in the world, at the mercy of everyone around them and without protection.
This is why Jesus in the same passage promises an “Advocate,” that is, someone who will stand up with his disciples in court, like an attorney. It also explains why translators can never seem to decide whether to translate the word as “advocate” or “counselor” on the one hand or as “comforter” or “consoler” on the other. The reality is that an orphan needs both a good lawyer and emotional support. There just isn’t any single word in English that will do the trick.
In our passage Jesus promises that, even though he will be absent—since he is returning “to the Father”—his disciples will not become orphans. Through the Spirit of truth who will be a counselor/attorney/consoler/comforter to the disciples, Jesus will be present and so will “the Father.” They will not be alone.
As always when we are reading the Bible we need to remember that the writer of this gospel is not telling the reader anything new. John’s readers already knew these stories, so that’s not why they were written. The gospel was written so that the readers could hear the stories being told in such a way as to help them face their present situation.
And the situation John’s readers faced was very hard. The majority of scholars date this book to around 90 ad, some sixty years after Jesus was crucified. This event was as far away to his readers as the bombing of Pearl Harbor is to us. If Jesus’ earliest followers expected him to return in triumph to defeat evil and transform the world soon after he rose from the dead, they would be beginning to wonder what was keeping him. They may even have begun to believe that the world as they knew it was the reality they would have to keep living with.
The Jesus movements had grown and gained in numbers to the point where it was coming to the notice of the Romans that there was a new sect of Judaism that was following Jesus whom they had executed as a rebel and criminal but whose followers believed was alive. The larger Jewish community for its part was reeling from the revolt of 69-70 and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Jewish attempts to define who they were as a people ran headlong into Jewish Christian attempts to redefine Judaism. There was a bitter conflict between Jewish followers of Jesus and Jewish non-followers of Jesus that resulted in Jewish communities being torn in two and Jesus-followers being expelled from the synagogues.
These followers of Jesus who were thoroughly Jewish found themselves on the outside looking in, sometimes separated from their own families as the boundary lines were being drawn. They were threatened by confusion within and by persecution from the outside. They were stripped of the modest legal protection of being a sect within the Jewish people and exposed to Roman suspicion and accusations. And just where was Jesus, anyway, and when was he coming back?
They felt bereft, abandoned, and left behind. They were exiles in their own communities. They didn’t know what to do next. They weren’t sure they had the energy or the courage to do it even if they knew what it was. They were demoralized.
I get that way, sometimes. Not most of the time, just sometimes. Most of the time I soldier on, doing the little good I can where I am. But sometimes I see things too clearly. And then I feel overwhelmed.
I’ve been carrying around a moment like that from our time in Portrerillos. It’s been haunting me.
While we were in Portrerillos Brandon Schmidt and I stayed in the home of a woman named Edís. One morning in addition to the usual tortillas, beans, fried plantains and fresh fruit, Edís offered us a box of corn flakes. It looked both familiar and strange. Carol says that I will read anything, and cereal boxes are no exception. It was an ordinary box of ordinary cereal. In the list of ingredients the very first item was maíz (corn). No surprise there. But it was not simply maíz. It was listed as maíz desgerminado, “degerminated” corn, corn with the germ removed, corn stripped of its most nutritious part, the part with most of the protein and other nutrients.
Now, the people of Portrerillos know something about corn. They are, in fact, direct descendants of the folks who domesticated corn. They have been planting and eating corn for centuries. Since they don’t have any fields, they plant corn and beans on the hillsides. And they plant them together. The people of Central America didn’t just domesticate corn; they also figured out that corn and beans are a good combination. They are good for the soil. Beans put back what corn takes away. They are also good because corn and beans between them supply all of the amino acids that people need.
For centuries, since long before the Spanish came to plunder whatever wealth they could find, before they came to enslave the people, before they came to force the people to turn to growing crops that the Spanish could sell, centuries before the people of Portrerillos started speaking Spanish, the people of Portrerillos grew corn and beans. It was a way of living that worked and it still works.
But now, you see, they can have corn flakes, corn flakes made of the least nutritious part of the corn, corn flakes that will contribute empty calories and obesity to a people who do not have money or health to spare. Now they can have corn flakes made in a far away place and trucked to them over roads that shouldn’t be carrying the traffic. And to pay for the corn flakes and other consumer goods the young men of Portrerillos are mostly somewhere else, working at jobs no one else wants and sending money back home.
I looked at the box of corn flakes and suddenly felt that I was looking at a good deal of what has gone wrong in our world. A box of corn flakes is undermining a delicate balance that the people of Portrerillos have with their fragile land. A box of corn flakes is turning the community of Portrerillos into an accidental association of individuals who happen to live near each other. I looked at the box of corn flakes and felt that I was staring into the eyes of the Beast. And I felt terribly, terribly alone.
How can I fight the Beast? How can I even fight the Beast on my own behalf, let alone on behalf of our friends in Portrerillos? How can I even explain what I mean? How can I say it clearly, so that it makes sense, even to me? So, you see, sometimes I feel overwhelmed.
But to those of John’s community who felt overwhelmed, John’s Jesus says this: “You are not alone. I have not left you orphaned.” John reminded his community of what they needed to remember. He reminded them about the Holy Spirit. We know about the Holy Spirit. It’s that mysterious third part of the Trinity, something we don’t understand, not even a little. We were baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And at our confirmation, hands were placed on our heads and the work of the Spirit within us asked for.
John wants his community to know that these were not just words. The truth is that the Spirit is with them as counselor/attorney/consoler/comforter. They are not alone. They have not been abandoned. They are not bereft of the presence and power they need to be who they are called to be and to do what needs to be done.
And neither are we. We are God’s children. The Spirit has been given to us. We know who we are. We know that we can do what needs to be done next. We know that we are God’s beloved. We are not bereft. We are not orphans. We are not alone.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
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