Welcome, Child

Here's today's homily. The readings are Proverbs 31:10-31 and Mark 9:30-37.

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Dear child:

There you are in Jesus’ arms. We don’t know how old you are; we don’t even know your gender.  We don’t know if you were a cherished heir, a beloved child of the family who owned that house in Capernaum, or a slave. Whatever your status, you would have been considered the legal property of your parents, not yet a person in your own right.

 

That’s also true of your mother, whether she was a servant or the “capable wife” celebrated in today’s reading from Proverbs, who acts almost entirely for the good of her husband and family.  It sounds like this wife loves her husband, and we have to hope he loves her back, because she’s his legal property too. That’s going to last a long time. Where I live, in the United States -- a country that doesn’t exist yet, in your time -- the law saying that a wife is her husband’s property won’t be declared fully unconstitutional until 1981. Where I live, so far in your future you couldn’t even imagine it, women still don’t get equal pay for equal work. My country has never had a female President. In some quarters, the view that women are people too is still controversial.  

But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? You don’t know about any of that, don’t care about it. You’re in Jesus’ arms, enjoying the attention from his friends. They’ve just been arguing about who’s the greatest -- the most famous, the most influential -- and Jesus is using you to make a point. He’s telling them that if they really want to be great, they have to take care of you. They have to welcome you. They have to treat you like a person. He’s telling them that if they really want to be great, they have to treat you as if you’re him:  the Messiah, the Son of God, the Prince of Peace.

Jesus knows about being a child. Jesus came to Earth as a child, a baby, and even though he was a cherished heir, he was also poor. His mother wasn’t like that ideal wife in Proverbs, with her servants and vineyards. He was born in a stable because no one would give his parents a room. Some poor shepherds knew who he was, and so did some rich kings, but a lot of other people didn’t, and still don’t. The Messiah is supposed to be great and powerful. Children aren’t. A lot of what Jesus does looks upside-down to everyone else, even his closest friends. He wants them to use their power to give, not to take, but he has to keep reminding them how it works.  That’s why he’s holding you, now, and telling them to welcome you.

What do they do, I wonder? The story doesn’t tell us. Do they ask your name? Do they play with you? When Jesus puts you down again, what happens? Will you ever see these men again? What does your future look like?

Child -- boy or girl, slave or free, EveryChild -- I wish I didn’t know as much about your future as I do. Where I live, here in the United States in 2015, we still haven’t fully learned what Jesus was trying to teach his friends. We welcome some children, our cherished heirs. As I write this, my niece is about to deliver her first child, a little boy named Charlie, and our family and friends can’t wait to welcome him. But yesterday in the news I read about a five year old refugee who drowned trying to reach safety in Europe. In my own country, more than 21% of children live in poverty. That’s the highest poverty rate of any age group. In my country, the average age of a homeless person is 11, and one in thirty children is homeless. Poor children are often hungry, and hungry children can’t learn, and that puts them at risk for other problems, terrible problems happening right here within our own borders, like the sex trafficking we hear about on the news that makes us shudder and hug our own kids more tightly and thank God they’re safe.

 

Remember when I talked about women, about equal pay for equal work?  These things are connected. Women and their children bear the brunt of poverty, and income inequality is part of the reason why.  

I’m talking about politics now, and there are people who say it’s impolite to talk about politics to anyone, let alone children. In my country, we believe in the separation of church and state. But Jesus was a political figure. He’s just told his followers that he’ll die a political death, although they don’t want to believe it. He’s trying to teach them about the proper uses of power, and you can’t get much more political than that. If we’re going to welcome you, child, it can’t just be in our own families. It has to be in the rest of the world, too:  in stables and homeless shelters and hospitals, in refugee camps and war zones, and in poor and struggling neighborhoods here at home. We say we care about children in my country, but we don’t fund education the way we should.  We don’t respect teachers or pay them as if they’re important. We don’t have universal daycare to make it easier for parents to work and feed their kids, or universal healthcare to keep children and their parents healthy. Two years ago, the United States ranked 34th out of 35 countries in child welfare; only Romania ranked lower.

Please don’t get me wrong. A lot of us do try to welcome you. We donate money and volunteer and support programs and agencies that help kids. When we see a child right in front of us -- a child who’s hurt or hungry or frightened or poor -- we offer every comfort we can.

I remember a child I met in the ER where I volunteer. The little boy was a year old, maybe. A foster-care caseworker had brought him in for an evaluation. X-rays showed signs of earlier abuse:  multiple healed fractures of the long bones of his arms. A tech who had to start an IV on him asked for my help, because the baby liked women. He lay quietly on his gurney, but when he saw me, he smiled and reached out his arms to be picked up.  He played with my hair, my glasses, my ID badge. He never cried, not even when the tech started the IV.  Most children scream during that procedure. They buck and bite and kick. They have to be held down by five adults. Somewhere, this baby had learned to stay completely still and quiet.  His silence haunts me. How much pain do we never hear, because the children and adults suffering it have learned that if they cry, no one will come? How many have learned that if they cry, anyone who answers will only hurt them more?

Child, we help you when we can see you, but so often you’re invisible to us. A lot of that is political, too. Some of our leaders want us to care more about some children than about others. We need to learn to look out for all, and to act for all. We need to vote for school bonds even if we have no children in those schools. We need to support political initiatives that will help parents and children. We need to resist the lie that children from other families or neighborhoods, countries or religions, matter less than our children.  

All children are our children. That’s what Jesus was trying to teach us. All children are his children. All children are him.

Child, we don’t know your name, your gender, your parentage.  We don’t know what your life was like before Jesus picked you up, or what it will be like after he puts you down.  We don’t know if you’ll remember him when you grow up. But we know that right now, you are safe and loved, cherished and nurtured, held in the warmth of Jesus’ arms while his friends smile at you.  And for his sake, we promise to do our very best to offer that same love and welcome to every child we meet.

Amen.

God's Triage

Here's today's Gospel lesson, one of my favorites. It's from the fifth chapter of Mark:

21 When Jesus had crossed again in the boat^* to the other side, a great crowd gathered round him; and he was by the lake. ²²Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet ²³and begged him repeatedly, ‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.’ ²⁴So he went with him.

And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. ²⁵Now there was a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years.²⁶She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. ²⁷She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,²⁸for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’²⁹Immediately her haemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. ³⁰Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ ³¹And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?” ’ ³²He looked all round to see who had done it. ³³But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. ³⁴He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’

35 While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?’ ³⁶But overhearing^* what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’ ³⁷He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. ³⁸When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. ³⁹When he had entered, he said to them, ‘Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.’ ⁴⁰And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. ⁴¹He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha cum’, which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’ ⁴²And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. ⁴³He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Below is my homily, which I delivered as a guest preacher in a Lutheran church this morning.

