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Twinbrook Baptist Church Rockville, MD Sixth Sunday of Easter May 13, 2007 Pastor: Kip Ingram Kip@TwinbrookBaptist.com |
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The story of America is not one of pure virtue and success. We are currently celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement. It was 105 adventurers who crowded three cramped ships in 1606 and set sail for the new country to arrive here in 1607. We are familiar with the legends like those of Capt. John Smith and Pocahontas. But the story of those first settlers is mixed, like that of America in so many ways. Listen to the way it was described in a recent Washington Post article: "They were the ones who established the New World's first permanent English colony on the shores of the James River in Virginia, who formed the New World's first representative government before the Mayflower crew ever spied land. They spoke English, a relatively new and remarkably pliant language that would easily absorb bits of Spanish, French and Algonquian. Despite their rocky start, these fortune-minded adventurers would be models of entrepreneurial thinking for generations to come. But Jamestown's settlers also vowed to exterminate the Indians after they could not win them over by gentler means. They blithely tossed aside egalitarian instincts when they saw that slavery could make them rich. And the crop that secured their fortunes -- tobacco -- condemned millions to servitude and millions more to an early death from its smoke. We may trace our fondest ideals to Plymouth Rock, but it is in Jamestown, in all its shame and glory, that we catch the earliest glimpse of the powerful, prosperous, wild, weird and burgeoning nation we have become." It was in 1619 that a Dutch ship arrived with 20 slaves which had been raided from a Portuguese ship bound for Mexico. Soon after this, 30 more Africans arrived from a second ship. These enslaved people who came from what is today called Angola were the first ones uprooted from Africa to labor in the fields of North America. The slave class in America was to last for more than two centuries, as human beings were taken from Africa and made to serve the economic and social interests of the country. The conditions were hard and difficult, so much to bear for any individual or group, but one of the ways it was dealt with was by singing songs of lament and hope. Out of this slave class, these human beings created a new genre of music known as spirituals. Because it grew out of the human condition, this music still speaks powerfully today. One of the songs which became popular captured the feeling of so many slaves as it repeated the words of its title in a plaintive way: "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long ways from home." It was a song of loss and despair, to be sure, but by emphasizing and playing with the word "sometimes" it also carried seeds of hope for recognizing better times. Jesus told his disciples: I will not leave you as orphans. What is it to be an orphan? What does that experience feel like from the inside? We know the title of orphan is given to those without a parental presence in their lives. Orphans are given a prominent place in our cultural imagination through literature and drama, from the musical Annie, to Charles Dicken's Oliver Twist, to JK Rowing's Harry Potter. We typically think of orphans as those children who through tragic or difficult circumstances, lose the place or presence of parents in their lives, and go to an orphanage to live together with other similarly fated children. In this sense, there are some of us who may have been orphans and most who were not. But going deeper, what does the experience feel like from the inside? To be orphaned is to be without family and all that family at its best means-to feel cared for, the presence of others, provision for what we need, protection from what threatens us, stability day by day. To feel orphaned is to feel alone, abandoned, cast adrift, without resources or protection, intensely vulnerable, without guiding and caring relationships, and in the extreme, to feel forsaken. In this deeper sense, we all recognize and resonate at times with these kinds of feelings, whether we have been technically designated an orphan or not. We all of us know the feeling of being exposed and vulnerable, like we have been abandoned to difficult circumstances in our lives. We can feel it when the medical diagnosis comes and it seems like the bottom drops out, we can feel it when spouse grows distant and separates from us, we can feel it when the child moves away and we are left with an empty room and empty hole in our lives, we can feel it when the boss dismisses us from our jobs and we wonder about our own capacities, we can feel it when a national tragedy like that of Virginia Tech happens and we are overwhelmed with our own reaction, we can feel it when we have made a mess of our lives through unwise or impulsive choices, we can feel it in the quiet but clear moment of realizing we are lonely, we can feel it in a hundred different ways. Perhaps even on a day like today, when we celebrate and honor the place of mothers in our lives, you have felt the trace of nostalgia for what a mother once meant in your life, maybe you feel the distance of a mother who lives far away or who is no longer living, maybe you can even sing sometimes the words of the old spiritual: "sometimes I feel like a motherless child." Whether we have ever spent time at an orphanage, we all of us know something of these deeper feelings in our lives. This is why our society takes such strong interest when we hear a story about a baby who has been abandoned and left for someone else to find, whether in a hospital waiting room, or on the steps of a church entrance or wrapped in plastic in a park. Such stories get our attention and the that of the society around