A Sabbath homily. Voice recording forthcoming.
There is a person sitting in a dark room tonight, and you may be that person. The lights are off, and not by accident. Something inside is heavy enough to darken a whole room. A fear. A grief. A failure no one knows about. A habit with its hand around the throat. And the worst part of carrying something in the dark is the quiet voice that says nobody knows you are in here, and nobody is coming.
Hold that picture. We are going to come back to it.
Now let me put something next to it that has nothing to do with church.
A team of researchers at UCLA wanted to know something simple. What actually makes a person feel better? So they gathered more than seven hundred people and gave them an assignment for two weeks. One group was told to do three acts of kindness each week toward themselves. Rest. Treat yourself. Tend to your own needs. The other group was told to do three acts of kindness each week toward other people. Reach out to someone. Help a stranger. Give something away. Same number of kind acts. The only difference was the direction they pointed. Inward, or outward.
Two weeks later they measured everyone. Both groups felt a little better. The people who were kind to themselves felt less depressed, and that is good. But the people who were kind to others felt less depressed, less anxious, and less lonely. They got the deeper relief. And when the researchers asked why, the answer was almost embarrassing in its simplicity. The people who turned outward felt more connected to others. Turning toward someone else had pulled them out of their own heads.
I am not telling you that as a trick to make you feel better about yourself. I am telling you because it is a clue about how you were made. You were not built to find your life by staring at it. Something in you only comes alive when you turn toward someone else. A study measured something the oldest stories we have were already trying to tell us.
Now, some of you in this room would call yourself a believer. Some of you are not sure what you believe. Some of you walked in carrying doubt like a stone in your pocket. I am not going to pretend the next twenty minutes will avoid the word GOD, because they will not. But I am going to ask all of you, believer and skeptic alike, to listen to a story that has been told for thousands of years, and to notice how closely it tracks what that study just found.
It is a story in seven parts, and it begins in that dark room.
♪ His Eye Is on the Sparrow
Lauryn Hill and Tanya Blount
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The first thing the old story says to the person in the dark is this. You are not as alone as you feel, and the dark is not as private as you think.
There is an image in the book of Ezekiel where GOD describes Himself as a shepherd, and He says, I will rescue my sheep from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness. Notice He does not wait at the edge of the field for the lost one to find its own way back. He goes out into the weather, into the clouds and the dark, after the one. Whatever you fell into, He is already walking the ground, looking for you in it.
So here is the first thing to do this week, before anything else. If you are the one in the dark, stop hiding. Tell one person the true thing you have been carrying alone. You were not meant to be the only one who knows you are down there.
And here is the second part of the story. When He finds you, He is not disgusted by what He sees.
We carry a terrible assumption that if GOD really saw us, the version underneath the version we show people, He would turn away. But the story says the opposite. There is a moment in one of the Gospels where a woman meets Jesus at a well, in the heat of the day, when no one else is there. She has had five husbands, and the man she is with now is not her husband. The story does not tell us why. It does not say whether she was widowed, or abandoned, or left, and it does not call her a sinner. It simply says Jesus knew all of it, every piece of her history, and He did not flinch and He did not leave. He saw her completely, and He stayed.
That is the part the whole rest of the story stands on. You are not seen and then rejected. You are seen and kept.
And this is the third part, and it is the one people like us most need and least believe. Before you ever do a single useful thing, before you help anyone or fix anything or become of any value to anyone, you are already loved. Your worth is not a wage you earn. It was settled the moment GOD came looking for you in the dark. You do not have to become impressive to deserve the search. The search already happened, while you were still hiding.
So this week, when the old voice tells you that you have to earn your place, that you are only as good as what you produce, answer it with this. I was wanted before I was useful. That is the ground you stand on, and nothing you do or fail to do can move it.
Now, because that worth is a gift and not a wage, watch how GOD actually hands out His gifts. Jesus said it plainly. Your Father in heaven makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. The sun does not check who deserves the morning before it rises. The rain does not fall only on the fields of good people and skip the fields of the bad ones. It falls on everyone. He does not sort us into the deserving and the undeserving. He pours out.
There was a story in the news this week worth carrying into this room. A young man in Tennessee, a community college student, taught himself to make dentures on a 3D printer and started giving them away, free, to people who could not afford them, thousands of them. And he said something simple about why. We are all one slip or one fall away. He does not sort the people who come to him. Any of us could be the one in the chair. So he gives the gift to whoever comes. That is grace in eight words, and it is grace with its sleeves rolled up.
So your move this week. Give something away to someone who cannot pay you back, and do not first decide whether they earned it. That is what it looks like to pass on a gift you did not earn either.
