Clearance: Restocking Your Emotional Inventory – Loneliness

Clearance: Restocking Your Emotional Inventory – Loneliness
Sycamore Creek Church
September 25, 2011
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12
Tom Arthur

Peace, Friends!

Have you got any emotions you’d like to run on clearance?  Many of us have an overstock of some and some we’re a little short on.  Through this series, we’re running a clearance sale on several emotions and restocking our emotional inventories with something better.  Today we’re looking at the emotion of loneliness.

Of all the emotions we’ve looked at so far, this is the one that I struggle with the least often.  I tend to be somewhat introverted and sometimes I think I have too little time alone time!  But I do sometimes feel very alone when Sarah and Micah are both gone.  I feel like a lost puppy dog.  I try to go on a walk by myself, but I just feel alone.  I watch a lot more TV and stay up a lot later, because I don’t want to climb into bed alone.  Sometimes I even get into a little pity party for myself.

When talking about feeling alone, it is tempting to think that loneliness is just about being single.  I think there are actually three kinds of loneliness and only one of them has to do with being single. Those three types of loneliness are romantic loneliness, social loneliness, and spiritual loneliness.  Let’s look at each of them.

Romantic Loneliness

Romantic loneliness is the one we perhaps most often think about when we think about being alone. It has to do with a longing for a romantic or intimate relationship with one other person.  This might be a dating relationship or a married relationship.  Of course, not all people who are single are discontent with being single, but many people who are single long to not be single.

Another kind of romantic loneliness could be the loss of a loved one.  Becoming a widow or widower carries with it the loss of the companionship of a life-long partner.  When both my grandfathers died, I saw a change in both my grandmothers.  They were both a little less connected to this world and a little more focused on the next.  I think some of this had to do with romantic loneliness.

A third kind of romantic loneliness is being in a dating relationship or marriage that is dead or dying.  Whatever spark used to be there is gone.  Whatever trust or commitment that used to sustain the relationship has long past.  The time with this loved one used to be sustaining but now it is draining.  Loneliness settles in.  At this point it is very tempting to become a little too intimate with that co-worker who helps alleviate your loneliness.

Social Loneliness

Romantic loneliness isn’t the only kind of loneliness.  A second kind is social loneliness.  This has to do with feeling isolated from those around you whether friends, family, or the broader community.  For example, a single parent might feel alone because the demands of caring for her children keep her from nurturing the friendships that she once had.  Or there’s the loneliness of infertility while others around you are celebrating their children.  There’s also the social loneliness of being in a job you don’t like, working with people you’re not connecting to.  I think there can even be a social loneliness in church.  You hear me talk about having friendships that are authentic and where you take the mask off and stop posing, but you’ve never had a friendship like that.  You want friends like that and you come Sunday after Sunday but nothing’s clicking.  You still feel alone.

This kind of loneliness takes us back to our middle school cafeteria.  We get our lunch, and we’re holding our lunch tray, and we’re looking desperately for someone we know who we can sit with.  But instead of seeing a community of people who love and care for us, all we see is a sea of unknown or even scary faces.  Ever feel like that walking into church on Sunday morning?  So what happens when your church meets in a school cafeteria?!  Sycamore Creek Church hopes and so deeply desires to be the kind of community of people where you don’t feel like that, but we always have room to grow.

Spiritual Loneliness

There is a third kind of loneliness and that is spiritual loneliness.  This is the kind of loneliness when you feel separated from God.  This can happen for several reasons.  You’ve got questions like all of us, and sometimes those questions pile up and up and up and pretty soon you’re drowning in questions with no answers in sight.  God seems far away and distant. Or your questioning goes even deeper.  You’ve moved on to doubting.  Doubting is one possible response to the uncertainty in our life.  The other response is faith.  But you feel more like doubting right now than having faith.  And with that doubt and all those questions that pile up and up and up is a lack of any sense of peace or comfort from God.  You pray but feel like your words fall on a deaf universe.  There is no joy left in your spiritual life.  This kind of loneliness is perhaps the most profound of the three.

God’s Wisdom on Loneliness

Thankfully God has not left us alone in our loneliness.  God has provided some helpful handholds of wisdom to guide us through these emotions.  I’d like to run a clearance sale this morning on loneliness and restock that emotion with something better.  Let’s take a look at God’s wisdom and see what direction it gives us.