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For many years now, I’ve volunteered in a local emergency room, offering spiritual care to patients and families. Most of you probably know that emergency rooms use a triage system. The most critical patients are seen first.  This means that someone with a painful but non-life-threatening fracture may wait hours for treatment, while an unconscious patient, or someone with severe chest pain, is seen immediately. I spend a lot of time explaining this system to irate patients who are tired of waiting, and who don’t understand why somebody who just showed up five minutes ago is being seen first. “That means that the person who just got here is sicker than you are,” I tell them. “Believe me, you never want to be sent to the front of the line in an emergency room.”

Much less often, I spend time with the relatives and friends of patients who have been sent to the front of the line. Being first in line in an ER means that you’re probably in immediate danger of dying. It means that you’re the center of a buzzing hive of doctors and nurses doing invasive, painful things to you that you probably can’t feel, because you’re probably unconscious. If you make it out of the ER alive, you’ll almost certainly go directly to the Intensive Care Unit.

The friends and family of these patients wait in a small, private room called the Family Consult Room. The Consult Room has subdued lighting, soft couches, a phone, and several boxes of tissues. Waiting here is agonizing. A doctor will race in, ask urgent questions about the patient’s medical history, deliver a five-second update on the patient’s condition, and race back out again. If the doctor approaches the room slowly, the news usually isn’t good. There are no words to describe the tension and terror in this place. Hell is a Consult Room.

And that brings us to today’s Gospel, which – if you’re Jairus, anyway – makes Jesus look like the world’s worst ER doctor. Jairus is a leader of the synagogue, which makes him a VIP in the Jewish religious establishment. The fact that he’s willing to beg a street preacher for help shows how desperate he is. He’s already tried everything else he can think of, and it hasn’t worked. He’s prayed, made sacrifices in the Temple, and called in all the best specialists, to no avail. His beloved daughter still lies dying.

So Jairus humbles himself. He leaves behind his safe, respectable piety to seek out the renegade healer from Galilee. People do crazy things to get close to this guy, to get through the crowds surrounding him. Just last week, some people cut a hole in someone’s roof to lower their paralyzed friend into the room where Jesus was. It worked. The paralyzed man can walk now.

Right now, Jairus would give anything to see his daughter walking again, instead of lying in bed, thrashing and moaning with fever, too weak even to sip water. So he ventures into the streets to find the healer, and he grits his teeth and forces his way through the crowd surrounding Jesus. Jairus has to use his knees and elbows, and he probably wouldn’t be able to get through at all, if his social status didn’t make him an object of respect and a little bit of fear. Finally Jairus reaches Jesus, and asks him for help, and Jesus says, “Yes, of course I’ll come to your house.”

Jairus has made very clear to this slightly disreputable street preacher that his daughter is dying. If Jesus were a good ER doctor, Jairus’ daughter would immediately go to the front of the line. Everyone else can wait. But Jesus doesn’t seem to be in any hurry. It’s incredibly hot, and the crowd stinks of sweat and bodies. Jairus feels like he’s going to be sick, and his daughter has no time to spare. Can’t Jesus walk any faster? But he doesn’t walk faster: he stops. And then he turns around to ask, “Who touched me?”  

“Are you kidding?” his disciples ask. “In this crowd? It could have been anybody. Jesus, what are you doing? Come on. We have to go to Jairus’ house.”

But Jesus is still standing there. He’s talking to somebody, a gaunt, filthy woman who’s kneeling in the street, weeping and babbling. She tells Jesus that she’s been bleeding for twelve years – that’s as long as Jairus’ daughter has been alive -- and Jairus can’t help but wrinkle his nose and take a step back, because according to Temple law, bleeding women are unclean.

Jesus keeps talking to her. She was the one who touched him, and the minute her fingers brushed the fabric of his robe she felt the bleeding stop, felt herself healed, and Jesus felt something happen too, which is why he turned around. And now she’s kneeling there, telling Jesus the entire twelve-year saga of her symptoms and sufferings, while Jairus’ child lies at home, dying. This no-account woman has already stopped bleeding. She’s not dying. She can wait. But Jesus just stands there, and listens to her.  

Take a moment now to imagine what Jairus must have felt as Jesus stood there listening to the bleeding woman. Imagine what Jairus must have wanted to say.

Well, probably Jairus did say all that. He probably yelled a number of things we don’t feel comfortable even whispering in church.  It’s entirely likely that he started tugging on Jesus’ sleeve, at the very least.  But Jesus didn’t budge; he stayed there, listening to this woman with no money and no social status, who until a little while ago also had no hope. Yes, she was already physically cured. Her bleeding stopped the moment she touched Jesus’ robe. But healing and cure are two different things. Healing takes longer, and goes deeper. Jesus listened to her until she’d told “the whole truth,” Mark tells us, and then he pronounced her well, and Jairus must have let out a huge sigh of relief and thought, “Finally!  Now we can get moving!”

But that’s the moment when the messengers come to tell Jairus that his daughter is dead.

I’m not going to ask you to imagine what Jairus must have felt then. I don’t think we can begin to imagine it unless we’ve been there.  Jairus didn’t have the privacy of a Consult Room: he had to go through hell in public.  He must have thought, “If only Jesus hadn’t stopped to listen to that unclean woman who’d already stopped bleeding, my daughter would still be alive.” When Jesus said, “Do not fear, only believe,” Jairus must have wanted to punch him. How could he believe? What was left to believe?

We know how the story ends. It’s the happiest ending, the child raised from the dead. But I wonder if Jairus ever really recovered. How do you ever get over hearing that your child is dead, even if she’s then given back to you? How do you ever get over seeing her dead, even if a few minutes later, she’s skipping around the room and munching on a piece of bread? What lessons about God do you take away from this heart-breaking, terrifying episode?

Some of the lessons are obvious. The first and most important, I think, is that God wants all of us to be whole and healed. Jesus came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. Like a good ER doctor, God treats everyone, both nameless outcasts and the children of the rich and famous. The lesson also reminds us that healing takes different forms for different people, and – just in case we’ve forgotten – that God’s time and priorities aren’t ours. How often, in extremity, do we abandon our illusions of power and control and beg God to help us, please help us, but God, you have to do it now, because there’s no time left! And how often, when God doesn’t answer on our timetable, do we rage and curse and despair?  

But another obvious lesson here is the value of perseverance. Both the bleeding woman and Jairus are stubborn and fiercely determined, pushing through huge crowds towards the One they know can help them.  Both of them have to wait: the bleeding woman for twelve years,Jairus for probably less than an hour. Neither of them likes waiting, but neither of them gives up and goes home before being treated, as I’ve sometimes seen angry ER patients do.

