5 Easter A

April 20, 2008 

Acts 7:55-60

Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16

1 Peter 2:2-10

John 14:1-14

Little Abby, our new Welsh Terrier housemate (just now four months old), suffers a little separation anxiety when I leave her. Jane loaned me a few books about dog behavior so I looked up what to do about separation anxiety. I’ve done what the book suggested and it’s working. What I hope to teach Abby, to minimize her separation anxiety, is that I go away. Often. But then I come back to her. When she accepts that and learns to expect it, she’ll be less anxious when I leave. I HOPE!

Separation from our loved ones effects us full-grown, two-legged creatures too. In this piece of John’s Gospel, Jesus addressed the separation his disciples would feel at his death ahead of time, before he left them. No doubt he hoped telling them he would come back to them would help their troubled hearts. Of course nothing he could say ahead of time could prevent a troubled heart when he died. A troubled or broken heart is the natural human response to being separated from those we love by death.

When Joseph’s jealous brothers sold him to gypsies and then told their father he was killed by a wild animal, Jacob tore his clothes, ripped them in two. That is a typical Old Testament response to the intense feeling of separation we feel when our loved ones die. It seems so appropriate to me.

Death may be the most weighty separation, but it’s not the only separation that troubles our hearts. I am filled with empathy for people whose children and grandchildren are in Iraq and other dangerous places. To me, that’s a persistent heartache they get little if any relief from until their loved ones come home. Speaking of home, there is a feeling of separation when we’re away from home or when we’re away from family members. It may not be the level of heartache but all is not well with us when we feel that separation. We may feel the angst of separation from meaningful work, from our purpose when one chapter of our lives has ended. Or when we are separated from good health in our bodies. My mother used to say people get irritable or weepy on the third day after surgery because our bodies feel the separation from the part that was removed. Even if we are better off without the diseased part, she said, our bodies still feel the separation.

It’s natural for humans (and little dogs too, I suppose) to want to avoid separation from whomever or whatever matters most to us. The disciples were no exception. They heard Jesus talk about going away. He already told them he was going to be betrayed, that he wouldn’t be with them much longer. Peter begged to go with him even if it meant he would die with Jesus.

Where we pick up the story today Thomas is troubled by talk of Jesus going away and then coming back. Jesus said to them, "You trust God, the Father, trust me as you trust the Father." Then he tried to convince them he was worthy of their trust. But he could not do it. After the disciples saw Jesus restore sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, cast out demons and raise Lazarus from death to life for heaven’s sake – after all they witnessed, Jesus still did not earn their trust that he was truly ONE with God the Father that he would return to them from death.

Parents tell their children trust has to be earned, that kids have to prove they are worthy of their parents’ trust. We grow up believing that. When in reality, trust is volitional. It is an act of the will. As creatures of free will we decide who we trust and who we don’t. It would be good if our volition was always informed by reason and experience, but it isn’t. Just as often our hearts dictate who we trust and who we don’t. If not our hearts, then our intuition.

I was seventeen years old, a senior in high school. I had a whole year’s experience driving a car by myself. Drove all around Little Rock, even went across the river to North Little Rock and back again. No accidents. No tickets. I got up early one morning before my Dad left for work and told him my boyfriend’s mother was sick in the hospital down in Crowley, Louisiana. I asked his permission to drive my little Toyota Corolla down there to see them. He got a look on his face that I was uncomfortably familiar with. He said he didn’t like the idea at all but he’d think about it and we would talk when he got home. And we did. We sat together and he said, "You know how much I love you, don’t you."

"Yes sir."

"If I say yes to you and anything happens to you on this trip I’ll never be able to forgive myself. And I really don’t know if I could live without you."

Then he told me a few things to do: get two new tires, get the oil changed, let him map out a course for me to follow and wear the seatbelt. I promised to do it all. Then he said, "Okay. I’m going to trust you to go down there and come back to me in one piece."

I did not have the driving experience to prove his trust was well placed. Reason could have told him that. Whether it was heart or intuition he decided to trust me to make the trip. So I went. On the way back I totaled the Toyota. I wasn’t hurt in the least. It doesn’t take much of a wreck to total a Corolla. And I did make it home in one piece.

My father’s ability to trust was tested. It was one thing to trust me to go away and come back again, the way I trusted him to do that every day. But, though I doubt he was aware of it, he also had to trust himself to be okay if I didn’t come back. That’s the trust the disciples weren’t able to muster. They believed everything they knew about God to be true. They even believed Jesus was the Messiah, the one sent by God. But they didn’t know what would happen to them if they were separated from Jesus by death. They didn’t trust themselves, little band of followers that they were, to be okay without their shepherd.

There is a close relationship between trusting God to be God, to do what God has always done, to keep promises and be present to the world God created in whatever way God chooses, and trusting yourself to be okay, to endure well all the separations and losses that come to your life. We cannot press God to earn our trust. We decide to give it. Like the chicken and the egg, I don’t know which comes first, whether we decide to trust God and then we are able to trust ourselves to persevere through the pain of separation, or the other way around. But by some mystery they are tied together. If we can live without the crippling fear of separation from the people, places and things that matter most to us, then we can know the peace of eternal life that Jesus passed through death to give us now in this life.