Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B

The Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B April 21, 2024 In 2023, the US Surgeon General issued a report titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The US Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Since then, Dr. Vivek Murthy has been traveling the country working to help us as a society to deal with this epidemic. Research has shown that loneliness—when people feel isolated, invisible, insignificant—has profound negative consequences for individual health, increasing a person’s risk “for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.” Now when the Surgeon General issues an advisory, it acts to call “the American people’s attention to an urgent public health issue and provides recommendations for how it should be addressed. Advisories are reserved for significant public health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” This loneliness epidemic is something that I’ve been pondering for a while now, looking for ways for the Church to help meet this need and offer tools of social connection that- when we have been at our best-we have cultivated over centuries. I’ll talk more about this in a minute. This week, the fourth week of Easter, we see a shift in our readings. In the first three weeks of Easter, our gospel readings have given us stories of Jesus’s encounters with his disciples after his resurrection. Today, we begin to hear Jesus’s teachings on intimacy with God (which will be our focus for the next four weeks). In today’s reading, Jesus compares individuals’ relationship with God to the relationship between a sheep and a shepherd. And one of the marks of a true or a genuine shepherd, Jesus says, is that he knows his sheep and his sheep know him. There is an intimacy in relationship that is suggested here, in the knowing and being known by God, and it is this intimate knowing that causes Jesus to lay down his life for all sheep and thus transform the very fabric of creation. So, I want you to reflect for a moment about what it means to be known by someone. We had a lovely discussion about this with the Wednesday healing service community. We talked about how we can be known by others, what that means to us, and how that impacts loneliness. We talked about how being known is a gift, how when we are known we feel cherished and how when we know someone else, we are given the opportunity to cherish them. We talked about the importance of showing up with our whole selves, about how being real with one another makes us vulnerable, but that is how we are truly known. Many talked about how hard it is to ask for help when we need it, but how that is another way of being known, and many also talked about how when people reach out (in a time of need or otherwise) that makes us feel known and loved. One person shared how she has felt loneliness at times when she knew there was a need, but she didn’t know how to reach out. And we talked about how there is this mystery to human connectedness, how the Holy Spirit shows up in the midst of us when we are our truest selves and about how sometimes we have to set ourselves aside to be fully present to another. The more we practice showing up before God and each other with our whole, true selves, the more we experience this knowing and being known, which is, I believe, the antidote for loneliness. But it’s not easy. It’s risky and maybe goes against what we’ve been taught, that we need to go through life protecting ourselves, armor on, only letting those whom we trust see our truest selves. So, how do we practice this being real, this knowing and being known by God and by others? Jesus models for us how to know and be known in his relationship with God. It is a relationship that is marked by trust, by listening, by faithfulness, by the willingness to give up his very self for the greater purpose of divine love and reconciliation for all. So to know and be known, there has to be an awareness of who we are in relationship with God and others, a willingness to see others as they truly are, and also a willingness to give up parts of our own agendas to love them how they need to be loved, to meet them where they need to be met. Here's one small example. We have so many people in this church who have cultivated deep friendships over many years. You look forward to seeing each other at church to sit together and catch up and spend time together. We also have lots of new people who are being sent to us by the Holy Spirit, people who are in search of a faith community and the meaningful relationships that come with that. Those of us who have been here a while need to be attentive to the opportunity to know and be known by those who are joining us; and we need to step out of our comfort zones and even step out of ourselves to meet them. I invite you to think about these ideas this week: how have you seen or experienced the loneliness epidemic in your life or community? What does it mean to you to be known? What’s interesting to me about the Surgeon General’s advisory and his work touring the country in talking about our loneliness epidemic is that we already have basic tools to help combat loneliness and strengthen relationships and communities. In our Wednesday conversation, I was amazed at how we were able to identify these key practices just in how we talked about times when we felt known. In the podcast titled Everything Happens with Kate Bowler in an episode titled Made to Belong , Dr. Murthy explains the 5 for 5 challenge that he has created to combat the loneliness epidemic in our country, and he talks about how, if we all begin doing this work of connecting, we can change the social fabric of our communities and our nation. His challenge is that each person take 5 actions over the next 5 days that will help you connect with someone else. There are 3 different ways you can connect. 1. By expressing your gratitude for someone. Tell them. Write them. Call them. Text them. What they mean to you or how you have been changed by them for the better. 2. By extending support to someone. Reach out to let someone know you’re thinking about them. Offer a stranger a simple kindness when the opportunity presents itself. 3. By asking for help. It is astoundingly simple! And each of us can be responsible for doing this work, for making a difference in our communities, for making peoples’ lives just a little less lonely. Five days. Five actions. 1. Express your gratitude for someone. 2. Extend support to someone. 3. Ask for help from someone. Will you try it? https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf https://katebowler.com/podcasts/made-to-belong/#transcript