Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Bjornsen, the great Norwegian poet, who received the Nobel Prize for literature was once asked what incident in his life gave him the most pleasure.

He replied that is was an occasion when his house was attacked and his windows broken.

This sounds slightly odd and paradoxical, but before you jump to conclusions about his sanity listen to the details concerning this painful incident which brought him pleasure.

Bjornsen had aroused the anger of the Storthing, which was the Norwegian Parliament, over some issue, and certain members of that body were so aggravated that they went to his home and smashed his windows.

Having expressed their contempt for Bjornsen, they then marched away singing the Norwegian National Anthem, "Yes, we love this land of ours."

Bjornsen chuckled to himself in spite of the damage, because he was the author of the National Anthem.

They could smash his windows, but they had to sing his song.

The paradox is double, for not only did Bjornsen get pleasure out of this persecution, because the persecutors sang his song, but because the persecutors expressed their pleasure by singing the song of the one they had just persecuted.

Here is a good example of the saying that truth is stranger than fiction.

The facts of history and experience demonstrate over and over again that paradox is a part of the reality of life.

That is why we find so many paradoxes in the Bible.

The title of my message is a paradox, for to say, alone, yet not alone seems to contradict itself.

How can two opposites be true?

How can one be alone and yet not alone at the same time?

This is only one of several paradoxes of Jesus in the closing two verses of chapter 16.

He also says His disciples are to have peace in tribulation.

They are to be of good cheer in spite of His prediction that they will forsake Him and suffer.

Then He tops it off with a proclamation of victory when in a matter of hours he was going to be nailed to the cross in apparent defeat.

This passage is a paradise for those pursuing paradoxes.

Practically everything Jesus says here sounds like a contradiction, but each is a profound truth that can be experienced in life.

We are going to take just one of these paradoxes for our study now.

Jesus makes the statement of being alone, and yet not alone, and this opens to us two channels for exploration concerning the subject of loneliness.

First let's consider-

I. THE REALITY OF LONELINESS.

Jesus knew what it was to be left alone.

He knew the feeling of being forsaken by all, including those He most loved.

He is about to go into the garden of Gethsemane and face the most agonizing inner struggle of His life, and He will have to do it alone.

His disciples will be careless and indifferent, and they will sleep rather than watch with Him.

It is likely that no one has ever experienced the depth of loneliness like Jesus did.

Alexander Maclaren does not hesitate to say, "Jesus was the loneliness man that ever lived...

He knew the pain of unappreciated aims, unaccepted love, unbelieved teachings, a heart thrown back upon itself."

Jesus spent much of His public ministry in the midst of crowds, and yet He was alone, for not only His foes, but His family and friends misunderstood Him, and could not share His deepest thoughts and goals.

Jesus experienced to the fullest the reality of loneliness.

In a Peanuts cartoon, Linus is admitting that he is afraid to go into the public library.

His friend Charlie Brown is trying to comfort him by explaining that everybody feels lonely in some place or another.

When Linus asks, "What is your place?"

Charlie Brown replies, "Earth."

In another cartoon Charlie is asked, "What are you going to be when you grow up?"

He replies, "Lonely."

Studies in many fields show that Charlie Brown has a vast crowd with him in the same boat, for earth seems to be the place where the majority of people are lonely.

It is one of the great paradoxes of our world that loneliness is a major problem side by side with the problem of population explosion.

No number of people can change the fact which Amiel writes of in his journal.

"In all the chief matters of life we are alone: We dream alone, we suffer alone, we die alone."

This was the reality experienced by Jesus.

He bore His ideals and His suffering alone, and upon the cross it was alone that He died.

So it is with all of us.

However much we rub elbows with the crowds, we are still essentially Robinson Crusoes on the lonely island of self.

You can be perfectly healthy, and have a well rounded personality like Adam and Jesus, and still be very lonely, for it is normal to be lonely.

Matthew Arnold wrote-

Yes, in the sea of life exiled,

With echoing straits between us thrown,

Dotting the shoreless, watery wild,

We moral millions live alone.

Like all the atoms of the universe, no two of which touch each other, so are we as persons.

As close as we are crammed together in large cities, we are yet islands with vast spaces between, and many cry out like the Ancient Mariner,

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea!

And never a saint took pity on

My soul in agony.

Billy Graham said that loneliness plagues more people today than any other single problem.

Many doctors say it is the major malady of our time.

One doctor went so far as to say, "Ninety-nine out of a hundred individuals is lonely.

The one who says he isn't probably is."

A poet put it-

Way down deep within our hearts

Everybody's lonesome;

Far within their secret parts

Everybody's lonesome;

Makes no difference how they smile

How they live or what their style;

Once in a little while

Everybody's lonesome.

This may be too strong, but if we consider the loneliness that comes at different stages along the path of life, it is certainly close to the truth to say that everyone at some time is lonely.

We all know of the child's longing for love and security, and how they can find comfort in a doll, teddy bear, or blanket when they are left alone.

But there is no substitute for real persons who can give love and affection in return.

A child who is not given this love can become insecure and lonely for the rest of life.

No parent wants to banish their child to a lonely island, but they accomplish the same sad end by neglect and lack of affection.

What is surprising is that the supposedly independent carefree teenager needs attention as much, if not more, than a child.

Studies indicate that the liability to loneliness is at its peak in adolescence.

The teenager fears loneliness like the plague, and yet they are constantly struggling with it.

You asked why they are so willing to go along with the crowd, and do even the most foolish and destructive things?

It is because they cannot stand to be alone, to be left out, and to be different.

The teenager lives constantly in the fear that he or she is different and possibly not normal.

They worry about whether or not they are developing and maturing as they ought.

They will do just about anything to demonstrate that they are.

In their desperate attempt to be mature they often do what is very immature.

They wrestle with their sins and inner thoughts about the future all alone, and they feel that no one really understands them.

At no time in life does one need to sense love and concern more.

The facts indicate that both parents and society, as a whole, are too busy trying to escape their own loneliness to give youth what they need to come through this crisis period.

Parents are like the disciples of Jesus.

They walked with Him along the smooth path, but when the road got rough they fled, and they left Him alone.

So parents enjoy the years of innocence with their children, but tend for forsake them in the turmoil of the teen years when they wrestle with the forces of temptation on every side.

Thank God, the teenager who knows Christ has the company of one who understands.

The battle with the reality of loneliness goes on even after the period of adolescence, however, and, in fact, never ends.

Thomas Wolfe, the American novelist, once thought that only he and a few others experienced loneliness, but after some study he wrote, "The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

As youth looks ahead in fear, those who have reached middle age look back in frustration.

They feel lonely because of what might have been, but isn't.

They could have done this or that, and now it is too late, and they regret it.

Ideals have been unattained, and dreams unfulfilled.