All of us can probably see ourselves in one of these characters, either the bleeding woman or Jairus. All of us need healing from something. And important as physical healing is, our afflictions and suffering take many, many other forms. The bleeding woman’s joy when she is healed is the joy, this week, of every gay couple in this country who has waited so long for marriage equality. It’s the joy that people of color – still facing violence, discrimination and institutionalized racism – can still only hope to feel, someday, when we finally manage to overcome our racial schisms.  Activists of all stripes need tremendous faith to believe that such joy is possible. That kind of perseverance takes more energy than many of us can imagine; anger, exhaustion and despair are ever-present temptations. Many of my friends, both gay and straight, never thought they’d see marriage equality in their lifetimes.  

But today’s Gospel offers another, subtler lesson. Because it’s so easy for us to hear this as a story about competition for apparently limited resources, we may overlook the fact that it’s also a story about people being pulled out of their usual social circles, out of their comfort zones, and into a space of common humanity. The bleeding woman, stigmatized and untouchable, normally wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a leader of the synagogue. Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, normally wouldn’t have anything to do with such a woman. Their pain and desperation lead them to the same place. For a few moments, they are visible to each other.

The Gospel doesn’t tell us if they acknowledged or spoke to each other. The Scripture story is about Jesus’ relationship with each of them, not about their relationship with each other. But that story happened centuries ago.  Here and now, our faith calls us to be Christ to, and to see Christ in, everyone. We are Jesus in the crowd. To paraphrase St. Teresa of Avila, “Christ has no body now on earth but ours, no hearts but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion looks out on the world. Ours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good, and ours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.”

Our world, like that of the Gospels, is filled with all kinds of pain and tragedy: with people who need life-saving care in the next ten minutes and with people trying to overcome decades, if not centuries, of oppression. Seeking healing, we often wind up side by side with people whose own pain has made them desperate. How do we respond? Do we shut them out, or do we listen to them? Do we seek healing only for our own pain, or for everyone’s? Do we view our unexpected glimpse into other people’s lives as a startling gift, or as an unwanted curse?  Do we ignore those other stories, or learn from them?

ER waiting rooms are some of the most diverse and democratic places in the United States. On any given day, at any given hour, they are filled with people waiting in agony and in hope, the rich side by side with the poor, everyone desperate to be next in line. In the waiting room, and in the ER itself, I’ve seen predictable and saddening acts of selfishness: people cursing those who are seen before they are, threatening the staff, accusing doctors and nurses of every kind of favoritism.  But I’ve also seen acts of compassion and humanity: strangers from different walks of life giving each other cabfare, watching each other’s children when someone has to go to X-Ray, and – maybe most importantly -- listening to each other’s stories. I can’t tell you how often an ER patient, when I offer prayer, has said, “I want to pray for the person next door, who’s dealing with so much more than I am.” In the name of the One who wants all of us to be whole and healed, let us go and do likewise.

Amen.

Keeping Awake

Here's tomorrow's homily.  The readings are Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25 and Matthew 25:1-13.  My thanks to the Rev. Chip Arnold for a rousing model of how to turn this parable on its head.

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One Saturday evening my first semester of college, my roommate asked me to stay out of our tiny dorm room until midnight, because her boyfriend was coming over. I didn’t have many friends at school yet, so I studied in the library until it closed at 9. Then I studied in the student café until it closed at 10. That left me two hours to kill before I could get back into our room.

It was winter. It was snowing. Everything was closed except restaurants in town I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t think of anywhere to go, so for two hours I wandered around campus. Getting progressively colder, I gazed wistfully into other people’s glowing dorm windows, those shining tableaux of warmth and safety. This was 1978, and campus crime wasn’t something we thought about much, so I wasn’t conscious of danger, although I was a woman by myself in the dark. I just felt cold, lonely, and unwanted.

At midnight I went back to my room and warmed up. I was fine. But whenever I see a homeless person now, I remember those two hours, what it felt like to be locked out in the snow because I didn’t have the resources or the social capital to claim shelter.

This may be part of why I’m on the side of the foolish bridemaids in today’s Gospel parable. The conventional reading of this lesson is that the bridegroom is Christ, that we’re being warmed up for Advent by being warned to watch and wait. But I’m not the only person who finds the behavior of both the wise bridesmaids and the bridegroom in this story more than a little un-Christ-like. The wise bridesmaids have oil but refuse to share it; instead, they send the other five women out into the streets at midnight to find an oil merchant willing to do business at that hour. When the foolish five return from their improbably successful shopping expedition, they find the door shut in their faces, and the bridegroom says, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.” Many critics agree that this is a story about a failure of hospitality.

Furthermore, it’s difficult for me to imagine that Jesus himself wouldn’t have sided with the foolish bridesmaids. This is the guy who told his followers to feed 5,000 hungry people with a few crumbs of bread and a few little fishes, a task that may very well have been accomplished by the crowd sharing what it had. Would he really approve of the ungenerous, uncharitable women who hoard their oil?

This is the guy who told that other parable, the one about the laborers who show up late to work in the vineyard but receive the same pay as everyone else. Would he really lock out five women who’ve arrived after the other guests, especially when they’re late because the supposedly wise bridesmaids were unkind to them?

And, finally, this is the guy who said, during his famous Sermon on the Mount, “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult  a brother or sister,  you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell  of fire.” And yet this parable pins the label “foolish” on the five women without oil? What’s going on here?

I think what’s going on is that we’re being tested. Do we remember those earlier lessons? Which side of the door do we see ourselves on? Would we share our oil? Maybe Jesus tells this story to challenge us, to make us examine where our loyalties lie. That would fit today’s lesson from Joshua. Joshua demands that the tribes of Israel choose their God, but warns them that remaining loyal to the God who brought them out of Egypt is a demanding discipline.
   
During my years offering spiritual care as an ER volunteer, I’ve seen a lot of homeless patients. When I look at them, I always think of my own measly two hours locked out in the snow. But I’ve heard quite a few nurses and doctors say things like, “Well, this is their own fault. They made bad choices.”  I can imagine the wise bridesmaids saying similar things to the foolish ones. “This is your fault. You made bad choices. You didn’t buy oil ahead of time, and then you fell asleep. Well,  all right, we fell asleep too, but that doesn’t matter, because we were ready. We already had our oil. We’d earned a nap.”

Jesus says that all of us should stay awake. What might have happened if the ten women hadn’t slept? Maybe the foolish bridesmaids would have had time to shop and still get back before the deadline. Maybe someone would have had time to figure out an oil-sharing scheme. And maybe the ten women would have spent that time talking, getting to know each other.

“You know, the reason I don’t have oil is that I have to save my money to buy food for my sick mother. She wasn’t invited to this banquet, and I’m the only person taking care of her.”

“The reason I don’t have oil is that we needed all the oil at home to cook for my little brothers and sisters. My father can’t find work, and I’ve been taking in washing to help pay the rent. I guess now I’ll have to spend some of that money on oil.”

