Longing
Sermon preached by the Reverend Patricia Farris
June 19 - 24, 2005
It is a
great joy to be here with you for this week of worship and music and
liturgical arts. We are already blessed by this place, this company,
by the care that has gone into planning and preparing this week for
us. I’ve had fun explaining to my friends on the West Coast
all that it means for a United Methodist to come to Lake Junaluska,
the heart and soul of Methodism in the Southeast Jurisdiction. Especially
today, as I looked out across the lake, I have been most grateful
to be in this place that calls to mind what was my Dad’s favorite
Psalm: I lift my hills to the hills. From whence does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
Happy Father’s Day,
dads, and thanks be to God for fathers present and fathers now with
us in the great cloud of witnesses.
This is actually my third
or fourth trip to this beautiful spot. I know that many of you here
tonight are residents and many are you who return year in and year
out for this time of fellowship and renewal. It is good to be with
those of you who are home and those of you who have come home and
so graciously welcomed me into your home.
Let us pray: Gracious God,
bless us this night with that sense of “Welcome Home”
that comes from you. Help us now to find that place within that is
so very hungry for your greeting, your acceptance, your love, your
blessing. And then, O God, in your mercy, meet us here. Amen.
It is my prayer that each
of us will experience the blessing of God in this week in a very personal
way. I am confident that we will be blessed by great music—indeed
it has been said by one of the great saints of the church that “whoever
sings to God in worship prays twice”. We will indeed be doubly
blessed. And we will be blessed by learning, by dance, by all kinds
of creativity, by fellowship and new friends.
It is the prayer of all
those who have worked so hard and so long to bring us together in
this way, in this place and time, that each of us will find the healing,
the insight, the comfort, the strength, the challenge, the vision
we are needing at this time in our journey to thrive and live as more
faithful disciples of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
These will be long days
of rehearsals and seminars. We may be feeling some performance anxiety,
some worry that we may not have the physical stamina to persevere…some
fear of not measuring up… And so, in the midst of all that,
in the midst of all the playing and singing and rehearsing and learning,
the spiritual work we will each need to each do this week will be
to center in and take some time in quiet and prayer and get in touch
with that place deep in our hearts that is longing, even this night,
this week, to receive a blessing from God.
So come, now, for a closer
walk with God. Come and focus in and be honest before God and ask
God for what you truly need. Come and be in the presence of the living
God, the One who has blessed us with the song of life, who blesses
us with the melody of peace.
You may be asking yourself
how you’ll be able to do this in the midst of such a busy week.
In our reading from John’s Gospel this evening we heard the
familiar verse “In my Father’s house are many mansions…”
There’s another translation of this verse that is wonderful.
“In God’s house are many resting places, many rest stops.”
Many rest stops.
Or what you musicians know as simply a rest. Or what dancers do when
they take a break. A place to take a breath, a moment of silence to
be refreshed, to compose yourself, to clear your brain. A moment to
center in.
In the midst of all the sound and hubbub of this week, there will also
be for each of us some rest stops and some rests, if we’re paying
attention, moments of quiet when we can open our hearts to our need
of God, our yearning to come home, and then welcome God in.
“Softly
and tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me; see on the
portals he’s waiting and watching, watching for you and for me.
Come home, come home, you who are weary come home. Earnestly, tenderly,
Jesus is calling, calling Beloved, come home.”
All
through this week together, we will wrap ourselves in the Beatitudes—through
Scripture, sermon, song, ritual, sacrament, prayer and silence. “Blessed
are they…blessed are they…blessed are they…”
There is perhaps no more beautiful and compelling teaching in all the
Gospels than these verses we have come to call the Beatitudes, Jesus’
invitation into Christian life, into Christian spirituality, his invitation
to deep faith and authentic living, to find the Kingdom of God within.
Jesus
wants us to come and accept his invitation and enter into the blessed
life. He wants us to search it out for ourselves and find our way home,
always restless until we find our rest in God, as St. Augustine also
observed, until we find the true blessing that is the expression of
God’s favor towards us.
Blessed
are the poor in spirit, Jesus said. The poor in spirit—those who
know their need of God, who know their need for God. The Psalmist had
said it long before: “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so
my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living
God.” We have been created for this life-long journey of faith,
seekers and searchers longing to grow ever closer to the one who gives
us life and sings through our thoughts, words and deeds.
Really
and truly, we’re all born what saints and philosophers have called
a “God-shaped hole” inside us, a God-shaped hole in each
and every soul that can be filled only by the love and grace of God.
This is not a hole that will ever show up on any CT Scan or MRI. No
surgeon or doctor will be able to find it on an x-ray-- although the
truly wise healers will recognize its presence. But being creatures
of God’s own making, God has placed within us this empty space
so that God may fill it first with yearning and longing for completeness.
God has created us with something inside left undone so that we might
live not unto ourselves.
As
we enter tonight into the first of the week’s worship services,
we must begin at the place of longing deep within us, the God-shaped
hole in our hearts that is our need of God.
Our
problem is that far too often we feel something missing inside but we
rush about trying to fill it up with everything but the one thing we
most need, don’t we? We try and fill the God-shaped hole with
food and things and relationships and busy-ness. We try to fill it with
our achievements and our hobbies and our performances and the beauty
of our homes.
We
try to fill it with our learning and our cleverness and our proficiencies…we
try to fill it with everything except what we most need. And so we are
still not satisfied. There’s always one more thing to buy, to
get, to try. Even this event itself can be such a dead-end if it’s
just one more thing we’ve run off to in hopes of a spiritual high
without a real commitment to go deep within.
For
so many of us, there remains a deep sadness inside, fear that we will
never measure up, that no matter how much we have or achieve, it will
never be enough. We are those who mourn, if we admit it, those whose
hearts are broken, those whose hearts are deeply troubled, whose desires
are frustrated, those who feel deeply confused.
Our
beloved Creator God is yearning for us to come home, yearning for us
to know that we are the beloved children of God’s heart. For the
fact is, as St. Augustine said long ago: “God loves us as if there
were only one of us.”
Because,
you see, the truth is, just as our hearts long for God, so God longs
for us. Inside the heart of God, there is a “person-shaped hole”
waiting for each of us, a person-shaped hole with our name on it.
God aches for us to come to our senses and make our way home.
We
heard it in the prophet’s proclamation: “Thus says the
Lord: see, I am going to gather them from the farthest parts of the
earth, together, a great company, they shall return here. With weeping
they will come and with consolations I will lead them back, I will
let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they
shall not stumble. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort
them, and give them gladness for sorrow.”
Jesus
meant all of that when he blessed those who mourn. They shall be comforted,
he said, a word with many levels of meaning. They shall be comforted.
They shall hear words of consolation and strength. They shall return
from their wandering. They shall be “united by love.”
They shall come home.
Dear
brothers and sisters, there is a great magnetic force of love in the
power of our longing for God and God’s longing for us. John
Wesley called it “prevenient grace.” Henri Nouwen called
it “an on-going blessing”, a blessing that invites us
“to hear in an ever-new way that we belong to a loving God who
will never leave us alone”, a blessing that reminds us “that
we are guided by love on every step of our lives.”
This
week together is a time to hear and trust the blessing.
I
close tonight with a blessing, a blessing for our week, a blessing
for each of us:
Lord,
you trace our journeys and our resting places. You are acquainted
with all our ways. How we long to see your face. Receive us, gracious
God, as your guest, your friend, your child. And may we receive your
blessing this night as you welcome us home. Amen.
© Patricia E. Farris, 2005. Permission is given for brief quotation
with attribution. All other rights reserved.
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