In the Hand of Jesus [Easter 4C]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

John 10:22-30

In the Hand of Jesus

It just happens.  I suppose it can probably be explained – maybe with something like evolutionary biology.  Or maybe a chemist could describe the chemistry, the release of chemicals in one’s body.  Maybe it is an involuntary reaction to big heads, round eyes, and utter helplessness.  Perhaps it can be explained.  But I can’t, for the life of me, understand why someone would want to explain something so beautiful, so poetic, so mystical, so magical.  I have twice fallen in love in a hospital delivery room.

I will, of course, never forget the warrior in that room.  The mother of my children, who for some reason that I will never fully understand, decided to go through pregnancy, labor, and delivery a second time, even though she knew what she was getting into.  But I am glad she did.  Like a champion who had just run her course, she held those precious babies like they were trophies; her victory hard-fought, impossible, and yet possible.  The look on her face, sweaty, dazed, and somehow so peaceful: the result of way too much pain and the amazing rush of adrenaline that met her pain head-on.  She rested there, still, like an icon of the Holy Mother, having just experienced life and death and miracle.  And of course I looked at her and loved her in that moment, but by that time, I had already long loved her – years before the delivery room.

It was the babies with whom I fell in love.  Two little boys, two different rooms, two different points in time.  And yet somehow, those two moments, the two times I have witnessed human birth, are linked in my heart, cosmically connected – as if they were the same despite all of the many differences.  Perhaps joined by the mysterious power of love.

They entered this world, those tiny babies, in exactly the condition one might expect an explorer to arrive on a new shore: messy and battered and with tears in their eyes.  From their lungs burst a primal scream: announcing both the pain and the triumph of such profound change.

And in that flicker of emergence, it just happened: I fell in love.  We had no history, me and those babies, but also I had no choice: love just happened.  And perhaps that can be explained, but any attempt would be utterly profane.  Before they ever called out my name, ever wrapped a hug around my neck, before they even opened their eyes, I knew I would love them forever.  The love was entirely unearned – they had done nothing in this world – but also it was undeniable. 

That’s how it started.  They are no longer the babies that they were on the first day; they are now lives in the process of unfolding.  Every day they grow and change.  Time carries them along as it does me; it holds us at a distance that proves itself to be one of the few constants in this life.   And as they grow up and I grow older, they teach me about the dynamic quality of love – how love grows, but also how it bends and dances and steels itself against the trials that beat against our souls.  But what that love does not do is fade; it does not atrophy.  I know them much better than I did in that delivery room, and that is both good and not so good, and I still love them – not in a way that can be measured, but in a way that is just exactly true.

But I can assure you that that love has not made my life easier; in fact, it has made it much more complex.  The thing about such tremendous love is that it changes the look of the world – as if the same shadows that once were a source of welcomed shade now appear much more foreboding than I had previously noticed.  The stakes are much higher and so the world in which these children live feels much scarier.  Whether it always was the case, or if now I just pay more attention to the howl of the wind and depth of the darkness, I’m not really sure.  But I do think it is safe to say that the world into which we bring and send our children is not safe.  It is entirely too real.

Which is not to say we should hide away the ones we love.  There is so much beauty in this world; and it would be a shame to miss it.  But it is also the case that in this world, where such beautiful things happen, like birth, like love, like resurrection, terrible things also happen.  Violence stalks the innocent.  Hatred festers in the deep, untended wounds of racism and prejudice.  Despair erodes the human spirit.  Our children inherit a world in which beauty and tragedy are both true.    

This week we were once again reminded, by yet another school shooting, that our little ones know all too well the brokenness and evil that haunt this world.  The stain of trauma is tattooed on a generation that has grown up with the images of children fleeing from elementary schools, that has come to age sheltered in place.  And our hearts break for them and for yet another mother who will spend her Mother’s Day in mourning.

It would be understandable for us to give in to despair and hopelessness because of the violence of our world and the stunning efficiency with which that violence is visited on the children of God.  It is tempting for sure.  But I ask you to not allow the hopeless of this age to produce more hopeless in your heart.  Be honest about the pain that you feel.  Be honest about the significance of the challenge we face.  But do not believe the lies of despair. 

Today I want you to try your best to walk out of this place in hope.  Because that is what this world, what our nation, what our state needs.  People need to believe that the nightmares we read about in the newspaper are not the whole story.  People need to know that violence and death do not have the final word.

The Gospel truth is that nothing, not even the violence of a bullet, can ever snatch a little one from the hand of Jesus.  That is the Gospel truth.  The pain we feel is devastatingly real but we have a God who wipes away every tear from every crying eye.

We place our hope in the power of love, the power of love to overcome the power of evil.  Jesus is in love with every victim, every grieving parent, every weary soul holding desperately on to some sliver of hope.  Jesus is in love with you, and your broken heart and your fragile faith.

Our hope, the hope that we get to share beyond these doors, the hope that will beat back the flood of despair that plagues our world, is that nothing, nothing in all of creation, not even death, can ever separate us from the love of Jesus, nothing, nothing, nothing, can ever pry us from the palm of his hand.