“I don’t have oil because I brought it to my brother in jail. He got arrested for making the Romans angry, and he needed light in his dark cell to write a letter pleading for mercy.”

How would the wise bridesmaids have responded to these stories? Might at least some of them have said, “Here, let me give you some oil”?

I’ve never spoken to a homeless ER patient who said, “When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to sleep on the streets, and search dumpsters for food, and lose my feet to frostbite and gangrene.” Poor people, like all of us, make bad decisions sometimes. They pay a lot more for their mistakes than wealthier people do, and they have fewer safety nets when bad things happen that aren’t their fault. Trying to catch up, they often wind up being locked out. They haven’t chosen their stigma and exclusion.  It’s been thrust on them.

Keep awake, Jesus tells us. Keep awake to the stories of your neighbors. Keep awake to social injustice. Keep awake to whom, and to what, you are following. We all want to be invited to the wedding. We all want to included in the feast. But is a bridegroom who’d lock other people out really someone whose wedding party we want to join? Jesus says, “if you say ‘you fool,’ you will be liable to the fire of hell.”  That statement makes the cheer of the banquet hall seem a little less inviting, doesn’t it? Maybe the five women standing with their noses pressed against the glass aren’t looking in at glowing tableaux of warmth and safety. Maybe they’re looking into an inferno instead. Maybe, in some situations, darkness is safer.

A few weeks ago, preaching on the Parable of the Wedding Banquet, Chip suggested that the host of the party is the oppressor: the Romans, the bureaucrats, the greedy capitalists. The lord in that story, and the bridegroom in this, represent business as usual. They keep us hungry for inclusion at other people’s expense, for banquets that take food from other people’s mouths.  Chip invited us to see the badly dressed wedding guest as Jesus: the outcast bounced from the party and thrown into darkness because he challenges oppression instead of conforming to it.

Let us follow the five foolish bridesmaids into that darkness now, as they turn away from the windows. The darkness is a little scary, but they’re together, and their lanterns burn brightly.  They have new resources. They know that there are merchants who’ll do business after hours for desperate people, even if they charge more.  Or maybe there were never any merchants open so late.  Maybe the five women went from door to door, finding kind people who gave them oil.

As they make their way through this darkness, they meet new friends. There’s a strange scruffy guy who isn’t dressed very well, but who heals the sick and shares his food with everyone.  At another wedding where supplies ran low, he even changed water into wine.  His friends, like the five women, have walked away from everything they knew, from their jobs and families, to follow him.

And they tell the women stories of other things that have happened in the dark, of other people who have stayed awake. They talk about shepherds, keeping watch by night, who needed no lanterns, because a star lit their way to the birthplace of a poor baby: to a lowly manger holding the promise of loving warmth, and lasting safety, and a feast where all of us are welcome, no matter what we’re wearing or how late we arrive.

Amen.

Eight Words

Here's today's homily, posted later than usual (and without links) because I'm buried under grading and have to get ready for classes tomorrow.  I may or may not put in links at some future date, but the stories and quotations I use here are easy to find via Google.

I also couldn't find a good image for this post.  The Gospel is Matthew 5:38-48, the one about loving our enemies.

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When I was a volunteer chaplain at the hospital, patients sometimes said, “I don’t think you want to talk to me.  I’m not Christian.”

My response was always, “I’m trained to talk to everyone.”   When I wasn’t familiar with a particular faith tradition, I’d ask for information.  “Tell me about that.”

During the seven years I volunteered, I visited (and often prayed with) Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and atheists.  And I met a handful of patients – always cheerful young men, clean-cut and polite -- who said, “Oh, you don’t want to talk to me.  I’m a Satanist.”

“Really?  Tell me about that.”  For one thing, I wanted to show them that I wasn’t shocked.  For another, I was genuinely curious.

All of them -- every single one -- said the same thing, in the same words:  eight words, to be precise.  It turns out that, at least for the young men I met, the definition of Satanism is very simple.  It doesn’t involve pentagrams, upside-down crosses, or conjuring tentacled demons.  It’s much more ordinary than that, and much more frightening.

“Christians believe in love,” the Satanists told me.  “We believe in vengeance.”

By that definition, I know a lot of Satanists.  So do you.  Many of them go to church.

Vengeance is everywhere in our national landscape:   in military rhetoric, in sports competitions, and in the violent fantasies of popular entertainment, where a personal loss at the hands of an adversary grants the survivors license to go on a hunting spree with guns blazing and explosives detonating.  We cheer for Vin Diesel, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis when they get the bad guys.  We’re happy when the bad guys suffer.  We scarf down our popcorn, confident that justice has been served.

And that brings us to today’s Gospel, which can also be summarized in eight words.  “Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you.”

This is, hands down, the hardest commandment in the Bible.  Sometimes it feels impossible.  It always requires thought, prayer, and imagination.  It’s a discipline, a task of discernment, and it takes different forms in different situations.  Here are three.

In 2006, a man named Charles Roberts entered an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and shot ten young girls, killing five of them, before killing himself.   The Amish community responded by visiting Roberts’ grieving family to comfort them.  They set up a charitable fund for his widow Marie, who was one of the few outsiders invited to the funeral of one of their children.  Thirty of them attended his funeral.   One Amish father said, "He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he's standing before a just God."

Some observers criticized the Amish approach.  How could they forgive someone who had expressed no remorse?  Didn’t forgiveness deny the existence of evil?  But people familiar with Amish culture explained that this emphasis on forgoing vengeance doesn’t undo the tragedy.  It doesn’t pardon the wrong.  Instead, it represents a first step toward a more hopeful future.

Well, sure, I find myself saying, but Roberts himself was dead.  It was easy to be compassionate to his family.  They weren’t the killer.  What do you do when the killer’s still alive?  How can you possibly love that person?  What does loving that person even look like?

In 1995, fourteen-year-old gang member Tony Hicks shot and killed twenty-year-old college student Tariq Khamisa, who was delivering pizzas in San Diego.  Tariq’s grieving father Azim, a Sufi Muslim, turned to his faith.  For several weeks after Tariq’s death, he says, “I survived through prayer and was quickly given the blessing of forgiveness, reaching the conclusion that there were victims at both ends of the gun. . . . I decided to become an enemy not of my son’s killer, but of the forces that put a young boy on a dark street, holding a handgun.”  Azim reached out to Tony’s grandfather, and the two of them worked together on programs to teach children that there is an alternative to violence. Azim says, “Tony has helped us deliver this message through letters and messages he sends from prison. We use these letters in our programs and they are having a positive effect on other kids. Think of how many kids he may save.”

