“I Can Feel the Tug”

“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. 

I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.

So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”

(John 10:15b - 16)

 

You, who have fished other oceans, ever longed for by souls who are waiting, my loving friend, as thus you call me.  O Lord, with your eyes you have searched me, and while smiling have spoken my name,

now my boat’s left on the shoreline behind me, by your side I will seek other seas. 

(“Lord, You Have Come to the Lakeshore,” Cesareo Gabarain)

 

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 4, 2008

Volume 2 Number 43

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

 

A child leaves the city and walks across the valley to a hill where he sets his kite flying high, gazing upward, holding its string tight.  As clouds move in the brightly colored kite becomes hidden by a darkening sky.  Still, the child clutches the string of his kite, now risen out of sight, far above the clouds.  Eventually, the child grows older and hands the kite to his child, who after many years passes the kite to his child, and he in turn to his, until one day a man approaches a boy holding tight to a string that reaches to the clouds and asks, “Boy, what are you doing?”

 

“I’m flying a kite.”

 

“How can you be certain?  Have you ever seen this kite?  I believe you are simply holding a string to the clouds.  The clouds are real.  I can see them.  But I can’t see the kite.” 

 

Replied the boy, “No, sir, I’ve never seen my kite, but I know the kite is there.”

 

“How do you know?”  

 

The boy says, “I know there is a kite because I can feel the tug.”

 

So it is that the church, through 2000 years of waiting, can feel the tug of their Lord, whose Absence has created a deep Yearning in their hearts.  These themes of Absence and Yearning are expressed in Cesareo Gabarain’s hymn with which we will end our service this morning, “You who have fished other oceans, ever longed for by souls who are waiting.”  

 

The rhythm of our church’s liturgy recognizes that the Absence which has produced this tug upon the hearts of believers began on the day of Ascension, forty days after the resurrection.  So, this Thursday was Ascension Thursday, concluding the forty days since Easter in which the risen Christ is said to have made appearances to his disciples.  Add another ten days, ending on Pentecost Sunday, and we have what we call the Great Fifty Days of Easter. 

 

Ascension Thursday casts the church in a mode of waiting, of increased Yearning, a spiritual hunger passed through the generations from parent to child.  Though 2000 years have passed and clouds have obscured the view of what we have never seen with our eyes, still the church has held on to that string, possessed of a Yearning for Christ. 

 

When those come – as they surely have and will -- who ask, “What are you doing? How can you be certain? I believe there is no risen Christ.  I believe this string you think you are holding is merely a way to help you cope with the clouds of life,” we reply, “I know that Christ lives, and that Christ will come again.  I know this, because I can feel the tug.”   This mystery of our faith we will confess in the liturgy of Holy Communion in a few moments -- Christ has died.  Christ is Risen.  Christ will come again.

 

This Yearning the psalmist expresses in Psalm 42, “As a deer longs for the flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.  My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.  When shall I behold the face of God?”   This spiritual Longing for God is deepened, I think, not much in the study of doctrine and dogma, not so much by instruction and education, but as a part of our spiritual journey, through what John Wesley called the Means of Grace – the sacraments, the Word, prayer and meditation, and worship. 

 

The Means of Grace nurture our heart’s Yearning by calling us to engage the mysteries of God’s Presence.  I think they intensify especially at the end of our lives, often even in those who have in life little regarded and little observed the Means of Grace.  Thus Paul spoke in 2 Corinthians 4, that as our bodies waste away, our spirit is renewed.  What is this renewal but an intensified hunger for God?  Such Yearning gives us eyes to see a different reality?  “We look not on those things that can be seen, but on what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, and what cannot be seen is eternal.” 

 

Yearning for one who is absent acknowledges that I was created for more than I can be alone.  In Yearning for one Absent, we recognize our incompleteness, as Augustine so famously expressed, “We were made for Thee, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”  When I miss someone, that tug of the heart is evidence that I have incorporated that person’s presence to an extent that I am incomplete without it.  

 

As Marc Gafni writes, such spiritual longing strips away our pretense of independence, even as it whispers our greatness, a greatness discovered in our incompleteness, our recognition that without the One who is Wholly Other, we cannot be whole.  It is the acknowledgment that ultimately this world with all of its wonder cannot satisfy our most intimate longings.  We cannot well describe it, but we know with all our being that it is there.  We can feel the tug. 

 

Sources and notes:

This sermon found its initial inspiration in an essay by Marc Gafni, “The Path of Yearning,” in PARABOLA (Summer 2006, Absence and Longing).