Is God There? Separation Anxiety and The Fear of an Absentee God

I’m preaching this sermon at St. Aiden’s Church in Hartlepool on 29th March at 1900, at their Maundy Sunday service led by my dear friend Revd Gemma Sampson. It’s based on this Bible passage from John 13. 1-17 and 31-35

 

 

I’ve no idea what it’s like to be a child and know God loves me. Or what it’s like to be a Christian teenager. I have no idea what it’s like growing up in a Christian household or saying grace at mealtimes because that’s just what Christian families do. I have no concept of what a steady, deep, wind-swept lifetime of worship and faith is like.

Some of you here will. Some of you are Cradle-Christians.

Others will be like me. You’ll have gone from not knowing God in your life at all, to realising God has always been there, since the very beginning of time. Like me, you’ll have discovered Jesus and you’ll have become a Christian. Some of you are Convert-Christians.

There’s another group too. People who’ve come back to faith after a time away, after walking a different path. For a time you may have felt that God wasn’t for you or you weren’t for God, or the whole thing was a sham. But you came back. You’re a Come-back-Christian.

I think this group also includes Cradle- Christians and Convert-Christians who’ve ever felt, for a period, that God wasn’t obviously present in their lives, that God wasn’t there.

Perhaps this group may really get what scares me. This thing that, as a newish Christian convert who came to faith later in life and didn’t grow up with it, I really, really worry about.

And that thing is separation from God.

It’s not the same as “not- knowing- God- and- then- knowing- God.” I spent 27 years not believing that Got existed and I didn’t feel like I was missing out. God’s absence from my life felt OK because I had absolutely no concept of how much Jesus loved me. To me that’s not painful separation from God. It’s having blinkers on.

But to know it, and then to be separated from it? That’s desperate. It’s the thing that scares me most. Ever feeling God’s presence slip away from me.

When I first became a Christian I was so worried I’d wake up one day and would no longer believe. I was so worried that my faith was shallow and fragile and could be easily unpicked. I was so worried that my belief, even though it felt firm, might float away, and it might turn out I just got a bit swept up in something.

But I now know that my love for Jesus isn’t some temporary madness, some passing phase or fling. I now know my love for God is deep and strong. I know in turn what it is to be loved by God. I know, even though at times I find it hard to comprehend, that Jesus knowingly and willingly went to his death for my sake. Broken and misshapen as I am, dirty as a disciple’s foot before it’s washed, he died for me all the same.

So it is all the more terrifying when I think of what those first disciples went through. What must they have felt when Jesus told them he was leaving? What must they have thought when the guards took him away? What depths of desolation and fear and darkness does a person feel when their Lord and Saviour dies on a cross and is placed, cold and lifeless, in a tomb? Gone. Silent. Absent.

It’s why I find this part of Easter so hard and why I feel so moved reading the passage we heard tonight. The scene the Gospel writer paints is littered with phrases pointing to Jesus’ absence, which I find heart-breaking.

For me, the most poignant and uncomfortable thing is what he says to Peter.

“Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.”

Because this one’s about choice. Peter is told his actions matter, and he either lets Jesus wash his feet, because of what it symbolises, or he risks being separate from Jesus. Peter needs to understand this. Jesus is teaching him and all of them something very important.

“So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.  For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”

He goes on:

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

How we live matters. When we love one another with acts of service, which is what foot washing represents, we are with Jesus and Jesus is with us.

This is how, even on Maundy Thursday as we see this church visibly transformed, stripped bare as a reminder of Jesus leaving, of God made flesh dying a human death, this is how we know we can still always share with Jesus, be with God.

We reflect Jesus’ love for us and how he lives in us by how we love one another. Loving one another… really, truly, loving one another. Even in the darkness of this night, that’s how we know Jesus lives in us.

By our love for one another, everyone will know that we are His disciples.

∞ 

I’d like to now leave some space for prayer, particularly for anyone currently having a bit of a crisis of faith and who feels God’s voice is very, very quiet in their lives…

Come Lord Jesus.

For anyone, even a cradle-Christian, who has yet to fully experience a Jesus-filled life in all its fullness…

Come Lord Jesus.

And to anyone who has yet to feel God’s absence, because you haven’t yet felt God’s presence…

Come Lord Jesus.

For anyone else who wants more…

Come Lord Jesus.

Lord Jesus show yourself to us, be obvious in our lives. Help us to see. Draw us in. Tell us you’re near. Be alive in us this day. When we fear you’ve gone out of our lives, remind us of your promise that you’ll never ever leave us. Be in the water our feet are washed in. Be in the hands of those doing the washing. Be in the peace. Be in the tears. Be in the waiting. Lord Jesus Help us to be open to you. Show us how to share in you so that you live in us. Break down any barriers we have so we can allow ourselves to be loved by you and to love one another. Christ live in us, always. Amen.

God’s Not Fair (Matthew 20.1-16)

I’m English, so when I was growing up, I learned what was fair and what was not. And being English, I became very cross at any violation of the accepted rules of fair play. But figuring the rules out wasn’t always easy. I remember sobbing when my big brother would get bigger portions of cake or a bigger bike or the bigger bedroom when we moved to our new house.

“But he’s older than you Rachael,” my parents would say. “It’s only fair.” This was a tough lesson to learn, but hey if the reason was for fairness’ sake, then so be it. Fair’s fair.

My life at school was governed by rules. The teachers and dinner ladies would always be watching out for anyone not following them; play fair, take your turn, don’t take what’s not yours, you can’t have more than your fair share, don’t jump the dinner queue.

