A sermon on John 14:15-21 & Acts 17:22-31 by Cheryl Williams
In a leafy suburb in Geelong the landscape is dominated by a very large building which is now a school and housing estate. When I was a kid, we all knew it was the place where the ‘unfortunate’ children lived, St Augustine’s Orphanage. It closed long ago with many of its secrets, some terrible things happened there within its walls, like in many orphanages. At one time Australia had 800 orphanages and some of them housed hundreds of children, children whose parents had died, or whose parents couldn’t look after them. UNICEF estimates that there are more than 153 million orphans worldwide. They in their own way must wonder what will happen to them, who will look after them, who will stand alongside them.
I worked with some women who had lived in such places and were traumatized by the experience, even though they left those institutions at about 15 years old, and were now in their eighties, they were still scarred by what happened. I have heard stories of them having to clean floors with toothbrushes, being punished for wetting the bed as children, being smacked or belted and feeling so alone. Some were in there because parents had died, my mother’s cousins were in there because their parents had separated, and they needed to live somewhere until their mother could get back on her feet. Sometimes siblings were separated. One woman cried with me when I gave her a Christmas hamper one year and explained, because she grew up in an orphanage, she had never received a Christmas present. For another woman it was her safe place.
There was and is an enormous stigma associated with being in an orphanage, being an orphan. There is a group who helps people who left these places decades ago called the ‘Forgotten Australians’ and they remind us of the trauma that is triggered in their old age. The sound of keys clanking together reminds them of being locked in rooms, the smell of disinfectant reminds them of cleaning on their hands and knees – these are things they now experience in hospitals and aged care facilities and which retraumatize them.
I guess one of the most famous orphans we think of is Oliver Twist. Oliver, orphaned as an infant, is raised in a workhouse, which was really just a child labour factory. The children received little food and they would draw lots to ask for extra food or gruel. One day it was Oliver’s turn, and we all remember those famous words – ‘more please’ – a riot ensues, and Oliver is sent away. He then gets into a fight and escapes to London. There he falls in with a group of thieves and is trained by Fagan as a pickpocket – not unusual in Victorian England.
I became an orphan in 2018 when my Dad died. However, many years earlier I was rudely confronted with the idea. My mother had just died, and I was as at BUV meeting, and some older women had just found out. One of them who I knew quite well, simply announced ‘well now you are an orphan’! I was horrified, I was hurt, my grief returned, I was reminded of my vulnerability. I was hurt not just because of her lack of empathy, but because of the stigma associated with being an orphan. Another reason for my indignation was, that I wasn’t an orphan, as my Dad was still alive and relatively well, considering he had just lost his wife of almost fifty ears. I guess I was confronted with a sense of abandonment, of being alone and lonely, of my mortality.
Not long after that event, I had been at a long and frustrating BUV Executive Council meeting and when I got home, I was deciding if I would resign from the Council or not. The phone rang, I thought it was going to be another council member checking to see how I was. No, it was Uncle Theyo, now Uncle Theyo was calling from Nagaland in Northeast India, and I had hosted him about seven years previously when he had attend a Baptist conference in Melbourne. He was an important man in Nagaland, a politician and when he was here, I had introduced him to my family and to the beach. (Nagaland is landlocked). He had just found out from somebody else that my mother had died. He was calling to offer his condolences, to tell me that he also missed her and then he said he just wanted me to know that I wasn’t alone, he and his family were with me! What a contrast to the other woman’s words. Not an orphan but one who was loved by others across the miles. Little orphan Biddy (a name my mum called me) was not orphaned, God had placed people in my life, even on the other side of the world, who reminded me I was not alone. This is a little bit of what I think Jesus is trying to tell his disciples.
The bible is clear on the need to care for the orphans and widows. The Psalmist reminds us that God relieves the ‘fatherless and the widow’ (Psalm 146:9). And in my experience, I can see why. For many this experience is intensely painful and as Oliver teaches us as well as the experience of ‘forgotten Australians’ ripe for exploitation.
I imagine the pain of the orphan is matched by the one who is doing the leaving. Jesus understands this, he knows his leaving will distress his followers, and might I say distress him as well. This experience will be akin to being orphaned. In our reading today he goes to great lengths to remind his followers that they will not be abandoned, alone, unable to connect with each other even after he has left. He tells them of his gift, the gift of the Spirit, the gift of God’s abiding presence to comfort, to enlighten, guide, instruct, defend and advocate for us forever. We are not alone. Jesus will be absent and yet present, we will be adopted, belong, know security and be loved, as we become part of this world-wide family of God.
Paul too knew this, that God does not abandon us. In Athens confronted by many religious statues and a memorial stone to the ‘unknown God’, he knew his God was different. Paul’s God was known, was present, was intimate, was living and never aloof. We are offspring he says, not orphans. We are not alone or orphaned. The one who creates, loves, reconciles, shows us the way to truth, shows us the way into the future is an abiding presence with us.
Like Uncle Theyo reminded me, we are not alone, we are loved. As Gustavo Gutierrez observes it is the abiding presence of the Spirit that enables us to be the children of God, God’s offspring and not orphans.
However, there is more to this relationship, it is two way. It is a relationship and just as we are loved, we are called to love. Keeping God’s commands is always about love – love of God and love of neighbour. It is a community of love.
