Sermon preached at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
April 26, 2020 / Third Sunday of Easter
Luke 24:13-35
In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
This is a sermon on the topic of isolation. As you will have seen, its full title is: “How to Not Let Isolation Overtake You,” the second in our Eastertide sermon series. As I have been thinking about the topic over the past couple of weeks, however, it has become clear that that title is only part of the story. Because the way to not let isolation overtake you involves not the rejection of isolation, but its transformation into something else, which is solitude. And so it would be more complete to say that the title is really this: “Embracing Solitude: How to Not Let Isolation Overtake You.”
So I will say something about solitude, about how transforming isolation is a spiritual discipline, and about how solitude is really about cultivating a relationship with the living God. All of this demands spiritual maturity of the kind that can only be hard won. And none of it is merely the exercise of spending time alone.
It is important, then, for us to understand what we mean by isolation, our topic today. Isolated comes from the Latin word for “island,” and so what is to be isolated is quite literally to be made into an island. Isolation is by and large not something a person chooses. A schoolboy is isolated in the dining hall when no one else will sit with him. A highly contagious and unwell hospital patient is put into isolation to prevent the spread of disease, like it or not. A person is isolated from her family when they choose en masse not to speak to her because of some falling out. We are all enduring a bit of isolation at the moment, some far more so than others. For the common good, we are cut off from the social interaction that is ordinary to human life. Many of us have computers and telephones and lots of people to talk to; but not everyone. And even if we do, the breadth of our society has been drastically curtailed, and I think the sense of being cut off, of being marooned, is very real indeed.
The first step is to face facts. We are isolated, much more so than before, and it’s not something we choose. Let’s admit it. Doing so may seem like a no brainer, but our first response, as good Americans, is usually to fight against situations that we do not like. “There’s no such thing as a no-win situation!” we might say. Or we might find one of the several thousand lists online of how to maximize our isolation, how to become healthier and more productive during our time cut off from normalcy. But that’s not facing facts; that’s trying to transform situations beyond our control to more closely correspond to how we think the world should look, or how we thought the world should have looked before things changed. Facing facts looks like this: “This situation is terrible. It’s a disappointment, even if it’s not without silver linings, but really I’m sorry things have come to this.”
I said something this past Holy Week about Judas, the great betrayer, about how Judas is a cautionary tale to all of us. It has been suggested that his crime against Jesus was not born of malice, but of “the deadly corruption of the proud virtues.”[1] Judas was a disciple, whose vision of Messianic fulfillment did NOT involve his Lord’s being strung up on a cross. He was disappointed! He expected Jesus to overthrow Roman rule of Judea; he loved his country and thought Jesus had failed it… and he thought that Jesus had failed him as well.[2] This Jesus, who washed his disciples’ feet and was to die on a cross, this was not what Judas signed up for, and Judas wanted to salvage the situation to his own liking. “There’s no such thing as a no-win situation,” he might have said, right before betraying his Lord to the authorities. Even when we realized he’d completely messed up, Judas still couldn’t face the facts; he hanged himself, still trying to control the situation, even if in the most twisted way.
What would it have taken for Judas to face the facts? It probably would have looked a lot like grief, and no one wants to grieve. It would have required giving up his false gods, which were really of his own devising anyway. The great Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth wrote this:
Trust in any sort of authorities, who might offer themselves to me as trustworthy, as an anchor which I ought to hold on to, has become frail and superfluous… These are the gods set up, honoured and worshipped by men in ancient and recent times: the authorities on whom man relies, no matter whether they have the form of ideas or any sort of powers of destiny, no matter what they are called. Faith delivers us from trust in such gods.[3]
If we learn anything from Easter it is that human salvation, both here and in the hereafter, is not something within our control. We can’t buy salvation; we can’t earn it; and we VERY OBVIOUSLY cannot achieve it. It grieves us every time we cannot escape that realization. It’s awful to grieve, and it’s awful to face the loss that all grief entails. And that is an unhappy but necessary realization on the way toward the spiritual maturity that will enable us—with God’s help—to find solitude under isolation.
Transforming isolation into solitude requires patience as well. We wait. Many of you will know me well enough to be chortling at the irony of my having to say anything about the virtues of patience. It is true: I am not a patient person. It would be more correct for me to say, as a Christian, that patience has been cultivated for me by circumstance, because nothing is wasted in God’s economy. As anyone who has children — or anyone who has ever met a child or a teenager — knows, you can’t manufacture maturity, and the same is true with spiritual maturity. Out of our most tragic realities comes the growth that only God can give. That’s the message of the cross, that’s the reason why this instrument of torture and defeat and shame has become the symbol of our Lord’s triumph over sin and death. And so we wait. Usually, we don’t have much choice.
And, finally we pray.
If there is one thing we know from Scripture, it is that God is the prime mover in the universal drama. The direction of the action is not us to God, or even us to each other. It is God to us. And we know that God comes to us unbidden. He came to us in the creation of the world. He came to us in the person of Jesus Christ. And he comes to us still through his Holy Spirit, whom we meet in prayer.
We see all of these factors at work on the road to Emmaus, where we were in our lesson from the gospel of St Luke this morning. Two disciples, not among the eleven but followers of Jesus nevertheless, are alone on the road. They are downcast, devastated even. Their lord and savior had been strung up, killed, dead and buried. Even though they have heard the testimony of the women at the tomb, nevertheless they are beyond consolation. You can hear it in how they respond to Jesus, who joins them but whom they do not recognize:
Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people: And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him. But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel[4]
We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel. It’s all right there in that sentence. The disbelief, the grief, the sense of loss and abandonment. But notice what happens next: Jesus meets them, he goes with them on the road, teaching, and he sits with them at table, where they pray. “And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight. And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?”[5] They were filled with joy.
As so we grieve, we wait, and we pray.
For centuries, Christians have pursued solitude as a way of connecting deeper with God and with themselves, as a way of cultivating renewal and growth. Embracing solitude is the way to not let isolation overtake you. To be isolated is to be cut off, but to have solitude is to be open. It is, “a posture of open reception”: to circumstance, to providence, and therefore to God.[6]
If you are alone, if you are isolated, the frustration and grief are real. But what else is real is that God will meet you in the midst of these perilous times, and will transform isolation and fear, right here, even now, if you grieve, if you will wait, and if will open yourself to him in prayer.
That’s what happened on the road to Emmaus. Our Lord met the two disciples in the midst of their grief and desolation, and he went with them on the way. When they recognized him, their trust in their Lord was restored, overwhelming their grief and their distress, and filling them with joy, even in what we know were still hard times. But their proclamation could not be stifled, and they could not help but exclaim, “The Lord is risen indeed.”
The Lord is risen indeed.
AMEN.
[1] Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born to be King (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 49.
[2] Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, I. Howard Marshall, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1992) 406–407.
[3] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 18-19.
[4] Luke 24:19-21
[5] Luke 24:31-32
[6] Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude