Not Responding

Not Responding

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC April 3, 2015, Good Friday.

Text: Mark 15:33-39                                                              

 

----------------Silence---------------------------

 

Into silence, the uncomfortable silence, the panicked silence, the despairing silence—in the space of nothingness, the emptiness, the shifting and shuffling and tittering and jeering all around only raising our anxiety and growing despair—into silence we want a word.

 

At the bedside of a dying mother, son, sister, father, daughter, brother, partner, spouse…in our anguish we cry out to God—we want a word.

 

In the face of cancer, abuse, AIDS, addiction—as we watch bodies break and bleed and drain of life—we cry out to God…we want a word.

 

When we find ourselves shrouded by the darkness of depression, having lost even the will to live, when we wake each and every day to chronic pain, when we feel deep in our bones our own helplessness and hopelessness about our lives or the lives of our loved ones or about the life of the world…we cry out to God—we want a word.

 

What word do we want?  Maybe we want the magic word, the healing word, the word that will reverse or erase what has happened or what is happening.  Maybe we want the word of comfort—“There, there…everything will be alright.”…Maybe we want any word—any sign—that we are not alone, that we are not abandoned.

 

And yet, so often, no word comes.  The only message we receive: “Not Responding.” What we need is not appearing…  In that space of suffering and helplessness, our prayers and cries to God are met with silence.  No word comes.  And the silence feels so deep, so dark, so final, that the absence seems to swallow us whole.  In that moment when our “mouth is dried up… and [our] tongue sticks to [our] jaws” (Ps. 22:15)… Do we still cry out to God?  What do we say then?

 

“In a hospital somewhere an older deacon went to visit a dying woman for whom the doctors could do nothing more, and squeezing her hand he saw her starting to say something.  Too feeble to speak it out but with great effort she moved her lips and he, in order to make it easier for her, leaned over to get his ear above her mouth.  And he felt her breathe upon his cheek the words, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…’  And then she stopped.  But the deacon gave words to her emotion and continued aloud what he knew she was unable to speak, ‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.  He leadeth me beside still waters…’  And on to the end when upon finishing he knew she had breathed her last.”

 

As Jesus hung on the cross, betrayed, denied, abandoned—his body broken and bleeding—he cries out to God…and for the first time in his life, his cry is met with silence, with absence, with nothing.  What does he say then?

 

Some who stood there at the foot of the cross thought he cried for help from Elijah.  But the words that Jesus spoke were not his own…they were the words of the Psalmist—Psalm 22 as we number them.  With his dying breath, he called upon these words of lament and, if we were to place our ear near his mouth and speak the words he never got to finish, we would find ourselves saying:

 

O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.

Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.

In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them.

To you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame…

All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord;

And all the families of the nations shall worship before him.

For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations.

To him indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;

before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him.

Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord,

And proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.

(Psalm 22: 2-5, 27-31)

 

In the midst of ultimate suffering and pain, in the midst of abandonment and silence, Jesus begins to recite this Psalm.  And so when we realize the fullness of what Jesus spoke there on the cross, we hear him, not crying out in a despair that has turned away or given up on God.  Rather we hear the plaintive notes of a love song…Even in this moment of forsakenness, Jesus continues to love God.  Even in the midst of the silence, the abandonment—in that space of sin where God cannot dwell—Jesus still loves, still believes, still knows that God is his God.  Eli, Eli he cries…My God, My God…  In Jesus’ affliction, God was silent, absent.  There was in that moment no one there to love.  What had been infinite love is replaced in this moment with infinite distance.  And yet…and yet…

 

“What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final.  The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love, though it may only be with an infinitesimal part of itself…”[1]  On the cross, Jesus goes on loving in the emptiness and, through that miraculous love, spans the infinite distance between the nothingness of sin and suffering to touch again—or at least reach out to touch—the Love that in faith he believes will be there…if not now, then.

 

In the darkness, in the silence, in the forsakenness that we will all experience in our lives, we too can speak the words…can sing the love song of the cross.  It is precisely here that we can share most fully in the divine life.  It is here that we have the opportunity for faith to become real…Paul says, “Faith is the evidence of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1)—I would add that faith is also the evidence of things not heard…When there is no word, only silence, faith hears, faith sees…Fueled by love—or at least the yearning to love—faith will glimpse, will imagine a voice, the voice of Love… Faith sees and hears what is seemingly absent, what is not seen or heard, what is invisible.

 

In the silence, in our suffering, in our despair, what will we say?  Jesus—even in the moment of affliction and forsakenness said, “love.”  Surely, this was God’s Son.

---

[1] Simone Weil, Waiting for God, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951, p. 70.