Well, sure, I find myself saying, but Tony’s in prison.  He was the first minor in California to be tried as an adult.  He’s locked up for twenty-five years.  Justice was served.  What do you do when your enemy is right in front of you?  What do you do when your enemy is hurting you right now, and you have no guarantee that there will ever be justice?

In 1942, while serving as the captain of a Scottish military regiment in WWII, Ernest Gordon was captured by the Japanese and marched with other British prisoners into the jungle to build the infamous bridge over the River Kwai.  As a prisoner of war, he endured both physical and psychological torture.  He watched many of his friends die.  He was expected to die himself.

Years later, after Gordon had been ordained in the Church of Scotland and had become Dean of the Chapel at Princeton University, an interviewer asked how he had survived.  Gordon said, “I practiced the discipline of remaking the face of each torturer into the face his mother had seen cuddling him in her arms.  It is very difficult to be swallowed in bitterness when you can do that, and it is the bitterness that would have killed me, even had I lived.”

Gordon’s story recalls the words of novelist Anne Lamott, who writes that “not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.”  Our vengeance ultimately hurts us the most.   The extraordinary stories of Ernest Gordon, Azim Khamisa, and the Amish community in Pennsylvania show that it is possible to avoid maiming our own souls this way.

And yet I often find it difficult to love even ordinary, everyday enemies:  the former friend who has betrayed me; the co-worker who slights me; myself when I’ve done something wrong or acted against my own best interests.  The urge to punish and belittle, to seek revenge and payback, can be very strong.  Those messages are all around us.

And, certainly, we must remember what loving our enemy doesn’t mean.  It doesn’t mean looking the other way, condoning terrible behavior, or shortchanging justice.  It doesn’t even require us to like our enemy. But it does demand that we see the enemy as human, as a fellow child of God.  It forbids us to wish our enemy pain or to delight in our enemy’s suffering.

I’ve often heard that it is presumptuous for Christ’s followers to call themselves “Christian.” We can’t claim that label ourselves; it can only be given to us by others who observe our behavior and recognize it as Christ-like.  Perhaps the only person who can ultimately make this call is Christ himself.  “Hey, I know you!” he might say.  “You’re one of mine!”

Whenever I hear about yet another hideous tragedy -- another shooting or bombing or act of inexplicable cruelty -- I picture everyone in some vast spiritual version of a high-school gym, waiting to be chosen for the softball team.  In one corner is a scruffy guy in sandals and a robe, who says softly, “Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you.”  ln the other corner is a polite, clean-shaven young man who calls out, “Hate your enemies!  Curse them and seek revenge!”

Which eight words will I respond to?  More importantly, which team will I be on?  Which of these two figures will say, “Hey, you’re one of mine!”                                        

Amen.

Over the Cliff

Here's tomorrow's homily, on the famous story of the Gerasene demoniac.  This is denser and more academic than most of my homilies, and I'm worried about whether it will be intelligible to a listening audience.  But Gary's approved it, and that's usually a good sign.

*

Back when I volunteered as an ER chaplain, I met a young man I’ll call Joe.  He was lying on a gurney in the hall.  He’d pulled the blanket over his head.  When I told him who I was and asked if he wanted to talk, he said, “No one understands.”

“What don’t they understand?” I asked him.

“They don’t understand what it’s like to hear the voices.”

“I don’t understand that either,” I said, “but I want to.  Will you tell me about it?”

The voices in Joe’s head started when he was a teenager.  There were three of them.  Nothing made them go away.  He heard them when he slept.  He heard them when he was on medication.  He’d seen psychiatrists and been in mental hospitals, but nothing helped.

The voices said only one thing, ever and always.  They told Joe to die.

Joe had managed to get through school and to hold down a job he liked and was good at.  His parents and siblings no longer spoke to him, but he’d found a woman he loved and married her.  They had a child.   A week or so before I met him, though, his wife had left, taking the baby with her, and the voices got louder.  Joe called the only friend he had left in the world, a woman in the Midwest, who told him to come to the hospital.

I told Joe that I thought he was very brave.  I couldn’t imagine the strength it took to stay alive in the face of such constant, merciless commands to die.  He barely heard me; I could tell from the distracted look on his face that the voices were drowning out everything else.  In any case, he didn’t want compliments.  He wanted a cure.  He wanted those voices out of his head.

I met other people in the ER who heard voices.  Joe was one of the lucky ones.  He was well groomed, polite, articulate.  He had a place to live.  He had health insurance.  Most of the other patients in this category were homeless, often filthy and raving, desperate and terrified.  Some of them wept when I offered to pray with them; some of them simply screamed at me. Staff avoided them the same way people on the street avoided them.  Such patients could be as frightening as they were frightened.   They cycled back and forth between hospitals or jails and the streets.  Schizophrenia is a poorly understood illness, often difficult to treat, and although most patients aren’t actually dangerous, they scare us.  We leave them alone.  We steer clear.

I imagine the Gerasene demoniac was a lot like those schizophrenic ER patients.  Many Biblical scholars believe that the “demons” in Scripture are various forms of mental illness.  Like the patients I met, this Biblical figure bounced between painful confinement and vulnerable isolation.  He lived in terror and despair, always in the shadow of death.  I wonder if his demons, like Joe’s voices, told him to die, to throw himself off the cliff into the lake.

He was luckier than Joe.  He found the ultimate doctor.  Even the demons recognized Jesus’ power.  Knowing they would be cast out, they begged Jesus to spare them the abyss, to let them go into the herd of swine instead.  Jesus agreed.  Was this his way of loving his enemies, even demons?  Did he hope that if the demons entered the pigs, they’d leave people alone?  Did he believe that this sacrifice of livestock was the only way to purge the infection, a price that had to be paid?  We can’t know.  All we know is that the demons destroyed their hosts.  The swine, who couldn’t resist them as the man had, rushed over the cliff into the lake and drowned.

Good riddance, we might say.  Surely the demoniac himself did.  But the demoniac’s neighbors didn’t.  They didn’t welcome the healing.  They didn’t welcome Jesus.  They were probably upset that a herd of valuable animals had been killed to heal a man none of them wanted around anyway.  Jesus’ healthcare was expensive.  They didn’t want to pay for it, certainly not with their own assets.  They valued the swine more than the man.

That’s one level of resistance, but there’s another, deeper than economics.  The Gospel tells us they were afraid, and while watching miracles can indeed be frightening, I think there’s more to it.   Three years ago I took a summer class on “Dissident Discipleship” at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.  The course gave us ways to think critically about American culture while remaining compassionate to ourselves and others.  We learned that wounds and behaviors we see as strictly personal have almost always been shaped and triggered by larger social forces and historical events:  military combat, economic hardship, bigotry and discrimination.  Private, individual suffering is a symptom of public trauma or dysfunction.  A mother’s neglect of her daughters, for instance, might very well mirror how she herself was hurt growing up in a culture that considered women inferior to men.

