Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Thursday, May 2, 2021, at 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher
Look for the Silver Lining!
“Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life.” (Collect, Easter V)
“Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God.” (John 4:7)
Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
One of the wonderful features of this year’s Sundays in Easter are the readings, not just from the Gospel of John, but also from the first Epistle of John, this latter being surely one of the greatest hymns to love in all literature. I have used the Message Bible’s translation this morning for its down-to-earth rendition of what love is. “Everyone who loves,” it states today, “is born of God and is in relationship to God.”
Such a beautiful thing. It’s not about what you believe, the opinions you hold or whether you are right or wrong. No, it’s about whether you love. And in that loving, whether you be a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim or, yes, an agnostic or atheist, you are in relationship to the most important thing…to God!
In fact, and there is the down side of the passage, and it is this: if you refuse to love, you don’t know the first thing about love. That’s pretty strong language, isn’t it? Because—and surely this is one of the wildest statements in scripture: “God is love.” So, John logically concludes, we cannot know God if we do not love.
How beautiful is that? And yet, as much as love is a pleasant, beautiful, even joyful thing, and as much as we have a lifelong insatiable need for it…we often withhold it from others. As a friend used to opine: “Everyone wants to be loved, but so few of us want to do the loving!”
And this withholding of love has, no doubt, a variety of reasons. We do not love when we feel unloved, either in general or by the one for whom we are withholding love. Someone hurts us, so we hurt back. Isn’t it remarkable how we live our lives in this kind of reciprocity? It’s natural, but it brings a lot of heartache. Love is withheld from us, so we withhold it from others.
But I do not wish to dwell today so much on the complexity of human relationships and how love is choked, blocked, and strained in all our hurts and resentments. God knows, this is the subject of many a discussion.
No, I want to discuss the things that eclipse our love of life, our gratitude for the commonest of things. This eclipse of love results from two major sourcs. The first source is from our feelings about ourselves. I am continually amazed by how so many of us who should know better, by age, maturity or training, hold ourselves in such critical, low regard. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves that can be more critical than those told by even our worst enemies. Many of us wouldn’t dare hug ourselves believing that we aren’t worth it. Is this not tragic? Think of what we are missing out on! Like a bad habit that we know isn’t good for us.
But there is a second source of that eclipse of love, not just our low regard for ourselves (shame on us!), but the gloomy assessments we can carry about how our lives are working out. These assessments can result from so many things: illness, for example. Goodness gracious, bodily aches and pains and chronic illness can take their toll and can, either temporarily or for the long haul, turn us into grouches.
And we can turn gloomy from staring too long at the circumstances of our world. Politics, the pandemic, global warming, nuclear weapons. We could add to this list for hours. Not exactly cheerful subjects, and we can give them such a negative spin that Chicken Little would blush and run from our pessimism.
This is why the messages in John, and indeed the message of Easter is such a restorative of sanity and cheerfulness. It encourages us to turn away from our painting of the world as dark, our opinions of the world as going to hell, and our gloompot assessment of our own lives. God is love, and, as John says, “you can’t know God if you don’t love.”
There is a beautiful song that can help me turn away from the dark moods that can overtake me. It goes like this:
As I wash my dishes, I’ll be following a plan
Til I see the brightness in every pot and pan
I am sure this point of view will ease the daily grind
So I’ll keep repeating in my mind:
Look for the silver lining
Whenever a cloud appears in the blue
Remember, somewhere the sun is shining
And so the right thing to do is make it shine for you
A heart, full of joy and gladness
Will always banish sadness and strife
So always look for the silver lining
And try to find the sunny side of life
So always look for the silver lining
And try to find the sunny side of life
Isn’t this something? That in washing the dishes, we look to see brightness in every pot and pan. Oh, how I wish I could live this adage more fully. Are there situations in your present where you spend more time worrying and agonizing over what has not yet happened than over enjoying the present moment? I can bet you that you have had plenty of such moments in the past. Times, that is, when your concern for something that had not yet happened consumed you to the point of frenzy.
I have had such moments for sure. Plenty of them. There is something about the mind that it tends to forecast doom and gloom. Sure, we look forward to a vacation or the birth of a grandchild, but more often than not, we think about the rain that’s coming, the republic that’s falling and the world that’s ending. Even Shakespeare failed to write tragedies as gloomy as those we tend to write in our heads.
But I wish to ask you to reflect on those gloomy prognostications from your past. Did they ever turn out as tragically as you thought they were going to? In fact, look again at such moments (pick out one particular occasion when you projected the worst). How bad did that moment turn out? Be honest. Ok, it may have turned out pretty poorly, but did you learn anything from it? Was there a silver lining in it? I bet there was. At least there has been in almost every case in my own life.
I could give you illustrations, things I had foreseen as ominous and bad that turned out not to have been so tragic. In fact—and here’s the point—those things sometimes turned out to be blessings, just the opposite of what I had imagined!
Look for the silver lining. Is this not good advice? It most surely is good advice in my case, for in retrospect almost always (I hestitate to say “always”) a beautiful blessing has emerged as my life has unfolded. So why not bring this advice and this experience into my lived life now?
So I need not just look for that silver lining as something in my future. I can live that silver lining now. Is this not what resurrection means? Easter is now. Love is now. Love is permanent. There is nothing to anticipate when love is in the picture. After all, among Christ’s parting words were, “Fear not, for I am with you always.” Always includes now.
As John says in our Epistle today: “God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry.”
Amen.