More Than Not Your Fault
Communion
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we, too, are his offspring.’
“Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
Acts 17:22-31
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
John 14:15-21
“I will not leave you orphaned,” he said. It is Mother’s Day, and if your parents are no longer with us, maybe this hits differently today. If you never knew your parents, then his promise will really hit different.
It is Mother’s Day, and I can remember a time when I did not want parents. Embarrassingly, this lasted longer than high school. When I moved to Los Angeles in my early twenties, I was so happy to be my own person. I was so happy to be my full, authentic self. I had left the church, left my family for the other coast, left my ideas of God, left everything but that red Toyota Tercel that couldn’t make it past Texas without breaking down. After years and years of being a product of social systems I didn’t ask to be born in, I was so happy to do what Carl Jung called individuating, becoming my truer self, my own man. A struggling artist but a free bird.
My relationship to Christ was non-existent, and where it was existent, it was resentful. I remember actually thinking that I’m not gonna let myself be the prodigal son, not gonna be me. If I had ever gone to church, and if I had actually heard Jesus say, “I will not leave you orphaned,” it would not have been good news to me. In some ways, I didn’t want to be a son at all. If I didn’t have to worry about my parents feelings, then I could really live how I wanted, completely be me, no longer worrying about disappointing them. I used to think this was just a me thing or a twenties thing but some of us carry this a long time. Maybe you still do somewhere. If your parents are no longer with us, maybe this hits in a different way on days like today.
So I did the next best thing and lived like I was an orphan. We California transplants, we who move there, we either desperately remind ourselves we come from somewhere else, finding other transplants who carry deeper connections to us than the entertainment industry, or we desperately don’t want to come from anywhere at all, and sometimes it depends on the sunny afternoon. We all live on the internet now, and Los Angeles is almost like living on the internet in person—the most glamorous nowhere, the blank slate perfect weather with open-top possibilities for personal expression and fulfillment. It can feel quite alive, vibrant, in touch with truth. No real obligations to you, you don’t have real obligations to me, we’re just equal beings man, tolerating each other but not going out of the way for each other, climbing ladders, fully discipled in the bleeding edge of culture. Just spiritual orphans figuring it out. And it’s not just a California thing; because America has been fully Californized, we all live in the age of self-discovery, individual meaning-making, and if we don’t know that we come from somewhere, we live as if we were orphans with minimal responsibility to anyone.
This can seem to work well enough for many people, because at least it’s “free.” But underneath it all for me was loneliness. All the freedom, all the individuation, all the not wanting to be a product of a system or a church or a nation or God, it let me do what I want, but the price was loneliness. And I don’t know how lonely you have ever been. I don’t know if you feel lonely now in your life, including on this Mother’s Day. But there is a level of loneliness you can hit where you start to really believe it. You can be so lonely that it doesn’t even feel like belief, it just feels honest. It feels true. It feels real. That you are nobody to nobody.
But “I will not leave you orphaned,” he said.
I don’t know how many of us here have seen the movie Good Will Hunting, but there is a famous scene in it where Robin Williams is a therapist talking with a young Matt Damon, a janitor at MIT who grew up in the foster system, still wounded over the abandonment of his father long ago. In the most famous scene, Williams says over and over to the young man who has never lost the wounds of being a foster kid, “It’s not your fault.” “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” And it’s a beautiful scene because it’s sometimes the best the world can give us, simply telling us that when other people abandon us to pursue their own individualism, that it wasn’t our fault. We aren’t to blame for our pain. So many of us carry deep wounds around this. And no, we aren’t at fault for being abandoned. The even better miracle is that we aren’t abandoned at all. For he said, “I will not leave you orphaned.”
Last week we talked about commending our spirits to God in the same way Christ commended his spirit to his father on the cross, “Into your hands, O Father, I now commend my spirit.” (Luke 23:46) But before he commended his spirit to his Father, he was here, in a living room with his closest friends and followers, saying first, I commend my Holy Spirit to you. And as long as you are with me, you are also with God, and you are also with each other, and we are all together. And when all this is too long for Christians to say, we summarize it in a single word that we forget about its full meaning: communion.
