The Reverend John E. McGinn, Rector
Saint John’s Episcopal Church
Sandwich, Massachusetts 02563
April 27, 2008 6 Easter
The sermon for today is taken
from the Gospel according to John, chapter 14, verse 18.
This morning I want to focus
on the words, not from the Gospel that I read, but from the verses just prior
to that - the words from Jesus beginning on chapter 14, the 18th
verse: “I will not leave you desolate, I
will come to you. Before the world will not see me anymore,
but you will see me. Because I
live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father
and you in me and I am in you. Whoever
has my commandments and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father
and I too will love him and show myself to him.”
I want to ask you this
morning: Have you been living a desolate
life devoid of spiritual energy? Have
you been living as if you do not have a God who cares about you? Have you been wandering, lost in the world
embarrassed to admit your need of a savior?
If so, I need to introduce you to God again. I need to introduce to the one who loves you
with an everlasting love.
Now let me, this morning,
suggest some ways that people live a desolate life devoid of spiritual energy:
First of all, we are living
spiritually deprived if we are living as if we are not accountable for how we
spend our life. Now listen again to
Jesus’ words in this chapter 14: “Whoever
has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me.” Obedience is something we really don’t talk
much about in the modern church.
Everyone nowadays wants to do their own thing, but Jesus is quite clear. “If you know yourself to be a child of God,
then you will live like a child of God.”
Recently I discovered a
humorous fact about outlaws in the old West.
According to the editors of the book Outlaw Tales, there was a
well-documented technique that many famous outlaws of the old West used to get
away with their crimes. This technique
was often referred to as the “Quantrill technique” after a famous Civil War
general named William Clark Quantrill who fought for the Confederacy. After the war, many of his shell-shocked
soldiers turned to a life of crime. And
here’s how the Quantrill technique worked:
If you were an outlaw, there were five things that you should do:
1) In the course of committing a crime, loudly
declare a false identification. For
instance, if your name is Bill Jones, make you sure you yell at your victims,
“They’ll never catch old Frankie Popovich. Yeah, I’m too smart for the law.” Many famous outlaws used this technique with
great success throughout their criminal careers. Its effectiveness came from the fact that
back then there were no such things as DNA evidence, finger prints, cameras,
televisions or radios.
2) Falsely claim that your victim had in some
way injured your family. “This will
teach you not to shoot my brother, you sidewinder.” Citizens of old West often thought that
crimes done to avenge a family member were perfectly acceptable.
3) Leave a false trail. Announce that you are traveling North that night and then go South. Announce that you are meeting up with your
gang at the Pecos Saloon and then go to Sally’s Saloon instead.
4) Claim that your crimes were committed by an
imposter. In the days before photographs
and DNA evidence, this was a great way to create reasonable doubt in the
public’s mind. Outlaw Cullen Baker
committed numerous crimes, then took out an ad in his
local newspaper offering a reward for the capture of the criminal mastermind
who was impersonating him. Now that’s
chutzpa, or maybe I should say O. J. Simpson.
5) Immediately after committing a crime, ride
like the wind to some distant town and try to establish an alibi there.
That’s the Quantrill
technique in case any of you decide to embark on a life of crime. Human nature never changes; some people will
do anything to keep from being held accountable for their actions.
I read recently, which I
could not believe, that April 13th of this year was designated as
National Blame Somebody Else Day. Some
people are like that - it’s always somebody else’s fault.
But we are
accountable. We are part of a family,
the human family, God’s family; and being part of a family, we have responsibilities. We are to take care of our home, the
Earth. We are celebrating here today at
St. John’s Earth Day, and that helps to get at the whole idea that we need to
take care of our Earth. We are to take care of these precious bodies
that God has given us; we are to take care of one another; and we are
responsible for those weaker brothers and sisters who are not able to look out
for themselves. We are living as
spiritually desolate if we are living as if we are not accountable. And this is to say that we are spiritually
desolate if we are living as if we are the only one on Earth who matters.
There’s a wonderful old story
about a young man from Scotland who was admitted to Oxford University. He moved into a dormitory, and his mother
worried how he would get along with all those snobbish Brits in a strange
land. She gave him a call on the
telephone: “How do you find the English
students, Donald?” she asked. “Oh
mother,” he said, “They are strange and noisy people. The one on this side bangs his head against
the wall all night and won’t stop. The
one on that side screams and curses until the sun comes up at dawn.” “Oh Donald,” said his mother, “How do you put
up with such rude and noisy people? “I
ignore them, mother,” said Donald. “I
just sit here quietly each night playing my bagpipes.”
