Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled

Excerpts from Life Doesn’t Frighten Me by Maya Angelou, John 14:1-7 and an excerpt from the Gospel of Mary

May 3, 2026

Rev. Nicole M. Lamarche

Good morning again and welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you for the privilege of your time. I take seriously what is shared at the door. A few weeks ago someone wondered if I have become more radical. I suggest to you that it is not me, but the situation. The United Church of Christ ministerial code of ethics says that we are to “preach the Gospel without fear or favor,” so thank you for being a place where I can do that. I invite you now as you are moved to take some deeper breaths with me, letting ourselves arrive, giving thanks for this place and this people. As you are moved, I invite you to join me in a spirit of prayer from Psalm 19. God of many names and expressions, who is love, the energy in us and between us, the ground of our being, come to us however we need you to, may we hear your message for us. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Do not let your hearts be troubled. These words to the disciples preparing them to do what they needed to after Jesus is gone- these words feel like they could have been written to all of us, sent across the eons, in a letter seeking to console our hurting hearts, our anxious minds, our weary bodies… These words are offered as a blessing, landing in our souls, hitting our hearts that are more than just troubled, in some places cracked, sitting in rubble, fractured, broken…

What are we going to do with this mess?

According to USA today, most Americans say they are financially worse off than they have been in the last 25 years ago, prices keep rising, with no end in sight. According to Pew Research polls released this week, 59% of Americans said the US should not have used military intervention in this way. No more unnecessary war! I was hoping that was one of the few things there was honesty about. It turns out they meant to say that they decide which wars are necessary because wars are actually necessary for our economy, as it is currently structured. BP had an “exceptional” performance, more than doubling its profits in the first three months of this year over last year. TotalEnergies, raised its dividends and doubled its share buybacks after announcing $5.4 billion in net profits for the first quarter.

Corruption, lies, cruelty- selective outrage about fairness while gutting the Voting Rights Act, selective outrage about free speech, while censoring journalists, selective outrage about violence, while refusing to change our laws, instead we need a ballroom! Pro-life for just the 1%.

How is this going to go?

Into this we hear, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

These words are the beginning of what scholars call a farewell discourse, a message of goodbye that Jesus is offering to them, an anxious crew, awash in uncertainty, and I knew they were for us today too.

Troubled, tarasso in Greek, is about being agitated, being perplexed, being stirred up, whirred up, having calmness of mind gone… We actually have this word quite a bit throughout the Gospels, and in the Book of Acts too, which makes sense for what was happening. At the very least, its repeated occurrence tells us that the communities that were gathering around his teachings were the ones dealt the edges of the Empire’s blow, the ones being owned, ranked, ruled under domination. But still they tried to build something counter to what they felt and lived, aiming to be for one another what they were never going to experience from the world, the tyrants were making, taking, running them over on their way.

So I think that part of why we have this word so much and part of why Jesus begins his goodbye speech to them with it, is that one of the core messages of his life, an essential element of what he wanted to tell them and us, was how to build an inner life, how to construct a world so strong that we are, unshakable, unflappable, able to create worlds inside our hearts, and here together and then outward it goes.

As you know, so much of what Jesus intended was lost, taken, diluted by imperial power, but among the most essential elements of his teachings, I believe, are about the inner work required to live a certain kind of outer life- the Way. The earliest name we have for Jesus is: People of the Way. What I mean is that in order to love our neighbors regardless of what happens, in order to move with courage when the Emperor is drunk on power, in order to be peacemakers when the war mongers have the reigns, in order to endure violence of words and policy, we call upon something that some of these men might have never encountered, and maybe don’t even know, because it is not something that can be bought or earned as a prize, and it can never be taken. It is the light from the inner awakening, the flow that comes from the power of drawing upon something deeper, a greater love. The mystics and contemplatives throughout history have written about this, turning inward, thestrength of the inner life. Knowing ourselves is not merely considering abstract truths, rather as Thomas Merton wrote in New Seeds of Contemplation, “It is awakening, enlightenment, and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God’s creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life.”

