Joy #1 in loneliness First UMC Carroll 2/3/19

Joy #1 in loneliness

First UMC Carroll

2/3/19

When the police arrived, James Lee was slumped over in a telephone booth with a bullet through his head. He had sent his story in a plain manila envelope to a reporter who tipped off the police, but they were too late.

In his pocket they found a child’s crayon drawing, much folded and worn. On it was written, “Please leave in my coat pocket. I want to have it buried with me.” The drawing was signed in childish print by his daughter, Shirley Lee, who had perished in a fire just five months before.  He wrote to the reporter that there was no family to attend his daughter’s funeral, since Shirley’s mother had been dead for several years and he had lost touch with all his family. Lee felt so lonely in his grief he asked total strangers to attend his daughter’s funeral, so she would have a nice service.

The heartbroken father continued, saying that all he had in life was gone and he felt so lonely. He gave his modest estate to the church his daughter had attended and said, “Maybe in ten or twenty years, someone will see one of the plaques and wonder who Shirley Ellen Lee was and say, ‘Someone must have loved her very, very much’" but he was convinced that there would be no one who would remember James Lee.

The U.S. Surgeon General says our greatest public health crisis is isolation. That is just how our culture has evolved. In the last 25 years

•            Evenings spent with friends, family dinners, and the average person’s willingness to meet new people is down 33%.

•            Inviting friends to our homes is down almost 50%.

•            The average American has two close friends down from 3 in 1985.  I’m not sure what the other guy did, but apparently, they got voted off the island.  At that rate of decline another 30 years we won’t have any friends. We will all just all by ourselves listening to sad country music on our earbuds.

•            Today most people don’t know their neighbors.  There’s the young couple across the street, the old lady next door, and the weird guy who apparently doesn’t own curtains but does like to dance around his living room by himself in his underwear. (by the way, if I just described you, the neighbors asked me to tell you that you should invest in curtains.)  Not knowing neighbors might seem strange to you, but to most people that is a reality. 

•            What do people do when they are lonely? They go to Starbucks where they sit at one of those little tables just big enough for one cup of coffee and put their earbuds in or sit staring into the screen of their phone while they pretend that they aren’t lonely any more.

•            Or they come to church expecting someone else to initiate a relationship. But because we are all just as lonely and just as afraid of them as they are of us, we all leave disappointed and still lonely.

Maybe you don’t feel lonely much.  But I think we all do sometimes. Maybe you feel forgotten, ignored, discounted, isolated… but I place that under the big heading of loneliness.

It would be no surprise for you to know that widows and widowers, divorced people, welfare recipients, single mothers, housewives, and the elderly make the top ten list of the loneliest groups on America. But get this… The American Insurance institute says college students top the list. That might be surprising, but maybe not when they leave their family and friends for the first time and enter such a radically different culture to make their own way on a day to day basis. Whatever our situation we all feel lonely at least from time to time and some of us chronically.

Loneliness is not new. Crazy Noah, you know the weird neighbor building a boat in his back yard, he knew loneliness. Weird Moses who always carried that stick with him for 40 years.  David tried to solve his loneliness by taking up with Bathsheba. That didn’t work out so well.

Jesus knew loneliness too. He was driven into the desert to be tempted for 40 days, he often retreated to lonely places to pray, he prayed “My God, why have you forsaken me.”  Jesus knew loneliness.

And so, we come to Paul who wrote the book of Philippians which is the subject of the next 5 weeks of sermons. It has been called the epistle of Joy. The words joy and rejoice, and their derivatives are used 16 times in 4 short chapters.

But did you know that Paul wrote Philippians from Jail? Yes, he was in jail, mostly all by himself. Timothy came for a last visit before he was to be executed. Epaphroditus tried to help, but that was about it. Separated from his friends in his favorite church in Philippi, Paul writes wrote them a letter saying how much he misses them, and how he may never see them because he is to be put to death. He had no wife. No kids. No grandkids. No home. No hometown. No home churches. He’s not near his friends, or other people for that matter except the guard at the door. He should be lonely, right?  Here is a guy who should be, by all accounts, absolutely depressed. Here’s a guy who should be absolutely without hope. He should have been the loneliest guy on the face of the earth… but he wasn’t. He was very alone, very isolated, cut off from virtually all his supports, but he was NOT lonely.