Well, no wonder his neighbors
were so disagreeable! Bagpipes playing
in the middle of the night have a way of making you that way, but that’s the
way some people are. They live as if
they were the only ones who matter. We
encounter them on the roads and in our office and maybe in our own family. In fact, maybe we are the ones who are
oblivious to our effect on others. We
have responsibilities to and for one another.
I think that’s what Earth Day is all about.
Did you hear about the man in
New York who was standing with his children waiting for a subway train when a
young man nearby had a seizure and fell down into the path of the oncoming
train? Seeing this young man’s predicament,
this total stranger responded by jumping down onto the tracks. He pulled the young man who was having the
seizure to the center of the tracks and put his body on top of the young
man. As the train passed over the top of
the two of them, the train came so close, it brushed grease onto the back of
the stranger’s sweatshirt, but both men were miraculously spared.
Thank God that there are
still people like that - people who will risk their lives for a stranger. They remind us that we are not alone - we
belong to a family - we are accountable - we have responsibilities for one
another.
But there’s another way that
we may live as spiritually alone. We are
living as spiritually deprived if we think we are alone in this world. We are not alone, of course. If we love Jesus, Jesus is with us.
Now, some of us can identify
with the stranger jumping onto the tracks to save a young man having a seizure,
but others of us may identify with the young man. We feel as if we are the ones who are
falling. We need someone who will save
us; and we do have someone who will save us.
“Do not despair whate’ere
betide,” says the old Gospel song, “God will take care of you.”
Jesus says in the Gospel of
John, “If you love me, you will obey what I command; and I will ask the Father,
and He will give another counselor to be with you forever, the spirit of
truth.” In some place the spirit is
called a comforter. The point is…we are
never alone; we are never without help.
As a child and even as an
adult I loved the Charlie Chaplin silent films.
In one of his films Chaplin plays a prisoner being transported to jail,
but his boat is shipwrecked. At the
film’s beginning he is sitting on a beach looking at an iron clasp around his
leg attaching him to a ball and chain.
The whole film shows him relating to this ball and chain, attempting to
escape its weight. First, he thinks he
will humor the ball and chain: “When its
guard is down I will dash away,” he said.
So he makes little jokes to distract the ball and chain, and then he
tries to run away from it only to fall into the sand. Scratching his head and
wondering what to and tries to walk away and again falls into the sand. As he becomes more thoughtful, his next
strategy is one of reason: “I know, I
will talk to it, I will reason with it.”
But again, down he goes into the sand.
Now at the end of his patience, he pretends that the ball and chain are
not there. He kicks sand over it, and
for a while it looks as if his problem has finally vanished; and thinking he
has solved this dilemma, he strides to the end of the chain and down he
goes. At this point the insight finally
dawns; and like a light turning on in Chaplin’s head, he realizes that he can’t
solve the problem alone. If he is going
to be helped, it has to come from the outside.
In the last scene, which is very powerful, he is seen looking upward in
a hope of rescue.
When we are
in times of distress, that is our hope as well. We are not by
ourselves. We are not alone in this
world. We have a Savior - a
Redeemer. Someone watches over us and
cares for us. Someone will counsel us
and comfort us. Jesus said, “I will not
leave you desolate; I will come to you.
If you love me, you will obey what I command; and I will ask the Father,
and He will give you another counselor to be with you forever, the spirit of
truth. And the world cannot accept Him,
because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him for He lives with
you and will be in you.”
And finally, we are living a
spiritually desolate life if we do not feel Jesus’ presence in our lives. Now, I have to be careful here…Christians
experience their faith in different ways.
Many devoted Christians never have what they would define as a dramatic
experience of the coming of Jesus into their lives. Jesus comes to us according to our own
personality and needs. Some of us
experience Jesus quite emotionally; others experience Jesus only as a calm
sense of reassurance. But Jesus tells us
we will know him when he lives in us.
All of us - you and I - need
to reconnect with God. We are not
spiritually alone; we should not live our life that way. We should not live as if we are not
accountable, as if we are the only ones who matter. At the same time, we shouldn’t live as if we
are all alone. Jesus has sent his Holy
Spirit as a counselor, as a comforter to give us strength, to give us power for
the living of these days. “I will not
leave you desolate; I will come to you.
If you love me, you will obey what I command, and I will ask the Father,
and He will give you another counselor to be with you forever, the spirit of
truth. The world cannot accept Him
because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him for He lives with
you and will be in you.”
We are not alone; we are part
of the family of God.
Amen