The teacher asked us a very important question.  “How does your suffering connect you to other people?  If you were abused by someone in your family who fought in a war, for example, you’re now connected to the children of veterans returning from Iraq, to children of military men and women around the world, and to the children of guerrilla warriors and freedom fighters, too.”

Much of the commentary on the Gerasene demoniac observes that the name “Legion” undoubtedly refers to the Roman Legion.  The demoniac’s possession by unclean spirits mirrors the occupation of the countryside by a despised military force.  Those drowned swine also remind me of Pharoah’s troops drowning in the Red Sea.   This isn’t just a story about a sick man who finds healing:  it’s a story about liberation, both personal and social, and about what that liberation might cost.  You lose a herd of pigs, but you get a person back.  Is the price worth it?

The healed man wants to leave this country.  He wants to join Jesus.  But Jesus tells him to stay where he is “and declare how much God has done for you.”  His job, now that he has been cured, is to tell other people that health and wholeness are possible, that freedom is within reach.   His job is to connect with the people who’ve previously shunned him, pushed him aside, locked him up or forced him to live in the wilds, in the tombs.  His job is to show them that his story is also their story, that they too can find liberation from bondage.

No wonder they’re scared.  They may hate the Romans, but they’ve got their livestock, their fields, their city.  They’re getting by.  Resenting their oppression is a lot easier, and a lot less expensive, than resisting it.   They don’t want to connect with the cured man.  They want his illness to be personal, private, his own problem, a sickness in his brain that has nothing to do with them or their society.

And what does Joe’s story tell us about our own society?  If nothing else, it tells us that we still isolate people with mental illness, that we don’t try hard enough to understand them, that we don’t use enough of our resources to find ways to help them.  Maybe we’re afraid of them not because they’re dangerous, but because the voices they hear are a bit too much like the ones  yammering in our ears, too:  telling us we have to be richer, thinner, more famous; that we should kill our enemies instead of loving them; that our houses and cars and iPads are more important than God’s suffering children; that curing our neighbors is just too expensive.

The story of the Gerasene demoniac is our story.  God calls us to connect with a hurting world, to seek healing for ourselves and others even when that healing costs us.  How much are we willing to give up to get rid of our demons?  What habits are we willing to break to be whole and healthy?  How much are we willing to pay to be free?

Reading at Sundance Bookstore, November 15

On Thursday, November 15 at 6:30, I'll be reading from Brief Visits, my new book of sonnets about my ER volunteer work.  Here's the official flyer for the event.

If you're in Reno, please stop by, and even if you can't make it, please spread the word!

Food for the Journey

Here's today's homily.   I went with the alternate reading of 1 Kings 19:4-8 because I didn't have the courage to tackle "Absalom, Absalom!"  The Gospel is John 6:35, 41-51.

*

Most of you know that I’m an English professor.  At least once a semester, usually around midterms or finals, a student comes to my office in panic and pours out a tale of woe.  Everything is due right now in every class, and the student also has a job and family crises and had the flu last week and just can’t keep juggling everything and doesn’t know what to do –

By now, the student’s usually sobbing on my tiny couch.  “I don’t know why I’m crying,” he or she will say, sniffling, as I hand over a box of tissues.  “I’m not usually such a mess.”

I give these students academic guidance, and I’ve been known to walk them over to UNR’s free Counseling Center.  But that’s not the first thing I do.  The first thing I do – something I’ve learned over many years of dealing with these situations – is to ask the student, “When’s the last time you ate something?”

And the student, who’s usually sitting on my tiny couch at about three or four in the afternoon, inevitably sniffles and says, “Yesterday, I think. Why?”

At that point, I reach into my desk and hand the student a power bar, a box of which I keep handy for just such occasions.  “You need to eat,” I say.  “You can’t think straight on an empty stomach.  This will all seem much more manageable when you have fuel in your system.”

As far as I know, none of my students have been prophets, and I’m certainly no angel.  Nonetheless, Elijah would recognize this scenario.  “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”   Elijah, fleeing Ahab and Jezebel’s death threats, was having an even worse day than my students usually are.   After hours of wandering in the wilderness, he was so exhausted and discouraged that he asked God to let him die.   Bone-tired, frightened and depleted, he couldn’t imagine how to continue.

Elijah’s despair certainly wasn’t caused by a lack of faith.  Two chapters before this reading, he called on God to restore a widow’s dead son, and lo, the child lived.  Note that in our lesson this morning, he again calls on God, shaping his desire to die as a prayer.  “O Lord, take away my life.”  The Lord doesn’t do that.  The Lord gives him bread and water instead.  This famous prophet has already seen and performed miracles, and will go on to see and perform many more.  He’s going to hear the still small voice of God a mere six verses from now, and he’ll conclude his career by ascending to heaven in a chariot of fire.  Right now, though, he has a serious case of low blood sugar.  He can’t think straight on an empty stomach.

Elijah reminds us that the physical and the spiritual can’t be separated.  Ours is an incarnational and sacramental faith: God has given us marvelous, intricate bodies, and has placed us in a marvelous, intricate creation that nurtures and sustains us.  If having a body is hard – we suffer from hunger and thirst, illness and injury – it is also a source of wonder.   Miracles needn’t take the form of angels or chariots of fire.  Miracles are within us and all around us: stars and stones, trees and grass, birds and beasts.  The seemingly ordinary is also always divine.  This is why Jesus came to us in a human body, and why the eucharistic feast is simple bread and wine.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus’ neighbors haven’t figured this out yet.  They don’t understand how this kid they watched grow up – the boy whose parents they know, whose games and pranks and skinned knees they witnessed throughout his childhood – can also be the bread of life that came down from heaven.   They labor under the misconception, still common in our own day, that holy things have to be rarified, otherworldly, set apart:  that miracles have to take the form of angels and chariots of fire, 3D special effects straight out of some CGI blockbuster.

And, in truth, Jesus does sound a little otherworldly in this passage from John.  “This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  That all sounds more than a bit mystical and off-putting, and I think the neighbors can be forgiven for being confused.

Jesus’ life on earth, though, very much depends on ordinary, prosaic bread.  Throughout the Gospels, he’s obsessed with food.  After he raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead, he commands her parents to give her something to eat.  He scandalizes the Pharisees by sharing meals with people who haven’t washed their hands.  One of his last acts on earth is to feed his disciples:  even Judas, the one he knows is about to betray him.   In one post-resurrection story, he asks what’s for breakfast; in another, he fries up some fish for the disciples on the beach.   He feeds us, now, whenever we take communion.  Jesus wants us to work to heal the world, but first, he wants us to have food for the journey.  He knows we can’t think straight on empty stomachs.