♪ Come As You Are
Crowder
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So now you have been found in the dark, seen without being rejected, told you were loved before you were useful, and handed a gift you did not earn. You would think the story could end there, with you safe and warm and taken care of. But it does not end there. Because there is a fourth part, and it changes everything.
The gift was never meant to stop with you.
There is a woman named Anh Nguyen. Fifteen years ago a brain injury left her with migraines, every day, for ten years. No cure came. Nobody fixed it. She lived inside the pain. I want to be careful here, because GOD did not send her ten years of agony to teach her a lesson. GOD does not author suffering and then call it a gift. What the story says is different and better. GOD met her inside the pain she should never have had to carry, and within it she found she could still give. In 2019 she donated a kidney to a friend. Years later, having thought it through and worked with her doctors, she gave part of her liver to a four-year-old child she had never met. When they asked her why, she did not give a speech. She said she simply felt she had it within her to give again, even while carrying her own daily pain.
There is a line the apostle Paul wrote from a prison cell. I can do all this through Him who gives me strength. People hear it as a verse about winning. It is not. It is a verse about exactly this. The strength that shows up not when the hard thing is finally removed, but when GOD meets you inside it and makes you able to do what you could not do on your own.
So look back at where we started, at that study. The people who turned toward others were the ones who came alive. And look at the woman at the well again. After Jesus saw her and knew her and did not turn away, she did not stay at the well basking in the moment. She left her water jar and ran back to the very town she had been avoiding, and she said, come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. She pointed away from herself, toward Him. And the townspeople came out and met Him, and afterward they told her, we no longer believe just because of what you said, now we have heard for ourselves. Her story brought them to the door, and then she stepped out of the way so they could walk through it.
That is what you are made for. Not to perform. Not to prove yourself. Not to spend your one life staring inward. You were found so that you could turn around and go back for the next person still lost in the dark. You were given the gift so you could put it in someone else’s hands.
Now I have to say something honestly, because I do not want to sell you a lie. I am not promising that if you turn outward this week, your anxiety will vanish and your sadness will lift on schedule. Some of you will make the call, sit with the lonely person, give the gift, and still wake up Monday with the same weight on your chest. Turning outward is not a machine you feed to get healing out the other end. You do not love your neighbor in order to fix yourself, and your neighbor is not your medicine. You turn outward because the person in the dark needs you, the way you needed someone. You turn outward because the gift was never yours to keep. And what the study quietly found, and what countless people have found before it, is that when you stop staring at your own wound and turn toward someone else’s, something does often loosen. Not as a reward you earned. As a grace that tends to follow the turning. The healing is a gift that comes with the giving, never the wage you are paid for it.
The old Scriptures have a word for the person who turns like this. Not an expert. Not a saint. Not someone with all the answers. A witness. Jesus told the people who followed Him, you will be my witnesses, to the ends of the earth. A witness is just someone who saw something and points to it. You do not need a degree. You do not need to win an argument. You do not even need an impressive story. You only have to be willing to turn toward someone and say, here is what I have seen.
And that same faith has always carried a second half, which is action. One of the oldest letters in the New Testament says the kind of devotion GOD accepts is this, to look after the orphan and the widow in their distress. To care for the people who can do nothing for you in return. The turning outward is not only words. It is showing up for someone who is hurting.
So let me bring this all the way home, to tomorrow morning, to your actual life.
You do not need to fix yourself this week. You need to turn around. Somewhere near you there is a person carrying something in the dark, the way you have carried yours. Be the hand on the other end. Make the call you have been putting off. Sit with the person nobody is sitting with. Tell someone, in your own quiet and unimpressive and true words, what you have seen. Give something away without asking whether they earned it. Care for someone who can do nothing for you back. Do it because they need it, not because of what it will do for you. And do not be surprised if, somewhere in the turning, you find your own weight a little lighter, because that is how He made this to work.
The whole week was pointing at one truth, and I will leave you with it. The same two words open nearly every letter in the New Testament. Grace, and peace. Not as a greeting. As the whole message. Grace, the gift you did not earn and could never earn. And peace, the rest that settles over a heart that has stopped trying to earn its place and has turned its face toward GOD and toward the person next door. That is GOD’s unchanging posture toward you. No matter how far you have wandered, no matter how long you have been in the dark, no matter what you are carrying right now, His face is turned toward you, with grace, and with peace.
He found you in the dark. He saw you and did not leave. He loved you before you were useful. He gave you a gift you did not earn. He is with you in the thing that has not been fixed. And now He is asking you to turn around, and become the one who goes back for the next person still lost in the dark.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
♪ Siyahamba (We Are Marching in the Light of God)
Traditional South African
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Grace and Peace.