Fairness is very important in our culture. Our love of rules and regulations is perhaps why we, the English, invented so many sports: football, baseball, tennis and rugby to name a few. And if we didn’t invent the game itself, we were certainly the first to lay down proper rules for it, to ensure fair play: hockey, horseracing, polo, swimming, rowing, boxing and even skiing.[1]

We’re known throughout the world as being obsessed with queuing: a prime example of fair play. Where our German, French or Hungarian cousins would make their way as close to the front as they could, so they had a better chance of being served first, we English much prefer the order of a neat line. We’ll all be served, when it’s our turn, according to when we arrived. We think this is fair.

We even self-impose the queuing system in situations where there aren’t any actual queues. In pubs across the country, the customers all have a sense of who got there first, even though drinkers all stand side by side and the bar. Pushing in is frowned upon. The person pushing in jolly well knows they arrived after the lady holding a fiver out. The bar tender relies on their own sense of fairness and the honesty of their customers to ensure everyone’s served in the right and proper order.

The system of fair play only problematic when we find we’re both English and a Christian at the same time.

Here’s an example from a church council meeting I attended. They were discussing Parish Share. Parish Share is the sum of money each parish contributes to the central diocesan pot. This communal pot, funds various things to help our local churches. Like running training events or courses so lay people can develop their skills, or funding children’s and youth ministry advisers, a missioner, a professional safeguarding adviser, having someone to give local churches expert legal advice on the use of church buildings, and of course, funding our clergy, their training, their housing and their pensions so that they can minister. All these things and many more come from money in this communal diocesan pot that each church contribute towards.

But how much each church contributes is where it gets tricky. Because this decision lies with each and every parish. It’s up to them.

At the PCC meeting I went to, a heated debate broke out between members. One wanted to contribute more to the communal diocesan pot this year, in line with inflation, and also because they had plenty in reserve and could afford to. He felt it was only fair. But another person wanted to contribute less, in line with what other parishes in the deanery gave. She wasn’t happy that their church was giving the lion’s share, whilst, she believed, others weren’t pulling their weight. Why should her church give more this year when other churches were giving less? It’s not like her church benefitted more from the extra they gave, yet those that gave less still seemed to get a vicar. She just didn’t think it was fair.

Hmmm… so what’s actually fair?

Well…brace yourselves…because Jesus is about to weigh into the argument.

In Matthew 20.1-16 Jesus is explaining to his disciples what the Heavenly Kingdom is like, which, it turns out, is nothing at all like the United Kingdom.

God’s version of fair play goes like this:

“I’ll pay all my labourers the same, no matter what time they show up looking for work. If they do a full shift they’ll get £100 quid. If they turn up at ten to 5 and get stuck in for ten minutes, they’ll get a hundred quid.”

But that’s not fair!

No. It’s not.

God doesn’t play by our cultural understanding of fairness.

Our version of fair, our rules, our orderliness, our queues at the bus stop…it’s all for nothing compared to God’s massive heart and generosity.

God doesn’t care if a criminal nailed to a cross has lived a most sinful and terrible life up until now. It’s the fact he recognises that the man nailed to the cross next to him is Jesus, and the fact he accepts that he’s the Son of God, that matters. And because of this recognition and acceptance, he is forgiven and redeemed, even in his last remaining moments of earth. He had no chance to live a better life or make up for all he’d done wrong, but in his dying moments, he accepted Jesus, and that was enough for God. God’s that generous. (Luke 23.40-43)

So what might God have to say about the debate at the PCC meeting? What’s fair?

Well, all I know is the kingdom of heaven is unlike anything we could construct or write a rulebook for. So our own sense of fair might have to go out of the window. Instead we might have to base the answer purely on what we know about God’s character through what we read in the Bible, what we come to understand through a lived faith, and what we learn through prayer.

I think it might go like this: God would want each church in Durham Diocese to give as generously as it was able, holding nothing back, giving joyfully, not grumbling, giving more than they have to. Giving, in fact, not just according to the need, but giving generously and faithfully as a response to God’s generosity. Disregarding what they thought a fair proportion, based on what neighbouring churches were up to, and instead giving according to whatever God had been blessed it with.

And if each church did that, there’d be enough in the common fund, the communal pot, to cover lower amounts given by the much poorer communities elsewhere in the diocese. Churches whose congregations are extremely poor, and who can’t come close to covering the cost of their vicar, or much else for that matter. They’d still benefit from all the central pot could provide, including their vicar’s stipend. Mission and ministry can happen in even the poorest corners of the diocese because of the generosity of the whole diocese. Of all churches working together as a team.

This is giving according to what’s generous, not giving according to whatever someone calculates is fair based on perceptions and a sense of self-determined sense of fair.

Our rules of fair play limit us. We’re are only human and we only see with human eyes, and with our human imagination. It’s limiting. We don’t see the bigger picture when we only rely on our own rules and instincts.

But there’s another way. When we take away our culturally inherited ideas about fair play, and instead we turn our faces towards God, when we study God, seek God, ask questions about God, when we grow in our own faith and when we build others up in theirs… we will come to learn a whole new set of rules.

When we give like God, we’ll see that so much more can be achieved. Prayers are answered. Miracles happen. Generosity flows and flows from the least likely quarters.

But from time to time, when we’re challenged- which does happen because generosity is tough- when we struggle to do what’s generous and instead we want to do what’s fair according to our inherited English customs, let’s remember who our maker is.

Let’s remember our God is so generous that no matter how much we have sinned, Jesus paid the price for us, that no matter how little we knew we needed help, Jesus saved us anyway, and no matter how far from the path we wander, our Father will always welcome us home with open arms. Not because he’s fair, because he’s God.

So at the next opportunity when we leave this church today, let’s not give fairly. Let’s give generously.

Amen.

[1] From Kate Fox’s “Watching the English”… a brilliant book.