us because we empathize and even identify with the situation of such a vulnerable and seemingly loveless child. Such stories strike a chord somewhere deep inside us with the anxious question of whether, when we cut out all the distractions and duties we give ourselves to stay busy, we are really all alone in the world after all, abandoned to whatever we can make of ourselves. On the first day of school or even of nursery school, children will sometimes cling to their parents, crying loudly and intensely, begging them not to leave them there. Parents want to go out for the evening, and they try to leave their young child with a babysitter, but the child holds onto mom or dad and does not want to let go. Even if there is no physical clinging or crying, sometimes the child will watch out the window as the parents leave, feeling something he or she can't quit put into words. A child runs through the aisles of a store with a look of panic and sheer terror, screaming and crying, because she or he cannot find mommy or daddy. Abandonment issues aren't just a psychological designation for a troubled few, they are part of the human condition. On his last night with his disciples, Jesus said to them: "I will not leave you as orphans." He said this because he sensed his death was imminent. Yet he also had the conviction that God would not abandon them but would bring their lives together again in a unique way. So he said: "I will not leave you as orphans. I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me; yet because I live, you also will live." This promise was not just for those first disciples but for all of us. We no longer see Jesus as a historical figure in the flesh, and yet, we are not abandoned by the living Christ. Jesus says: "because I live you also shall live." His living presence means we are not as orphans, even though we may feel like it at times. His living presence means that we are part of God's family, God's enduring family. His living presence means that we are part of a larger family of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, all of us finding out what it means that God has given us to be family with each other. To use the apostle Paul's language in Ephesians, we have been adopted into this family by the love and grace of God, and we have gained a family inheritance that will not perish. And so we seek to live out the meaning of being family. We reach out to those family members who are sick or hurting, letting them know that they are not alone. We reach out to those in our community who struggle or seek a place, whether at Chase House Shelter or in the Latino Outreach Program. We want them to know the good news of God that they are not alone. We reach out in mission around our world, sharing our money and resources in order enlarge the joy of God's family. We want people who might feel forsaken to know the possibility of a larger family of concern and with it, a God whose love can embrace us in our worst moments. We may not always see, but God is always there, present in the ups and downs of our days, so we are not as orphans, we are God's children, part of the family. Novelist Wendell Berry captures the honesty and feeling of an experience better than most authors. In his recent novel, Jayber Crow, he recounts a life lived in a small riverside town, from the perspective of a old man telling his life story. Toward the beginning, Jayber talks about his earliest memories, of hearing stories about a far off war, and of hearing how the river froze up and created havoc with the countryside, and of hearing about sickness going around. Then he recounts the following: "And then that winter became terrible for me by more than hearsay, for both of my young parents fell ill and died only a few hours apart in late February of 1918. I don't know how I learned that this had happened. It seemed to me that they just disappeared into the welter of that time: a war off somewhere in the dark world; a river of ice off somewhere, breaking trees and boats; sickness off somewhere, and then in the house; and then death there in the house, and everything changed. I remember a crowd of troubled people in the house. I remember crouching beside the woodbox behind the kitchen stove while several people offered to pick me up and comfort me, and I would not look up. And then an old woman I knew as Aunt Cordie gathered me up without asking and sat down in the rocking chair and held me and let me cry. She had on a coarse black sweater over a black dress that reached to her shoetops and a black hat with little white and blue flowers on it there in the dead of winter. I can remember how she seemed to be trying to enclose me entirely in her arms. 'God love his heart!' she said. 'Othy, we're going to take him home.' And that was what they did. There really was nobody else to do it, but she treated me like a prize she had won. Uncle Othy too. They had had three children of their own, and all three had died as children. I suppose Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy had a store of affection laid away that they now brought out and applied to me. Later I would know how blessed I had been." Wendell Berry has captured here in a few lines, a parable of God's grace, of the fear of being orphaned and the blessing of finding ourselves a part of God's family. Although we may be tempted to feel so at times, we are not all alone in this world. There is one who picks us up, embraces us in loving arms and treats us as if we are a worthy prize. We don't always see it at first, but we catch glimpses of God's eternal love in the words and faces and gestures of others, signs that we are family. On this Mother's Day, on this Sunday when we dedicate young Jazmin Lee, in what has been a difficult week for our congregation, we need this precious reminder. i."Inventing America," Washington Post, May 9, 2007, H01. |
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