A Sermon for Epiphany 5 (Year B) Parish of the South Coast

 Sermon for Epiphany 5 Feb 4 2024

‘He departed and went to a lonely place, and prayed there’

Sometimes the Greek word ‘lonely’ is translated as ‘desolate.’ Loneliness and desolation are powerfully evocative. Perhaps at this moment you are feeling a sense of loneliness or reminded of an experience of desolation when you felt alone and isolated. Despair is never too far away and often adding to that sense that sense of being overcome or overwhelmed.

Jesus departs and disappears. In Mark the disciples search for him and in Luke it is the crowds hungry for healing. Why are you here Jesus? Why are you indeed in this God forsaken place? Why are you as the poet Yeats’s put it ‘in the rag and bone shop of the heart’ (‘Desertion of the Circus Animals’)

‘He departed and went to a lonely place, and prayed there’

At the Royal Adelaide Hospital I convened a small group that sat for twenty minutes or so in the sacred space on level three. We were very much interfaith, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Atheist, several Christians and a Quaker who came regularly from outside the hospital community to support our Contemplation group.  There were nurses, allied health, health science, students, volunteers, patients, and visitors. No words were ever used and a timer ensured that no one had to watch the clock giving all ample time to move at the beginning of the next shift.

 

For me this time alone together with others was a powerful time of healing and reconnection. It was for me and others a way of being in solidarity with the desolation and loneliness that so many experience during their admission as well as renew strength and focus for our compassionate and creative work in the hospital. Pierre Lacout the Swiss Carmelite priest who became a Quaker writes

‘A soul gathered in silent worship is never alone with God.  It is always in communion with the souls of all other worshippers; its silence plunges it into that Inward Light which lightens every person’ (p10 God is silence)

When I am most truly alone, I’m one with all’ says the Benedictine monk Brother David Stendl-Rast.

It seems strange to suggest that the antidote to loneliness and desolation is to be alone yet in a conscious communion and connection to the living breathing cosmos and indeed to our own bodies.

In our loneliness and longing we say that Jesus has got there first and makes us welcome. In the story he does not return but with his students moves to a new place where he is unknown so that the healing medicine of the Gospel may become manifest. We too are taken to a new place, not physically but in our perception of life.

Let us fly alone to the Alone as Plotinus wrote. May the Divine Presence cool the fever of our desires and raise and restore us to the place of wisdom. May the gift and grace of silent prayer draw us closer for the sake of the world and unite us whatever our faith and philosophy in the practice of fearless compassion