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Dealing with Loneliness
A sermon by Dr.
Jesse Fletcher
First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, October 21, 2007
II Timothy 4:9-22
If you have your New Testament, perhaps you’d want to turn
with me to the text which is in the closing part of Second Timothy. This is
really almost the clean up, the addendum to this second letter that Paul wrote
to his protégé, Timothy. He’s finished with the teaching part of the letter.
This is more circumstantial and yet, I’m finding what I want to say in this
passage. Let me read it to you. I’m using the modern translation from The
Message.
“Get here as fast as you can. Demus, chasing fads, went off
to Thessalonica and left me here. Crescens is in Galatia province, Titus in
Dalmatia. Luke is the only one here with me. Bring Mark with you; he’ll be my
right hand since I’m sending Tychicus to Ephesus. Bring the winter coat I left
in Troas with Carpus; also the books and parchment notebooks. Watch out of
Alexander the coppersmith. Fiercely opposed to our message, he caused not end of
trouble. God will give him what he’s got coming.” That’s almost a “God’s going
to get you-type” statement by the way. We see a little bit of Paul’s edges, just
like we see our own. Scripture doesn’t hide them. Isn’t it amazing he can speak
such truth to us and still show his own humanity?
“At my preliminary hearing no one stood by me. They all ran
like scared rabbits. But it doesn’t matter—the Master stood by me and helped me
spread the Message loud and clear to those who had never heard it. I was
snatched from the jaws of the lion! God’s looking after me, keeping me safe in
the kingdom of heaven. All praise to him, praise forever, Oh yes! Say hello to
Priscilla and Aquilla; also, family of Onesiphorus. Erastus stayed behind in
Corinth. I had to leave Trophimus sick is Miletus. Try hard to get here before
winter. Eubulus, Pudens, Linus, Claudia, and all your friends here send
greetings. God be with you. And grace be with you.”
Timothy was writing here at the very end of his ministry.
In fact his martyrdom is very close. And you can just kind of feel a little bit
of this impending sense that it will soon be over and he’s reaching out. And I
think you’ll see in a moment why that’s so important.
Some of you may have been here last Sunday when I preached
on belonging. This sermon is now the rest of the story. Because not everybody
feels like they belong. A lot of people feel left out. They feel isolated. They
feel all alone. They’re lonely.
The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse: war, famine,
pestilence, disease do great damage to our civilizations and they have through
history. But I don’t know that they’ve done any more than loneliness has done.
Because somehow loneliness can reach into the heart of people isolated by
everything else and do its damage. And sometimes when it’s acted out there it
can be awful damaging as we’ve seen in a lot of high profile stories recently.
Loneliness is as probably as old as mankind and it pervades
every age. Even children feel that sense of loneliness. Sometimes it’s
circumstantial, they are just isolated. Sometimes it’s just part of where they
are, trying to grow up and getting a sense of what can be but they haven’t yet
realized it. And some of them have imaginary friends.
Now, I’m not going to ask for a show of hands for all you
that had imaginary friends when you were growing up. My daughter had one. His
name was Fearless Fly. We never saw him, of course. He lived in Melissa’s leg
and he would only come out at rare moments and usually when she was by herself.
We would know that Fearless Fly had appeared because we could hear Melissa
talking to him. She was a very precocious child and could speak very
articulately at a very early age and she told Fearless Fly nearly everything.
Sometimes by adolescence that loneliness can take totally
different turn. It’ll bring a young person to the place where life is not worth
living. I told you the story recently of a good friend that I lost years ago.
What I didn’t tell you is, just a few years later his only son took his life out
of the loneliness that came following the loss of his dad.
Adolescence can be a tough time, but the loneliness that
can come with it can make it extra tough. And yet adults are not immune to it.
In fact sometimes it’s in the throws being who we’re trying to be: our work
place, our home place or whatever our activities are that we feel the
loneliness, and we reach for something that will connect us.
Of course, aging has its own kind of loneliness because
loneliness is both circumstantial and relational. Circumstances can rob us of
the people that kept us from feeling lonely. All of sudden we look around and
there’s no one that can fill that particular role for us.
I remember hiking in the Smokey Mountains one time with
Judge Howard Bozeman from Knoxville. He took me up on the Appalachian Trail to
little out of the way places that I wouldn’t find just on my own. And I remember
one time we went to what had been a old home place and there was just a dying
apple tree and a few boards and the remains of a very small cabin, but it was
obvious that somebody had lived there in very isolated, lonely circumstances. I
tried to imagine what that kind of loneliness might be.
The great Swedish actress, Liv Ulman, once said that the
worst kind of loneliness is not the kind you feel when you’re isolated, it’s the
kind when you’re in the midst of people and you feel lonely.
That’s what this scripture is about. Paul is talking about
being lonely. He’s talking about the sense of loss that comes from people that
he cared about being gone. Some that had disappointed him, some that
circumstances had taken away, some that had relationally not turned out the way
he wanted to, and he’s confessing his loneliness.
Even our Lord had moments of loneliness. Now you may not
want to accept that, but remember that scripture says that he was tempted in all
points as we. He knew all the things that we have to deal with and one of the
things we have to deal with is loneliness. And he had to deal with it. In the
garden of Gethsemane he urged some of the disciples to come watch with him as he
tried to work through the things going on in his heart and they went to sleep.
He said, “Couldn’t you watch with me?” He felt that loneliness. And of course,
it reached a crescendo on the cross when he said, “My God, my God why hast thou
forsaken me?” Maybe it was something that he did for us. But the scripture
doesn’t shy away from the reality of loneliness. But the good news is, and this
is what the word Gospel means, good news. The good news is that what Christ did
gives us the ability to deal with loneliness. When he says, “I’m going to make
you free” and then, “free indeed.” He’s including loneliness. We get free of our
sin, we can get free of our mistakes, we can get free of our fears. We can get
free of our loneliness.
