RECENT SERMONS

Jim Thomas’ Sermon — "Jesus Loves Me"

December 4, 2005

May our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.

My overwhelming feeling this morning is one of gratitude and thankfulness. And on behalf of Sally and myself I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you for the hundreds of cards that we’ve received, emails, phone calls, letters, food, flowers. You all have been so gracious and kind in our hour of grief.

Our granddaughter was stillborn two weeks ago today and that is our situation. And it is a difficult thing to go through but what I want to share with you this morning is my very simple faith, which is my strength, what I hold on to. My very simple faith: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

As I was baptizing that child and holding her in my arms one of the last things I said as I put the sign of the cross on her forehead, is "Josie, you are sealed in baptism of the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever."

And so are we. We are sealed in our baptism of the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. And as I was holding her I kept thinking of the story of Jairus’ daughter, how Jairus, the synagogue leader, had gone to Christ and asked Christ to come and heal his sick daughter. She was dead, and the scripture says that Jesus breathed the Spirit back into the child and the child woke up and I thought how I wished that I could do that; how I wished that I could somehow breathe the spirit of life back into the child.

Then I got to thinking, the way I can breathe life into anything is by doing two or three different things. The first is loving whatever it is that you want to breathe life into. The second is being present to the idea of the holy gospel and the scripture and we breathe life into each other when we discuss that, when we talk about it, when we pray and worship together.

In today’s gospel, John is preaching out in the wilderness. He’s kind of a rough guy and he’s baptizing people. He says "I will baptize you with water, but one is coming that will baptize you with the Holy Spirit." That means that there are better things to come. There are more wonderful things to come than we even know right now. That when we allow Christ to be at the very center of our being, then we become alive and find new life even in the face of death and suffering.

I think to really understand that we really need to understand Jesus’ relationship with God. And it’s interesting because I think Jesus looked around and thought "Well, now how can I explain. How can I explain this idea of having a relationship with God that is totally loving. A relationship where like a parent that, no matter what a kid does, no matter how snotty or rejecting or whatever the kid acts like, the parent still loves the child unconditionally.

And Jesus says "That’s as close as I can get, folks, to telling you how much God loves you. It’s easy for us all to think that God created us. God created this wonderful environment. I personally think we live in paradise here; this is so beautiful here. We see God’s creation around us all the time. It’s the next step to move into believing that God loves us and that no matter who we are or what we do we have a loving God who loves us with all heart, mind and soul. And we are that deeply loved. But it’s even one step further when we go to trusting God, trusting our life. I think that when we think of God as being loving and caring, and we think of God as creator, it’s easier to think of God as creator. And we think about God being loving.

But before we can really get to that point and really understand that, I think we have to deal with some subjects very honestly and sincerely, and just lay it out there. That’s what I’m going to do today, and that is the nature of suffering.

Now, there’s no way I can explain away suffering. And even if I had forty hours to sit here and talk to you about it, I don’t think I could explain it away, because the whole thing is a mystery. But I know that life involves suffering. In fact, Buddhism is really based on the idea that life is suffering and we must not get too attached to life, not get too attached to each other or whatever but to be able to take away ourselves out of the suffering. We do suffer. And we don’t understand it.

But I think there are some things to think about when we’re considering this whole thing of suffering and life and what it’s all about. And I think the first is that we have to admit that some of our suffering is brought on by ourselves. I mean, we don’t usually like to admit that. As some people say, had I known I would have lived this long I would have taken better care of myself. Or things like that. It’s a recognition of the idea that we do bring suffering on ourselves.

I am in no way blaming the victim, but, at the same time, we tend to victimize ourselves sometimes by what we do and set up consequences where we are going to suffer, and we know it, but we just keep doing our thing anyway.

I think the second thing is that suffering is an opportunity for us to grow. It’s not that we’re happy about suffering, but somehow suffering changes us. It somehow re-orients our priorities. It helps us to value this or that differently. It sometimes puts life or situations into perspective where we can see more clearly. Maybe we can see the way God sees things. But I’m not really sure about that.

Indeed, it is all a mystery.

I think another idea is that wherever there is love there is suffering. I don’t know of any situation where there is a lot of love poured into the situation without there being some suffering. It seems that loving anyone, anything, involves suffering in some way, because that suffering is a natural part of really wanting things to be a certain way, and they are another way. Wanting things to be here and they are there. Wanting things to be like this and they are like that.

So Christians pull together their idea of suffering, and their idea of Christ suffering also, and I think you get the point to where you can conceptualize God as being creator, and God as being loving. Then we can move to the trust in God. The God we can trust and put our lives into.

In the twelfth chapter of second Samuel there’s a story about David and David’s first child with Bathsheba who died shortly after it was born. David was flailing around and he was rolling on the ground and probably bumping his head on trees. The servants were really scared "Gosh, if he’s doing this and the child is still alive, what is he going to do when the child dies?!" Finally they come to him and they admit that the child is dead. David gets up, cleans himself off, goes into the temple and prays, comes back out and says, "I’m hungry, fix me something to eat."

And they said "What gives? You were flailing around when the child was alive but now that the child is gone you are acting pretty normal." Now I’m not too sure about my Hebrew, but I think my theology is correct on this, I think what David did was to say "Now I’ve got it. Now I understand that there will never be a day that the child will come to me, but there will be a day when I will go to the child.

"You see we are all related, and connected. We all share suffering and joy in this life. And life seems to run like a railroad track: there’s suffering and there’s joy and sometime they’re side by side.

This morning at 8 o’clock we had a baptism and I decided to preach this sermon anyway because I want us all to think about the idea that there is the joy, but there is the suffering. Sometimes we don’t realize that others are suffering also. For instance, in about one third of the cards and letters Sally and I have received people said "We have been there. We have lost a pregnancy. We have lost a child. We have lost a loved one." I think we tend to kind of suffer in silence and loneliness until we realize that there are many others that are suffering also and have suffered.

There’s that story about the young mother who’s just lost a child and she went to the Buddha and said I’m just suffering so bad I can’t stand it. I feel so lonely. Buddha says, "Go out into the village, talk to everyone you see, and try to find a family that has not lost a child." You see, the suffering is universal and it’s mysterious, and we don’t understand it.

But I have a simple faith: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

People have said to me, are you really willing to take that third step from creation to understanding God’s love to trusting God. And I say, "I’ve seen it and I’ve experienced enough in my life that I’m willing to chance it." I’ll leave the future and the heavy debates, and so forth, to those who know and like that sort of thing. Mine is a very simple faith: Jesus loves me, this I know.

Robert Frost wrote a poem entitled "Acquainted with the Night":

"I have been one acquainted with the night
I have walked out in rain, and back in rain
And I have out walked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane
And have past the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry came over
Houses from another street, but not to call me back
Or to say goodbye.
And one further at an unearthly height,
one luminary clock against the sky
proclaims the time was neither wrong nor right.
For I have been one acquainted with the night."

The good news is I’m also one acquainted with the light. The light of Jesus Christ shining and being among us. The light of the Holy Spirit abiding with us and among us. The light of Jesus Christ creating us, loving us, in whom we trust and in whom we put our future.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen

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