Listen….

“I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you”

Does that sound like a guy who is depressed and lonely? I don’t think so. People who are depressed and lonely don’t often “pray with JOY in every one of their prayers.”

There is a good reason for that. There is a good reason for Paul’s Joy even though he should be lonely.

I’m going to call it Christian Friendship. But don’t just take that at face value.  I want to describe what that means.

Christian friendship is washed in prayer. Christian Friendship is walking as partners. Christian Friendship is about perfection.

 Let me unpack those. Christian Friendship is washed in prayer. That means that even though Paul was far from his friends they were still close in prayer. That means that even when we feel like no one cares, if we have a Christian Friend we know we have someone who is praying for us. It means even when we feel powerless, we always have the power of prayer. It means that when all else seems lost, we are not lost because we are being cradled in the prayers of our friend. You can see already that Christian friendship as I use it is different from most friends. It is a relationship based in prayer.

 Paul writes. “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you” He writes, “It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart.” He continues “for all of you share in God’s grace with me,”

In part, Paul can have joy instead of loneliness in his desperate situation because he has Christian Friends and he knows they are praying for him just as he is praying for them.

Christian Friendship walk as partners. That means that even though Paul was far from his friends nothing could separate them. That means that even when we feel like no one cares, if we have a Christian Friend we know someone does and we are never alone. It means even when we feel most isolated, we need not feel lonely because whether they are physically present or not they are on our side.  It means that when all else seems lost, we are not lost because don’t take one step in life without our Christian Friends by our side.

Paul writes “I thank my God every time I remember you” and by implication every time he remembers that he is remembered. “because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now.” His Philippian friends always there, and never far away. “all of you share in God’s grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.”

 Christian Friendship is also about perfection. Now hear what I am saying.  I am not saying any of us are perfect, far from it. Perfection is a good Wesleyan term for the process of becoming the best child of God we can be. Christian friendship is about praying for one another, partnering with one another all to help the other person to be all that God wants them to be. They may surpass us in status.  They may become a better preacher or teacher or have a stronger faith. They may grow to have a stronger resistance to temptation than we do, but we are always seeking the best for them, and they are always seeking the best for us.

Paul writes “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.”

 He continues, this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

 If you had a friend like that, don’t you think it would be easier to face the isolation of modern life. Don’t you think it would be easier to make it through the dark nights. Don’t you think it would be easier to face life with Joy rather than desperate loneliness?  I do. I have a couple of friends like that. They are truly CHRISTIAN FRIENDS by this stricter definition I have offered. Washed in prayer. Walking as partners. Seeking perfection.

You may have a friend like that, but I am pretty sure many of you do not.

Do you know what… this is your best place to make those friends.

I have been impressed by the quality of relationships and caring I have seen here. I have said we have the advantages of a large church but the heart of a small church. I think we really care for one another… but do any of your friendships here qualify as Christian friendships? Washed in prayer. Walking as partners. Seeking perfection?

If you are not in that kind of relationship, this is the place to make those friends.  But we have to do it on purpose.

We have to seek out someone with whom we feel that connection. We have to build that relationship. We have to covenant together to pray for one another, be partners in good times and bad, near and far, and always be seeking the best for the other person.

I have heard one thing that troubles me in the last 7 months. When I ask, “who was that person sitting next to you” I often get the answer “I don’t know a lot of people here.” When I ask if they know so and so, I get “I only know a few people here.”  We can’t even get started on being Christian friends if we don’t know each other’s names. I was hoping to have talked to the council about this before this sermon, but the meeting was postponed until this week because of the cold.  But this Wednesday I will be suggesting that we would benefit from going back to name tags.  I know you used to have them and they just kind of petered out.  But if we want to make a commitment to relationships and being the best Christian friends we can be, the first step is knowing one another’s names.  Not everyone will want to wear one, but those who do will be extending an open hand inviting others to enter into Christian friendship.

Until we do that… and it will take a little while if the council approves… until we get name tags, I want to hear a lot of people saying things like “I see you every week, but I don’t think I know you.” No one will be offended, chances are they would like to know your name too. Start building those relationships. Start seeking out those Christian friendships. Because it is in having good solid Christian friendship that along with Paul we will experience REVOLUTIONARY JOY.