Last week I heard a little piece on the preacher from
Houston who’s gaining such notoriety named Joel Osteen. A very attractive,
articulate young man with a strikingly beautiful wife who helps in his ministry.
He preaches in a former sports arena and now and then they show pictures of that
thing and they have a crowd. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people and
the TV piece was wondering what’s the appeal. What draws people in to him? Why
are they coming? And a lot of people who’ve listened said, “Aw, it’s just
self-help stuff, it’s gospel-lite.” I don’t believe that. I believe he’s
preaching the Gospel. He’s preaching a word of encouragement, he’s reaching out
to people, he’s pulling them in, they can be with each other. I think he is
dealing with the things that Christ wants us to hear. I’m not trying to endorse
him. I hear lots of people that I think have something very special to say. I’m
just trying to say, anything that encourages, anything that can help us
experience the freedom came to bring us, I’m all for it.
Out of this passage, I see two things that can really
impact loneliness whenever we encounter it. Number one is I think it’s not
always about other people. I think we can be creatively alone. Paul is talking
about the victory he had in Christ by himself, when others had left.
How many times did Jesus draw apart to find his renewal.
Even the temptations that were difficult times came when he was off by himself.
Sometimes it’s when we are by ourselves that the most creative, integrating
things happen to us. A lot of people try to tell us that all life forms, of
which we assume we’re the highest, are self-organizing. There’s a principle, a
cellular principle that is self-organizing. Now if you’ve ever been in my study,
you would question that in my case. You’d say, “I don’t know if this guy’ll ever
get organized.” And times I feel like that self-organizing process is up against
its biggest challenge. But what it means by self organization is the move toward
being all together, integrating all of your experiences. Sometimes, it’s in
aloneness where we’ve got the best chance to do this—the result, integrity. We
can act in terms of who we really are. So, aloneness can be a creative kind of
aloneness that cannot only dispel loneliness but it can grant us some of the
best moments we can ever have. Generally speaking, most of what you’re hearing
from me Sunday after Sunday are things that go on in my life. Things that I hear
or I feel or I work out. But an awful lot of it comes where I draw aside and
just tried to ask God, “What is it I’m supposed to say to these folks when I get
there next Sunday?” Because I believe that some of that aloneness is where the
things that I need to hear are going to happen to me.
But there’s a second thing that we need to hear. Paul is
not only talking about the victories he had when he was alone, because there is
where he really felt the presence of God. In fact, the old monks of the medieval
period used to talk about practicing the presence of God. I don’t know whether
you need to practice it or not but you sure need to be aware of it and sometimes
that happens in aloneness. And Paul was saying, “In these victories I had when I
experienced God alone beside me, I may have had my best moments.”
But he does something else. This letter’s about something
else. He’s reaching out. He’s reaching out for Timothy. He’s reaching out for
Mark. What irony, back when the Christian mission began out of the little church
in Antioch when Paul and Barnabas were first set aside to begin the great
mission that took them into Asia Minor and on to Greece and Rome. Mark was with
them. But Mark got cold feet and left. And so when they started out the second
time and Barnabas wanted to take Mark, Paul said forget it, he had his chance.
He blew it. He may not have said it just exactly that way, but that was what he
meant. Mark didn’t get to go. Isn’t it ironic now, Mark’s so important? Paul’s
reaching for Mark. Don’t ever cut anybody off folks. You may need them. And they
may be important to you. And Mark became the writer of the earliest Gospel and
became the kind of person that Paul wanted to reach out to right here.
Who do you need to reach out to? Jesus reached out, again
and again, to those around him. He didn’t move into this world and through the
incarnate experience that led to the cross by himself. He reached out and
gathered people with him and it wasn’t just so that he could train them and
leave the task with them. He’s showing us that we all need people and we need to
reach out to those that we need. Because what we may really find is that they
need us. And this reaching out experience can be one of the most powerful
opportunities that any one of us will ever have. And the beautiful things about
both of these, if you want to deal with loneliness this way is that they’re in
your hands.
You see, so many lonely people feel victimized. They feel
things happened to them that they had no say over. A loved one is taken, they’re
isolated. An illness comes, they can’t get around anymore. They feel victimized;
things that they couldn’t control made them lonely. You control both of the
things I’m talking abut. Trying to practice a creative aloneness where you
develop a sense of the presence of God. Where you try to ask him to bring you
into what you really ought to be. You control that action. It may his working in
your life, but you can start, you can initiate. And this reaching out business,
you don’t wait for somebody to come rescue you. You’re not waiting for somebody
to come cure your loneliness. You’re not waiting until somebody spots your pain.
You’re reaching out. To me it’s a beautiful solution, inherent in the Gospel, of
becoming free. You know loneliness may be a little bit like fever and pain. It
may be the messenger that something is wrong and that you need to do something
about it, like make your aloneness count, like reach out to somebody. And if you
can do that, it may make all the difference.
Augustine was a great early Christian philosopher and
minister and he’s quoted so often, but one of his most famous statements, if I
can paraphrase it, is that we were made for the Lord, and our heart is restless
until it reposes in Him.
Next time you feel lonely, maybe you’re hearing the call of
God to recognize Him and sense His presence. A lot has been made out of some of
the revelations of Mother Theresa lately that during all this time that she was
being celebrated as such a saint, she was struggling with a sense of “no
God”—total abandonment, total absence. But you know what, during all that time
she kept reaching out. You don’t have to stay lonely.
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