I understand that to some this seems ridiculous- the notion that making spaciousness for Spirit in our lives can create more peace, more power, more openings, but I can tell you it is true. It’s as if once we attune ourselves to see it, to feel it, it’s all around. It’s like turning down the noise of the madness to hear love more loudly.

And this week part of how that showed up for me was hearing that I needed to go visit one of our members Nan and being there right in time to sit and pray with her and be with her before she died the next morning. At other times in my life, I might have blown off those whispers, ignored these holy nudges, these mysterious interventions into the ordinary, but not anymore.

I believe God wants to get to each of us right now, whatever that means, however we will hear it. Reaching right across into our troubled hearts to ask us to hold on, to keep the vision, alive, to keep the embers burning…

I had the privilege of hearing SarahDawn’s thesis presentation this week- a beautiful message on shaping our future with hope, remembering it is not all decided, that even if we are now living inside the imagination of billionaires, it is not determined for us, our vision is not dead, but it needs our tending, our listening, our refusal to be moved. Not letting our hearts be troubled is a sort of spiritual superpower we have, that we can increase, that we can use, that we can share with each other, to call upon together.

Many have turned this discourse in the Gospel of John into a recipe for an afterlife- I didn’t use all the assigned text because I wanted you to notice this part with this angle of the inner life, offering a path for how to endure on our insides. Hear it in this way: 14:1"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in Love; believe in the energy that is love and believe in this path I have offered. 14:2 In Love’s realms there are many dwelling places, possibilities beyond this….

I learned in a lecture from renowned biblical scholar Elaine Pagels recently that the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John are believed to be around the same age. So when we include some of the parts of the letters that weren’t included in the Bible, this perspective makes even more sense. In Thomas Jesus said to them: “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside as the outside, and the outside as the inside, and the upper as the lower…then you shall enter the Kin-dom” And like we heard from this snippet in the fragments of what we have from the Gospel of Mary, we read, "Be on guard so that no one deceives you by saying, 'Look over here!' or 'Look over there!' For the child of true Humanity exists within you. Follow it! Those who search for it will find it.”

People try for fake versions of it and we see a lot of this right now in the form of Christian Nationalism, but it’s like ultra-processed religion, it has no real spiritual value of any kind because as Merton wrote this is a kind of “false mysticism of the Mass Society (that) captivates men who are so alienated from themselves and from God that they are no longer capable of genuine spiritual experience.”

It's so obvious, but if you don’t have the lens of love, you don’t necessarily see it.

How is this going to go? Where will this end? How will they be stopped? What if part of our answer to these questions is not letting our hearts get so troubled that we can’t hear or know or see what Love seeks now? What if our task now is strengthening and reclaiming, building and believing in the power of what is possible? What if not letting our hearts be troubled is a sort of superpower we can increase, that we can use? The thing that rattles them most is calm, quiet, steady, an inner strength that is not moved by hateful words or harmful plans.

I am not talking about ignoring what is happening or acting as if our job is to meditate and pray, turning inward as the world burns, what I mean is that what if there really are ways that claiming and taming our inner lives, helps to tame the chaos outside?

Because from what I have seen, one of the few things that has offered a boundary, or forced a stop to the violations, was when a person or a group didn’t get drawn into the whirring and instead remained rooted and firm and anchored in truth, not being hooked by the game, not accepting these lies as fact, knowing and believing that we have the kin-dom within.

A couple of days ago, United Church of Christ minister, Rev. Traci Blackmon shared that it “took roughly 40 authors; 80+ collaborating institutions; and scores of ancillary supporters, 10 years of research and 900 pages to come up with a plan cunning enough to insure governing control to mediocre, insecure white men who manipulate the benefits of inequity, because they know they are incapable of “winning” without force.” She asked, how powerful must we be? ….Dry your eyes. Wash your face. Nourish your body. Change your clothes. And let’s go!”

Beloved of God, do not let your hearts be troubled! We will let love take our hand! Guard your peace. Believe in the power of love. Make space for it, call upon it, claim it as yours. Know that we cannot be stopped! Do not let your hearts be troubled! May it be so. Amen.