This kind of love means we cannot allow others to live as orphans, to live in distress and pain, to live ostracized or traumatized, to live lonely lives, to live in such way that they feel abandoned or without hope. This should affect the way we welcome asylum seekers, who acutely feel a sense of abandonment. It should affect the way in which we welcome in the homeless. It should affect the way we embrace those battling addictions. It should affect the way we treat those exploited by others or by the system. It must affect the way we try to understand those who have been abused. Together we are offspring and not orphans.
We are not alone, in God we have life, love and being and because of that we cannot allow others to be crippled by feeling alone, but it is hard. In Leunig’s words – we are called to love one another, it is as easy and as hard as that. Amen.
3 Comments
In the 1970s I had the privilege of volunteering at a Home for Children under the management and care of the religious Sisters of Mercy, a large Roman catholic teaching, nursing and welfare provider. They employed professionally trained religious and lay staff. It had been called an Orphanage for most of its life but by 1970 it was mainly a home for children of separated parents who needed support in caring for their children. The children soon made it clear that they did not live in an orphanage! The Home by that time was home to under 100 children ( including infants). In its heyday the population of children exceeded more than 500 plus. Once it had been geographically isolated and isolated in so many others ways too. Thankfully in the 1970s the children were being sent to schools in surrounding suburbs rather than being confined on site 24/7. Also beginning was the process of setting up “Group homes” in suburban homes under the care of “House parents”. Not withstanding these improvements. the basic issue remained – who is best to care for the children – “blood relatives” or ” external providers to the family”? In 1970s the care was excellent but one could not get beyond the desire for everyone to reunite blood family under the same roof. Some days the emotional temperature was very high with different children and adolescents over this obvious impasse. Today we live with de-institutionalisation and the opposite issue arise- is there enough care for children housed with a parent who has trouble coping across the whole spectrum of need. Coming from a family of 14 siblings, I and my siblings and parents are all so grateful that we all could grow up together. No so with many other families.
So whenever I come to this reading from John about “orphans”, like Cheryl, I am drawn to it as i am sure most of us are. I am also drawn to the reading from Acts and the experience of St Paul. It is my key passage whenever I do what i am doing now – writing to you about the Word of God!. I write to share and converse, not becasue I think I am in anyway credentialled beyond your own abilities. That is why I love describing myself in the saem word that was applied as an insult to St paul in Acts chapter 17 verse 18. In some translations Paul is mockingly called a “chatterer” but in the Greek the word ( spermalogos) is more accurately translated as a “seed-picker”. It referenced birds who went around seking out scraps on the hround, usually wheat left over in the fieled. It could also refer to lay abouts in the marketplace who listened for all bits of gossip and used it to garner a subsistence existence. Paul was being called someone who just put a whole lot of meaningless ideas toegther and tried to conjure up one big idea to impress the Greek audience. So be careful – I might be doing no better! Curiously our lectionary today stops at verse Acts 17(31) and odes not go to verse 32 where some doubted but others were prepared to hear Paul further on the matter he raised…a preposterous matter of resurrection!. Paul was like so many orphans who have had to contend with disadvantage from their earliest years but never gave up the challenge.
And so John, who must have grown up in a society where being an orphan was so tough, uses that expression to build the foundation for the departure of Jesus – we are NOT to be Orphans. One of John’s key themes is “light”. Jesus is called the Light of the World in his gospel. The greek word for “orphan” means ” no – light” ie ” or-phanos”. An orphan is one who has no light, is blinded in their existence. John tells us that Jesus is Light and if we follow Jesus we will always have Light. This even when he is about to depart and leave us something quite mysterious – a Promise of a Consoler, an Advoctae, a Paraclete. I wonder what Paul was thinking when he went to Athens. I wonder if he knew what John would one day commit to paper. I wonder if paul fely orphaned that day in athens, not yet having read John’s gospel which was 60 years in the future!. What was the Community that Paul lived in that allowed Paul to speak with so much boldness ( parrhesia). Luke was also to write his Gospel- a Gospel which many scholares used to say was written steeped in greek culture. It is Luke who has the commanding story of the Ascension- the withdrawal of the Risen christ to heaven- and the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost in an experience that sounds like a large group praying in tongues and singing psalms of praise- so loudly that it sounded like a rushing wind and so strangely that onlookers thought they were drunk. Little wonder that at time s as a christian I feel the distance of God- as someone said – God’s presence is not proximity! Dwell on that phrase and live with Catholics for whom the Consecrated Bread and Wine is Jesus’ substantial presence- coincidentally a Greek based phrasing. Come to my church tradition and you enter a very strange and alienating world. John’s promise that I will not be orphaned is very important to me.
Thank you for this sermon – After my mother died a lady at work said the same thing to me -“What is it like to be and orphan? I too was shocked although for me it was true – my father had died 10 years earlier but it had not occurred to me. I still also remember the day when Merryl Kitchen was preaching at Rosanna Baptist on the John passage and she said “You are not an orphan” and suddenly those 2 stories came together for me and I knew I was not orphaned – I i remember them as clearly now as i did when they were first said almost 30 years ago – so thank you for reminding me
After my mother died, a lady at work asked me the same question – “What is it like to be an orphan? and like you it took me by surprise as I did not consider myself an orphan – even though it was true as my father had died about 10 years earlier. It was Meryl Kitchen when she preached at Rosanna that answered that read that passage beginning with the words “You are not an orphan,,,,” We are part of “a community of love.” and as such as “we cannot allow others to live as orphans, “