Throughout this series we’ve been looking at the book of Proverbs which is a book of short, pithy and wise sayings about all kinds of things in our lives.  But Proverbs isn’t the only book of wisdom in the Bible.  Another book of wisdom is Ecclesiastes which means “teacher.”  Overall this book makes the point that there’s not a lot in this life that you can count on.  It’s all like a vanishing wisp of smoke or fog.  But there are some things that are a little less vanishing than others.  Here’s a piece of God’s wisdom for us that speaks to the emotion of loneliness:

Two people can accomplish more than twice as much as one; they get a better return for their labor. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But people who are alone when they fall are in real trouble. And on a cold night, two under the same blanket can gain warmth from each other. But how can one be warm alone? A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 NLT

Doesn’t this describe the situation well?  When you feel alone you feel like you’ll fall and no one will be there to help you get back up.  You feel like you have to work doubly hard as everyone else.  You feel like you’re in some serious trouble.  You get cold easily.  You feel left out and wide open for attack.  That’s what it’s like to feel like you’re alone.

But there’s also in this passage the antidote to feeling alone: community.  God has been busy building community ever since the beginning of time.  God’s relationship with humanity has been less about a relationship with individuals and more about a relationship with communities.  Think about it: God created Adam and Eve.  God then called Abraham to begin a new nation.  God loved and wooed and guided and taught the people of Israel in all kinds of ways.  Then God entered into the story in Jesus, and what did Jesus do?  Jesus practiced community.  We’re going to look at that more fully in just a second.  Following Jesus there are all kinds of images of heaven in the Bible.  Every single one of them is communal in nature: a banquet, a city, a wedding.  Each of those images is a picture of the promises of heaven and the community therein, the absence of loneliness.

The temptation whenever we begin thinking about loneliness is always to point to marriage as a kind of solution for lonely people.  But remember that there are more kinds of loneliness than just romantic loneliness.  And if marriage was supposed to be the highest form of human community, then we’ve got a problem with Jesus. He was single!  But while Jesus was single and unmarried, he did have at least two practices of community that I want to share with you this morning.

Jesus’ Practices of Community

First, Jesus followed the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and actively built community around him by seeking out and calling twelve disciples or followers.  Why twelve?  I can think of at least two important reasons.  Twelve is probably about the max number of people we can have a real intimate relationship with.  We can have more acquaintances than that, but we really only have time to keep about twelve relationships running smoothly.  These twelve were Jesus’ small group.  The ones he kept closest tabs on.  The ones he poured the most time and energy into.

But another reason has to do with Jesus’ recreating or re-imagining the nation of Israel.  Jesus recognized that God always works in community, and so he was simply practicing God’s practices himself.  He was working not just in individuals but in communities of individuals.

Jesus’ second practice of community was taking regular times of solitude.  What?!  Yes, you heard me right.  I’m saying that Jesus practiced community by getting away from people and enjoying solitude.  This is a practice of community because it is nurturing community with God.

We read in several places that after being with groups of people he got away to be alone.  This isn’t loneliness but rather the practice of solitude, being alone with God.

As soon as Jesus heard the news [about John the Baptist’s execution], he went off by himself in a boat to a remote area to be alone.
Matthew 14:13 NLT

Afterward [of the feeding of the 5000] he went up into the hills by himself to pray. Night fell while he was there alone.
Matthew 14:23 NLT

Jesus is building community in these moments with the Father through the Holy Spirit.  God’s very own nature is community.  The Father and Son, Jesus, share in the friendship of the Holy Spirit and that community required time alone to nurture.

Jesus’ Loneliness

If we’re not careful here, we could end up thinking that Jesus never actually felt loneliness, but that wouldn’t be true.  Jesus felt a profound spiritual loneliness when he hung on the cross.  He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46 NLT). Wow, Jesus felt disconnected and isolated from God in that moment.  It’s a little hard for us to wrap our minds around, but it is perhaps easier for us to wrap our emotions around.  When we feel lonely, we know that Jesus, God’s very own son, felt lonely too.

Here’s the amazing part.  It was at this moment of intense loneliness that God worked powerfully to turn that loneliness upside down and throw wide open the doors for all of us to enter into community with God and one another.  On the cross, God through Jesus made something right that was before that moment wrong.  God healed a broken community and communion with God and one another.  At the lowest moment of loneliness God’s grace delivered us.  If God did that in and through Jesus, maybe God can use our loneliness in similarly powerful ways.

So what prepared Jesus so that his loneliness could be used in such a powerful way?  I’d like to suggest that Jesus was prepared by those two practices of community: having a small group of followers who did life together and having time away from everyone to be alone with God.

