1 Peter 2: 2-10

John 14: 1-14

A Sense of Direction

Elizabeth Macaulay

What an amazing thing, to be loved by a savior who kneels at our feet and caresses our tiredness and our fears, both.

Knowing that his disciples are about to go through the great pain of watching their teacher and their hopes die, Jesus gifts them with a sense of direction to guide them always.

First, Jesus asks them – and us – to remember that there is through all time the promise. We are enfolded into the community and being of God. Jesus, who lives there, tells us that because we are his followers, we get to call the house of God our home. Jesus, who called God his Abba –his father –, invites disciples through time to climb into the lap of God and rest awhile.

Think on it. Is there a one of us here who hasn’t felt the all encompassing terror of being a squalling mess of fear and pain, whether as kids bruised by teasing or fist fights, or as adults felling bruised by the challenges of living. Is there any better antidote for pain than the gift of compassion and enfolding in the arms of love? A place to rest and be comforted and loved into being able to breathe fully again?

Jesus tells his followers: you will know fear, but rest oh rest in the assurance that I am with you. Hold onto that. Remember the power of my voice.

I was a newly wed all of 22 years old. Driving home from a three-day honeymoon on the North Shore, I learned much about fear and the power of assurance.

Probably the only thing we owned that was worth anything monetarily was a two door Opel. Three days into our marriage, the Opel wasn’t worth much, because it ran head on into a semi truck.

The fact that we survived is miracle. I wasn’t even wearing a seat belt.

We were rushed to the hospital in Two Harbors and then shifted to St Mary’s hospital in Duluth.

During the intake procedures, it was determined that intensive care was necessary. I wasn’t too badly hurt – it was mostly for observation – but my new husband, Jim, was in critical condition.

I was scared most mightily. Amidst the buzz and beep of intensive care, isolated from what was happening and none too sure I really wanted to know, I knew great fear.

Until I heard a voice that cut through the fear with a power that still moves me.

My grandfather was a doctor in Duluth. A tall, patrician and most gentle man much respected in the community. He had been retired for years.

But I heard his voice as he inquired about our condition at the nurses’ desk. And the reassurance that I was going to be all right because my grandfather was there was so very powerful. I could relax and feel secure.

God knows, fear clenches us. Makes it hard for us to breathe and believe. What Jesus tells his disciples is to remember to breathe in the promise of God’s presence. Remember whose you are in the place of squalling. There is room on the lap of the holy for the soothing of your terror.

Remember the way. And the truth of the teachings. And the life found through working with those teachings and trying to live them into touchable holiness.

Because we are powerful when we open ourselves to the gift of living holy love. Powerful beyond our imagining in ways we cannot imagine.

Anne Lamott, in her new book Plan B, tells the story of a woman who knew the power of Jesus’ promises.

Lamott tells a story about a woman who is a member of her church and a friend. The woman’s name is Anne. She is an ardent activist who “sometimes sounded like a mad Old Testament prophet, beseeching (her church) to tend to the starving people of the world, to save the rain forest.” She made some people nervous with her political passion. She also made people nervous because she had only one hand. And when she was getting emphatic about her views, she would wave her stump for emphasis. She was, Lamott says, like your craziest aunt, the religious one with funny eyes who drinks.

She fell prey to a reoccurrence of cancer. She shared her pain and struggle with her church during times of prayer, but always shared the message that God loved the world, all evidence to the contrary, and we must not give up on God.

Lamott asked her to come and talk to her Sunday school class about her faith. The kids ranged in age from 5 years old to 12.

As she sat with them, she asked them if they noticed anything unusual about her. They finally got over their politeness and mentioned her stump. And so she let them examine the stump up close.

The kids studied it with fearless attention. She told them about how her mom was a military chemist who found her one handed state disgusting. She told them how lonely she was. She told them that the deal was that if she shared her mother’s bad opinion of her, she got to be in relationship with her mother. Otherwise, she was totally alone.

Until one day, Jesus came into the great emptiness.

“It happened when Anne was six or so. She was sitting on her rocking chair in her bedroom, when she suddenly noticed a baby’s face in the scar tissue. She wrapped the end of her arm in a scarf, swaddling it, so only the features in the scar tissue showed. “It looked like a doll,” she told the children. “And it was looking at me very, very gently.”

“It was me,” she told the children. “Both children were me. The six year old who was doing the mothering and the baby were both me. And I felt Jesus looking up at me, from inside the baby. And he was saying, ‘I’m sorry it turned out this way, but you are whole in my eyes.’

So I got me back, and in Jesus, I found a real mother.”

She went on:

“Having this paw made me notice how much suffering there is in the world. It makes me ask, “What’s that suffering about? What’s the answer?’ The suffering itself means nothing. But the answer is also that I can’t look away from it. I saw that God wanted me to help relieve the suffering. And that work has given me peace.”

Anne died a few months later. And festooning her coffin were pictures drawn by the children she had shared her life with. Her coffin, Lamott says, looked like a gift box. And so it was.

(Anne Lamott, Plan B pgs.209-211)

So…we are reassured by Jesus about our place in the embrace of God.

And we are told to put the power of those assurances to work. Because we know our place in the being of God, we are to claim our identity as people of the movement God.

We have tasted that our God is good.

So how do we live the meal? We who are more powerful in our spirit emboldened love saturated selves than we can even imagine.

Well, some of us demonstrate. Some of us write letters and pray. Some of us organize others and some of us volunteer in schools and food shelves and some of us are willing to look each other in the eye and see goodness there and some of us are utterly convinced that if the people of the Jesus movement would tap into even a smidgen of the power given us we could turn this world into a place where fear stalks with less power and love unfolds the grace for which so many in this world of abundance (literally) hunger.

May we know the gift of reassurance and may we not be afraid to live the gift of response.

Amen