Sermon Begins at 23:05
What do we do when hard times hit?
When things seem to be bigger and more powerful than we are?
When we seem to be held at the whim of forces which are beyond our control?
All good questions to ask the week after a Hurricane, when the basement floods and the raging waters would have gone right over us…
For the weeks before a pivotal election, when it feels like enemies rose up against us and would swallow us up with their fierce anger toward us…
For weeks when a loved one is sick or in need of healing…
For weeks when our purpose and direction in life may be in question…
For weeks when we’re bone tired, when we feel like a bird caught in a trap…
For weeks when we seem to have an extra reserve of energy or a glimpse of joy that comes out of nowhere, when we know that God has released us from any snare that can hold us back…
What do we do, and where can we go, when life throws itself at us?
I’m moved to preach to you this morning some of the words of one of my favorite psalmists, Mr. Bill Withers, “We all need somebody…”
In his 1972 hit song, Bill Withers takes us on a journey that could have come right out of the Apostle James’ letter to the ancient church.
“Sometimes in our lives,” he croons, “we all have pain, we all have sorrow.”
It is fairly passé in our culture to talk about how we are all so connected to the internet, but yet so many are still lonely.
The Surgeon General has called this a “loneliness epidemic.”
And that’s true. We as a society of individual people are more connected and more lonely.
The real question is, what causes loneliness?
How can it be that we have access to hundreds or thousands of friends, where we can write anything or everything that is happening in our lives and yet still feel as if nobody cares, or no one is paying attention?
I can’t answer this for everyone, but I can tell you about my own experience.
It seems to me that there are at least a couple of different kinds of loneliness.
The two main ones for our day and age are incarnational and digital.
What they both have in common is that loneliness seems to strike, when we feel invisible, overlooked, or unimportant to the people who surround us; like we could disappear and nobody would even notice.
Another hallmark of loneliness - because we don’t feel connected to the people in our lives - is the thought, “nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows my sorrow.”
So, we get doubly isolated by lack of attention and lack of perception; by feelings of distance and absence.
Have you ever seen someone post one of those blast messages, “if you’re my true friend answer this…” or, “I’m testing people, if you don’t comment on this post, I’m going to unfriend you… etc…”
That is the manifestation of digital loneliness; checking to see if you’re invisible.
When I get most digitally lonely, that is, when I feel lonely online, it’s usually because I put something out into the “world” and then I go check a few days later and nobody has liked or commented.
I didn’t get my dopamine hit that I was looking for, which is our body’s happy hormone.
My body recognizes that the attention I was seeking online was not reciprocated or recognized.
The problem we get into online sometimes is that we are asking, as James’ letter said last week, but we are asking wrongly.
The internet pulls us into a false sense of being surrounded, being present with people, but then getting no feedback.
It feels like we’re in a room full of people screaming for attention and nobody hears.
The truth is, we all just need somebody.
We put things on blast on the internet and expect response.
We’ve gotten used to that kind of feedback.
But, instead of putting it out into the ether, if we actually approached a single friend or a group of friends, if we just called on somebody, when we needed a hand,
I bet we would find that we actually do have somebody to lean on.
We just asked for the wrong thing.
We asked for attention in a hall of mirrors, instead of seeking solidarity with someone who is solid.
The second thing that makes us feel lonely is that we often feel like we’re the only ones going through something.
The internet should cure us of this perception, because we are constantly surrounded by stories of what is challenging people.
But somehow loneliness convinces us that it’s just us.
So, what do we do about all of this loneliness?
The first thing is that we shouldn’t expect the internet to cure us of loneliness.
The second thing, I would suggest, is prayer;
Both praying yourself, and letting yourself be prayed for.
You know we have a whole part of our worship every week that is dedicated to the fact that we believe that prayer matters;
That prayer is effective, and that prayer helps everyone in the community feel like they are cared for and seen.
Bill Withers tells us, “please swallow your pride, If I have things you need to borrow, For no one can fill those of your needs if you won’t let them show.”
This is true on a practical level, but it is even more true with prayer.
How many times are we going through something, and we think, “I’ll just power through this,” or, “I don’t want to bother anybody?”
Instead of understanding that “I just might have a problem that you’ll understand.”
How many times do we do this to God?
“God is so busy, I don’t want to bother God with my little problems.”
I would suggest that we feed our loneliness, when we don’t let ourselves be worthy of prayer.
But this is the opposite of what God wants for us.
One of the big lies that we internalize from the world around us is that we have to do everything ourselves.
This is a recipe for feeling lonely.
Prayer lets you get enveloped by others in an embrace of love.
Trying to do that for yourself is like trying to give yourself a hug;
It helps a little, but it’s so much better when it’s someone else’s arms.
Letting yourself be prayed for helps to assuage feelings of loneliness.
We also help to stop our feelings of loneliness when we pray for other people.
When we stop for a second and see the needs of others in our lives, we take ourselves out of our own issues for a second and recognize that we’re not the only ones going through something;
We close the distance between our own sufferings and those of our friends;
We close the distance between our own sufferings and God’s promise to be with us in the midst of our suffering.
This is why the apostle James is so insistent about the early church praying for one another as the ultimate remedy for all things.
Are you suffering? Are you cheerful? Are you sick? Have you committed a sin?
He believed that prayer was powerful and effective, that it worked.
St. Teresa of Avila once said that one of our main problems in prayer is that we often pray as if God were absent.
Building on St. Teresa’s observation (I say it this way because it seems more charitable to say “building on” rather than “mansplaining”) Thomas Keating, a Trappist Monk who died just a few years ago in 2018,
noticed that God can feel absent and distant from us.
Keating goes on to say that the reason Jesus focuses on children so often is because feelings like God’s absence and distance get established during childhood and grow stronger as we grow up “unless we are touched by the Gospel and begin a spiritual journey.”
The spiritual journey – the journey of prayer - is the only way to dismantle, “the monumental illusion that God is distant or absent.”
This is why bringing the little children to Jesus is so important, why Jesus makes such a big deal out of not standing in their way, or becoming a stumbling block.
When the world around us tries to tell us we have to do it alone, or that we have to scream into the void for attention, or that God isn’t interested in our little problems,
Christian faith tells us that we can do nothing without each other or without God.
Christian faith tells us that God knows what it is like to suffer, and so God understands us.
Christian faith tells us that God wants to close the distance between us so much that God became human.
Christian faith tells us that God wants to be so present with us that Jesus gave us the Holy Spirit to be with us, when His time on earth was done.
Christian faith is the affirmation that God loves us; Prayer is our affirmation that we know we matter and that we believe we are worthy of that love.
James is reminding us today, that when we pray we feel less distance from one another and less absence of God, and so we feel less lonely.
In the same way, Bill Withers’ classic serenade reminds us, that we all need somebody to lean on.
That old beloved gospel hymn tells us that those who will be safe and secure from all alarm are those who lean on the everlasting arm.
My message for you today St. Andrew’s is this… never forget that you need somebody, never regret leaning in.
God is here for us to lean on.
We are here for each other.
Prayer is a revolutionary act that can heal your loneliness.
Don’t believe the “monumental illusions,”
Believe in God’s solutions.
Amen.
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