But he never force feeds us.  The feast depends on our consent and participation.  Elijah has to reach out to take the food the angel brings him, just as my weeping students need to agree to eat their power bars (and not all of them do).   The elements of the Eucharist represent not only God’s good creation, the grain and grapes that nourish us, but human stewardship in tending them and human skill in turning them into bread and wine.   God gives us what we need to live, but like any good parent, he knows that we must ultimately learn to feed both ourselves and others.  We have to learn to cook our own food, to share it, and to clean up the kitchen afterwards.

Even when we have done this, most of us will hit low points, moments when we feel too discouraged to continue.  Sometimes our despair literally takes the form of praying to die.  At such times, it’s crucial to remember that bread and water almost always help; low blood sugar and dehydration only make things worse.   But it’s also important to look elsewhere in the creation for sustenance, to remember that simple physical things can offer spiritual nourishment.

Years ago, during one of my volunteer-chaplain shifts in the ER, an ambulance brought in a suicidal patient.  He lay in a fetal position, unmoving and unspeaking, as the paramedics rolled him into a room.  Later I learned that he’d had no food or water for three days before, finally, summoning the strength and courage to call 911, to ask for help.

The ER staff started a saline drip to rehydrate him, and gave him a meal.  When I went in to talk to him, he was slowly munching a sandwich which, blessedly, had simply appeared without his having to prepare it.  In severe depression, even making a sandwich can seem overwhelmingly difficult, and a hospital food tray can be a miracle.

He poured out a long tale of woe: mental illness, job difficulties, abandonment by family and friends.  This had all been going on for many years.  “So what’s kept you going through all that?” I asked him.  “What makes you happy?”

“Nature,” he said.   He told me about camping at a lake in the mountains.  He told me about a waterbird he liked to watch there, about its antics and feeding patterns.  His descriptions were very precise, and as he told me about the bird, his face brightened.  He sat up on the edge of his bed, put down his sandwich, and whistled the bird’s courting call while he used his hands to imitate its mating dance.  And then the man who had wanted to die laughed for pure joy.

I know the saline drip and sandwich were food for his journey, but I believe his memory of the birds was, too.  I pray that after he left the hospital, he went back to the lake to see those birds again, and I pray that as he listened to their calls, he also heard the still small voice of God.

Amen.

The Last Shift

Today I served my last shift as a volunteer lay ER chaplain.

When I was there Monday, a letter was being written to spiritual-care volunteers explaining that the department was being cut because of the sale.  I never got that letter this week.  When I went in today, the letters were sitting unmailed on my supervisor’s desk, although he told me he’d called everyone to make sure they knew.  “It doesn’t say much,” he said with a sigh as he handed me mine, and indeed it doesn’t: thanks us for our service, explains that the department’s closing, instructs us to hand in our ID badges.

“I need to say that this sucks,” I told him.  “The way this has been handled is terrible.”

He nodded glumly.  “We do many things very well.  This has not been one of them.”

I went next door to sign in, and then popped back into his office to ask him a question, but he was on the phone, so I went downstairs to the ER.  The first thing I usually do down there is to check the blanket warmers: I give out a lot of warm blankets, and I need to make sure I have my supplies, so for years now I’ve restocked the warmers at the beginning of each shift.  There’s one at each end of the rather large ER; usually the one farthest from the linen cart is partially full and I only need to carry a few blankets down there.  But today that warmer was completely empty, so I decided to roll the entire cart down to the warmer rather than trucking back and forth with armloads of blankets.

The cart is huge, taller than I am, and very ungainly.  It was difficult to steer; I couldn’t see over or around it and wanted to make sure that I wasn’t running over staff, patients or equipment, so I finally got in front and walked backwards, pulling and looking over my shoulder to navigate.  And then, all of a sudden, I saw my supervisor’s face, his eyes round with surprise, peering at me over the opposite end of the cart.

I’ve never seen him in the ER.  I thought maybe there was a patient emergency and someone had called him.  But before I could ask, he said, “What are you doing?”

“Restocking the blanket warmer.”

He frowned.  “We really aren’t supposed to do that.”

Bite me, I thought (completely unjustly; I’m just a volunteer and he lost a salaried position, so getting cranky at him makes no sense, except that he’s the one who’s there).  I’ve been restocking the warmers for over seven years, and I get grief about it on my last day?  “Look, I give out a lot of blankets, and it’s easier and faster for me to do it myself than to nag an overworked tech about it.”

He nodded.  He got that.  (Later I apologized for being cranky and he said, “It’s okay.  Letting people be cranky at me is about all I can do for anyone right now.”)  It turned out he’d come down to find out what I’d wanted to ask him, which was really very decent of him.

We chatted; he left; I kept rolling the cart.  A registration clerk spotted me and said, laughing, “Okay, you’re hired.”

“Actually, I’m fired,” I told her, and explained the situation.  She hadn’t known.  Nobody knew until I told them.  I didn’t tell many people, since everyone was busy, but I did have a long talk with a nurse sitting in the psych hallway, and I also mentioned the situation to the psychiatric social worker, another nurse, and a security guard, all of whom gave me spontaneous hugs.  “You’ve been here forever,” the social worker said, and the security guard said kindly, “With your gifts, you can go anywhere.”  Nice guy.

From my point of view, it was a somewhat slow shift, but a lot of people thanked me for looking in on them, and one couple recognized me from an ER visit last year.  And we had one extremely obstreberous patient who wound up in restraints and was threatening all kinds of violence to medical staff.  “Don’t go in there,” the nurse said.  “That patient doesn’t like women.”  But when I went in and identified myself as the chaplain, the patient started crying, and asked for prayer, and clung to my hand, and treated me to a long, heartfelt and incoherent life history.  Things went south again with medical staff later, but for a few minutes while I was there, that part of the hallway was a little quieter.  The nurse came in again to get vitals while I was there, and the patient said, “I’m talking to my chaplain now, and she trumps you.”  (I explained that actually, medical staff trump me.)  Somehow I don’t think identifying myself as a patient advocate would have had quite the same effect.  Still, I’ll go back as a patient advocate if they’ll let me, as soon as the new owners start accepting volunteer applications.  My supervisor says it’s possible that the new outfit will bring back some form of spiritual care, but I’m not betting on it.

After my shift, I went back upstairs, and removed my badge from its holder, and gave it to my supervisor.  I was pretty teary-eyed.  “Are other people having a hard time with this?” I asked him.  

“No,” he said gently.  “Not as much.  Or at least, they haven’t talked to me about it.  But it’s an individual journey.”  I find that a little hard to believe, since some of the other volunteer chaplains have been doing this much longer than I have.

I cried the whole way home.  Seven and a half years and 1,132 hours: that’s a chunk of my life that’s over now.  And I know I’ll find things to fill the void, but they haven’t arrived yet.

