St. Luke’s / Prescott, AZ
The Rev. Mark Moline
Sunday February 22nd, 2009
Title: “Just Being There for Others”
Two week ago I preached about the Rule of St. Roberts and just how we as a parish and a diocese determine God’s will in our corporate lives as the Body of Christ. I spoke of our reluctance to wait for God – and our resistance to tabling issues until God’s will was made manifest to us. In that sermon we almost inadvertently brushed against the topic of mere presence. About whom we are as believers being at least as important as what we do. “Mere Pressence” is indeed a significant concept, but was not particularly crucial to that sermon about “waiting.” Today – on the other hand – with the Gospel story of Peter at the transfiguration and the Hebrew story of Elisha at the Rapture of Elijah, “Just being there – just showing up” takes on it’s true spiritual magnitude.
About 800 years prior to the time of Christ, Elisha had been Elijah student for ten years, and Elijah was ready to leave this life. God sent Elijah to the Jordan, via Jericho, via Bethel. Elijah tried to lose His student at each stop along the way. But Elisha would not go away, He remained with his teacher to the very end, saying, “As the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” Beautiful words to hear — “I will not leave you!”
He didn’t actually do much. He just sort of tagged along. He was simply there for Elijah and that mere presence brought him his credentials as a Prophet of God.
Peter served God in many ways. One of those ways, I’m Convinced, is to simply remind us of us. There he is up on the mountaintop with James and John, witnesses to the transfiguration of Christ. Jesus had requested his presence. Our old friend Elijah and then Moses appear with Jesus, and then Peter blurts out, “It is good we’re here, We will start constructing homes for you three.” He just had to be doing some thing, even if it was the wrong thing. Peter, don’t do anything, don’t even say anything – just be here and listen.
This reminds me of one great lesson taught me in seminary. I had entered seminary with the naïve expectation that I would actually learn a verbal formula for comforting those frightened and suffering and those devastated by grief. I thought that as a priest I would go out armed with just the right strategic words and passages drawn from Holy Scripture and with the most effective things to say to bring comfort and God’s blessing. As a police officer I always knew that I didn’t have the best words for those in need of spiritual and emotional care. All I could really do was to stand by and remain with the hurting person until competent professional care could arrive, usually in the form of a priest or minister. Then in seminary I learned that there are no magic words or little rituals in a caring pastor’s tool kit. When everything is said and done, it is simply his or her love and prayers and mere presence that helps at all.
Although reluctant at first, I think I eventually recognized and even applied this crucial teaching, but until my own pain and suffering came along — I don’t think I truly valued the spiritual significance and merit of meager human presence.
Of course this concept goes far beyond pastoral care to encompass the concept of Christian community itself. It involves you. However, I think suffering requires more than just the knowledge of community, it takes more than just knowing that people are praying for you. That certainly helps – God answers prayer – and is often the only thing we can do, but; this spiritual concept cries out for the presence of community – community that the sufferer can reach out and touch.
We shouldn’t be too astounded by this need, for mere human presence is the holy foundation of God’s own incarnation. God took on human form just to be with us. To be present! So that human-kind could reach out and touch the face of God. The longing and driven quest for God’s presence causes us at times to read scripture not for the information and guidance it offers, but for the discernment of the presence of a living God to be found there between the lines and amongst the words.
When we suffer we find a need for both divine community and human community and we need both of these to be present for us both in our pain and in our JOY. I realize we believe in an unseen God that must be worshipped in faith, but in the King James wording, God does send us the Holy Comforter. When the two meld together, that is the Holy Comforter and human community, when we can feel the presence of God in the presence of others we are greatly comforted.
When they removed my right kidney, I awoke in the darkness of the night, drugged, confused and frightened only to hear the sound of my thirty-four year old son asleep in the chair beside my hospital bed. During those moments all his life’s accomplishments mattered not in the least. What mattered was that he was there with me, and thus I was spared even the want to cry out, “My God, My God why have thou forsaken me?” In reflecting upon Christ’s abandonment upon the cross and in my son’s presence, I found God’s presence and love to be very real for me. I found that holy presence in my smiling, loving daughter who was there for me throughout the day and during the evenings, and I found God in the love and patience of my devoted wife. I found that presence in the priests who came to visit and bring me Holy Eucharist. I found that presence in friends who were there for me.
God bless you as you are there for others, as Elisha was there for Elijah, even as Peter was there for Jesus.