Your Practices

How do your practices of community compare to Jesus’ practices of community? How do your practices of community compare to God’s wisdom we read about in Ecclesiastes?

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to be in a small group.  If you walk into church every Sunday and join us for worship, and that’s all you do, it is likely that you will never connect with anyone on a deeper level.  You will not overcome your loneliness just by coming to worship.  You will only be able to run a clearance on loneliness and restock with community if you take the initiative like Jesus did to seek out a small group of followers to join.

But even that’s not enough.  Because when you join a small group, you can still wall yourself off from everyone else in the small group if you don’t open up and share about who you really are.  You’ve got to take the mask off with those people.  Otherwise the mask will keep you alone.

I received an email last week from a single person in our church.  This wasn’t in response to anything I had asked, it just kind of came out of the blue.  But it made my day.  I asked this person if I could share it and was given permission to do so.  Here’s a small part of the email:

I have grown spiritually more from small group participation than from anything else (bible study, church attendance, prayer, and other efforts at personal spiritual growth.)  I am a better Christian and closer to God because I admitted in my small group exactly who I was, my sins, my fears, my failures, and my hopes and dreams.  It was a safe place to let my habits, hurts, and hang-ups, be admitted and addressed.  These people who cared about me and didn’t judge me, gave me things I needed to think about.  Some of my beliefs and attitudes that were written in stone started crumbling.  Thank you God!

Wow!  Wow!  Wow!  Did you catch all that?  This person shares their sins, their fears, and their failures right alongside their hopes and dreams.  That’s a serious clearance sale on loneliness.  I love it!

Some of you say that we don’t have a small group that fits with your schedule.  Then find a friend or a couple of friends who can meet regularly with you.  Make your own.  We can only do so much as a church.  Sometimes you’ve got to take initiative on your own.  Some of you say that you’re too busy for a small group.  Well, then you’re too busy.  Period.  Here at SCC we believe that a small group is essential to spiritual growth. You will never grow fully into who God is calling you to become if you’re too busy to join some kind of small group.  Some of you say that you’re uncomfortable opening up to people who you’re not sure you trust yet.  How do you build trust if you don’t begin somewhere?  Ask God for the courage.

How is your practice of community with God?  When was the last time you spent time alone with God?  When was the last time you went on a retreat of solitude?  This too was one of Jesus’ practices, and if you’re too busy to spend time alone with God, well, then you’re just too busy.  You need to take a hard look at your life and with God’s help cut something out.  Saying you’re too busy to spend time alone with God is like saying you’re too busy to eat.  You will not grow.  You will wither away and spiritually die.  You will be alone.  Run a clearance sale on loneliness and replace it with time alone with God.

Images of Community

I have a friend who tells the story of why she began looking for a church.  Her husband had just had a major surgery, and he was at home recuperating when she had to travel for her business.  As she was leaving she told him, “If you have any trouble call…”  She didn’t know who to tell him to call, so she said, “Call security.”  They lived in a gated community.  It was that moment of loneliness which drove her eventually to the community of the church and ultimately to Christ. She says, “I came to the church looking for community and I found Christ.”

Contrast that story with Sarah and my experience of feeling a little lonely when we moved here to Lansing.  One of my first Sunday mornings here at Sycamore Creek Church, Sarah came down with a debilitating migraine.  Last time this had happened, I had to take her to the ER.  I didn’t know what to do.  She was on the floor in the bathroom throwing up, and I had to leave to go to church.  I barely knew any of you at that point.  I didn’t yet know who I could call at 6:30AM on a Sunday morning and ask for help.  So I picked up the phone and called the member of our church who lived the closest to us: Alice McKinstry.  I woke her up.  I told her what was going on.  She came right over.  That’s putting loneliness on clearance and restocking it with community.  But it took me opening up and saying I needed help.  It took me taking the initiative to seek it out.  And it took all of your work as a church developing community for eight years before I even got here.  Thank you church, for being the kind of community where I could call a stranger and receive help.  Now, do to one another as you have done to me.

Prayer

I’d like to pray for those who are struggling with loneliness.

God, loneliness sucks.  It’s the one emotion that isolates us from everyone else.  It’s so much easier to live through the hard stuff of life if we’re not alone.  Help us to be the kind of church where the lonely find community.  Help us to be the kind of people who take the initiative to seek out community.  Help us to be the kind of people who drop our defenses and take off our masks so that we can be true community to one another.  Help us to be the kind of people who seek community with you.  Give us courage when we don’t have it.  In Jesus’ name and by the power of his Spirit, Amen.