The Silent Presence of God – Br. Jack Crowley

SSJE

Br. Jack Crowley

John 21:1-19

One Friday afternoon many years ago, my boss called me into his office. Of course, immediately I thought I was being fired! I had only been working at this school for a few weeks, and on that particular week, I had made a minor mistake. It was such a minor mistake that I honestly don’t even remember what it was, but what I do remember is that silent walk from my classroom to my boss’s office. All the students had gone home and most of the teachers had left.

That walk from my classroom to my boss’ office took maybe all of fifteen seconds, but in the course of those fifteen seconds, it felt like my whole life flashed before my eyes. I thought I was going to get fired, I thought about updating my resume, I thought about spending the weekend sending out job applications… I thought and I thought and I thought and I still can’t believe how much thinking I jammed into those fifteen seconds of silence.

When I finally sat down in front of my boss, he smiled at me and took a long inhale, and said something like “Jack, just wanted to say how glad I am we hired you. Things really seem to be going well with you working here.” I don’t remember exactly what he said, but we chatted for a while, and he told me to have a good weekend. I just remember leaving his office thinking to myself oh thank God, I still have a job.

The point I’m trying to make with this story is that our minds can go crazy in silence. When we don’t know the whole picture or know what’s coming, silence can cause a whole lot of problems. In silence, our minds can warp, distort, project, assume, and catastrophize whatever is going on in our lives. In our walk with God, we have to learn how to deal with silence. If we don’t learn how to deal with silence, we run the risk of never being fully present to God.

Our Gospel passage this morning has one of my favorite examples of silence in scripture. This was actually the passage I chose for my life profession. The story goes that Jesus has been resurrected from the dead and appears to his Disciples on the shore when they were out fishing on a boat. The famously naked Simon Peter hears that Jesus is on the shore, puts on clothes and jumps into the water to swim to Jesus. Then the rest of the Disciples come to shore on their boat to see Jesus at a charcoal fire with fish and bread.

We are told by the Gospel writer that none of the the Disciples dared to ask Jesus who he was because they knew it was the Lord. I love that line. I love trying to feel that stunned silence on the beach with Jesus, that smell of charcoal smoke in the air with that weird feeling of having breakfast after being up all night. I always try to imagine what I would say to Jesus in such a moment, but I always come back with stunned silence. The thing I love most about this scene is Jesus reaches across the silence to feed his Disciples breakfast. He does so without saying a word. I always imagine Jesus here exuding this warm, inviting, and loving silence.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced different kinds of silences in our lives. The sacred silence of an empty church, the awkward silence of a fumbled conversation, the tense silence following a confrontation, or that delightful comfortable silence we can have with loved ones. Here in the monastery, it feels like we run the spectrum of silences on a 24-hour cycle.

Our journey with God is punctuated by a spectrum of silences. Sometimes these silences are so welcome. They amplify our mood and make us feel loved and safe. Other times, these silences make us feel cold and abandoned.

So how do you deal with silence on your walk with God? How do you deal with the urge to fill it? It’s one of the best and worst urges we have. We can fill that silence with love, praise, and gratitude. We can also fill that silence with fear, resentment, and guilt.

Whenever I feel overwhelmed by noisy silence, I return to that image of the resurrected Jesus sitting by the charcoal fire. I imagine Jesus looking at me, and me knowing that Jesus knows everything that’s going on in my head. I imagine Jesus still looking at me with love and a knowing eye, reaching across the chatter of my mind to invite me to breakfast in silence.

In our own journey into silence, we must seek the loving presence of God even when it feels like there is nothing there. When we seek the presence of God, then we can be present with God. To be present with God does not have to be earth shattering, it can be as down to earth as a simple breakfast on the beach. To be present with God can be as mundane as to say God give me the strength to get me through this day.

Our journey into silence brings out the best and the worst of us – the worst of our fears and the best of our hopes. Like my walk to my boss’ office, silence can make us feel like our life is over. Like Jesus by the charcoal fire, silence can also make us feel like life is possible again, that everything that has happened up until now is all worth it and is a part of a greater plan with a glory greater than we can ever understand.

We must act like those Disciples around the charcoal fire. We must have the courage to abide in that stunned silence in the presence of God. We must have the faith of those early morning hours to know that even though we do not fully know what will happen in the day in front of us, we at least break our fast in the presence of God. We look to God for nourishment after a long, hard night out at sea. We land on the radical notion that God does in fact love us and that God wants us to love one another, no matter how difficult a task that may seem.

We abide in the silences of our lives because at this point there’s no turning back. We’ve all met God and we all seek to follow God no matter what the cost. No matter how crazy we may feel in our heads, we have not been fired, we still have a job to do. Thank God. Amen.