Communion isn’t only when we partake in the Lord’s Supper. We are always in communion with the living God. He has never abandoned us, and he has never abandoned you.
First-century Athens was not 21st-century Los Angeles, the city of angels. But they were both cities of gods. Against all odds, Paul has found himself here in the marketplace of ideas, preaching the message he once tried to destroy. And here he is with all these free-thinking philosophers, after being a tent-maker throughout the empire for everyday citizens and their gods. As we heard in our reading today, he doesn’t say, “You have no idea what you’re talking about, you spiritually bankrupt degenerate narcissists” (maybe I sound like that). He says, “Athenians, what a spiritual people you are. I know your poetry. It has truth. And the God that you don’t know? Actually, I do know him. And you are his offspring. You are not orphans. You are part of his family.”
And Luke preserves these words for us and everyone in the ancient world because it’s for anyone who has been on a faith journey, anyone who “search[es] for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him--though indeed he is not far from each one of us.” (Acts 17:27). For anyone who feels like they aren’t lost because they’ve never been found, Paul says, “You don’t even realize it, but you already are in communion with him. For as your poets know in their guts, in him we live, and move, and have our being. Just by being alive, you are already in communion with God, and you didn’t even know it. And he has made himself so much more clear.”
Why still study the classics? Why still study the Greek gods? Not because anybody thinks they “really exist,” but because even as dead idols, they are still a strange expression of some part of humanity, still some piece of creation. The gods embody the good and the bad, the vices and virtues, and by peering into how those old Athenians worshipped, we still learn about what we worship. All that our culture worships—let’s be honest, all we worship—all our dead gods include some of these virtues, all things that have truth that is of God but become deformed apart from God and destructive when we crave them. Power, beauty, wisdom, courage, justice, Greek gods had all these things, twisted by power games and capricious whims. You can still see it today. Like the ancient Romans, we still serve these gods unconsciously, forces of spiritual nature to appease and make trades. And we can carry this habit and posture into our faith, making our Christianity transactional, thinking God wants to make a trade with us, my behavior for his love.
But the true God didn’t make a trade with us. He made a trade for us. And in giving his life for you, he gave you the gift of full communion. When we live out of our sin and disobey, it is not about breaking a trade, it’s about living in the lie that we are our own, that we don’t fully belong to him and we don’t fully belong to each other through him. But we are not our own. We belong to God. He did not leave you orphaned.
Jesus taught us that while the Christian life has many “do’s” and “don’ts,” it’s less about “do” and “don’t” than it is living in the truth of relationship. It’s about living in the knowledge that he gave us here in John 14, that if you are in Christ, Christ is in you. He is in God, and the Holy Spirit is helping all of this. The living God is in you, and you are alive because of him; you live because he lives. That is communion. Whenever we sin, we forget the truth of our communion. We forget our father, which makes us forget our brothers and sisters. But none of us are orphans. We are each other’s keeper.
Looking back, I was pretty dumb to go to a place called the city of angels to escape God. And try as I could, I couldn’t escape him. And however many times you’ve tried, you couldn’t either. And neither does your neighbor. Neither does your enemy. Sometimes, it can be hard and weird to be a Christian in an increasingly secular, and especially in a state where we are a minority in our towns. But if you remember that whether people know it or not, they are in communion with you and God, let that change how you see them. Let that shift something in you. Let that move you to curiosity about the piece of God’s truth that they worship. And by showing them the love of Jesus, help them feel the communion that they don’t know they’re a part of. And pray for them, for every time we pray for someone, we remember the truth that is the fullness of our communion.
So hold onto that word: communion. Grow in holiness by growing in obedience to the communion you are already in, in obedience to the love of the one whom you have committed your spirit to, but who first committed his spirit to you. Remember that before we knew who he was, he knew all of who we were, and that whoever we meet who thinks they don’t know him and are just total spiritual individuals, they do already know him in part, for in him we all move and live and have our being.
And no matter how real loneliness feels, do not believe the lie. He has told you, O mortal: “I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you. And because I live, you live.” Amen.
For more discussion of this week’s texts:
Loved this one, Joe. Thanks for the word.