We’re going to a concert tonight.  Music will help.   On Monday, which would ordinarily be a volunteer day, we’re going to a movie.  I’ll keep myself distracted.  But this is a true loss in ways even I can’t quite put my finger on yet, and I ask my friends’ patience and understanding.

End of an Era

1: Background

My hospital has been sold.  All of the hospitals in this area – like so many hospitals across the country – are having terrible financial problems.  If my hospital hadn’t been sold, it would have had to close.  In everything else I say here, keep in mind that closure would have been worse.

The sale’s been percolating for many months.  At one point, it looked like we’d be sold to a particular company: I got online and checked out the websites of the hospitals in their system, and a number of them had spiritual-care departments, and when I spoke to my supervisor, he confirmed that they were sympathetic to spiritual care.  So we were happy.

But that sale fell through, and we were sold to another entity, and when I checked that entity’s hospitals, none of them had spiritual care departments.  And my supervisor confirmed that fact, too, and said it didn’t look good.

2: The Plot Quickens

A few weeks ago my supervisor told me that he had been fired and that there would no longer be a Spiritual Care Department.  He didn’t know what would happen to volunteer chaplains.

This past Friday, I passed his office on my way to sign in for my shift, and ducked inside to say hi.  “Anything new?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah.  There won’t be volunteer chaplains anymore.  The last date they can work is, uh . . . “ – he checked his calendar – “the 18th.”

“Of May?  That’s in two weeks!  We haven’t gotten a letter!”

“It will go out Monday.”

I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.  I reeled through my shift, fighting periodic tears, venting to a few staff.  One doctor I hadn’t even talked to came up to me (very unusual, but it was a slow shift) and said, “I just heard. I’m so sorry.  You guys are so important.  Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

I kept wondering aloud if there’d be some way for me to stay in the ED, maybe as a patient advocate, but everyone told me I’d have to talk to the hospital’s volunteer coordinator about that, and she was on vacation.  So I finished up that shift and came home in tears, heartsick and furious.

3: Big Picture

A lot of my anger was political.  My hospital is the only one in the area that still has in-house Spiritual Care; after the change, there won’t be any.  The importance of spiritual concerns in illness and healing is pretty general knowledge these days, and after seven and a half years of doing this work, I know firsthand how much prayer, comfort and conversation mean to patients.  I literally can’t count how many patients have wept in gratitude during my visits with them, how many of them have told me that they feel better just from talking to someone like me.   I may even have played a tiny role in helping save a life or two, simply by – for instance – offering suicidal patients a different perspective on their despair.  I know for certain that during the time I’ve been volunteering, ED staff have asked at least twice for more chaplains in the department.  Emergency-medicine people are the ultimate empiricists: they aren’t going to ask for something unless they know it works.

It absolutely infuriates me that this crucial aspect of patient care is being abandoned because it doesn’t meet a corporate bottom line.  There’s no billing code for prayer.  Over the weekend, I talked to a professional chaplain who confirmed that it’s not just us: Spiritual Care Departments are being dismantled, and chaplains fired, all over the country.  This is only one more indication of the country’s economic slough.  Once again, I’d rather see departments dismissed than see entire hospitals close, although I have to wonder if Spiritual Care actually has a positive effect on the bottom line that no one’s bothered to try to measure.

4: Also, It Feels Personal

So I spent a lot of the weekend weeping and raging, not just over the dismal swamp of healthcare in general, but also over my own loss.  In case it wasn’t already obvious, I love being a volunteer chaplain, and I think I’m good at it, not least because my somewhat spiky personality is an asset, rather than a drawback, in the ED.  It’s often very difficult for me to see progress in the classroom, and I’m often despondent about my writing, but after any given volunteer shift, I can point with certainty to places where I did good work and produced palpable results.  Losing that role felt like having a body part torn off.

And this loss comes close on the heels of many others.  Over the last five years, I’ve lost both of my parents, Gary’s father, two cousins, an especially beloved cat, and my church.  The world feels a lot thinner than it did five years ago, and (like so many other people), I’ve also suffered losses connected to the inexorable tightening of standards in the university and the church.  Five years ago, I believed I would one day be both a deacon and a full professor: now I know that I won’t be either, because the level of insane hoop-jumping required to reach those spots - a function of nationwide changes in professional expectations - simply isn’t anything I want to attempt.  These decisions are choices, of course, but I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal evidence that this kind of bar-raising is happening in many other fields as well, placing a lot of jobs out of realistic reach of people who’d be very good at them.  Losing my cherished volunteer gig at the hands of a faceless corporation isn’t quite the same thing, but it pushed some of the same buttons: the powerlessness any of us feel in a world of moving targets we can’t map or predict.

Let me say here that I am also very blessed, and know it.  I’m very grateful for everything I have in a world where so many people have so much less.  That doesn’t change the fact that I’m also grieving.

It was not a good weekend.  I sent wailing e-mail to three of my clergy, cried a lot, went through some PTSD-ish bouts of anxiety when I started wondering what I was going to lose next – I probably drove Gary nuts with my clinging – and, not to put too fine a point on it, was a mess.  To be fair, I also did research.  My supervisor had recommended that I move over to being a hospice volunteer, and I talked to a hospice chaplain who said that I’d be very welcome.

5: Cautious Optimism and Tentative Plans

Today was much better.  I talked to the hospital’s volunteer coordinator, who sympathized completely and gave me a huge hug; I once visited her and a sick family member in the ED, and she’s a fan. She said that I should indeed be able to remain in the ED as a “patient advocate.”  I’ll have to reapply, as everyone else at the hospital will.  I’ll have to be retrained.  I won’t be able to say the word “God:” she said there are very strict rules about that.  But I’ll be able to stay in a place I know, where people know me, and I’ll be able to keep helping patients.

She also told me that the last day for volunteer chaplains isn’t the 18th.  It’s the 11th: this Friday, not next.  I have one more shift.

Today’s shift was full and busy and confirmed, yet again, the value of volunteer chaplains.  I prayed with a newlywed whose spouse was on life support, and who thanked me copiously.  I prayed with a woman who wept in gratitude and squeezed my hand.  I cheered up a lot of people just by popping in and asking if they needed to talk.

The doctor who’d come up to me on Friday was working today, too.  I told her about the patient-advocate gig and said, “I could move to hospice, but I’d rather stay here.”  She smiled and said, “We’d rather you stayed here!” which of course made me feel good.

I saw another doctor and filled her in.  When I said, “I can stay here, but I can’t say the word ‘God,’” she rolled her eyes and said, “You have got to be kidding me.  Well, just do what you always do and call it something else.”

Exactly.  And again, lots of what I do – talking to people about advanced directives, giving out the number of the crisis-call line, calling shelters to try to find beds for homeless patients – doesn’t involve explicit mention of God anyway.  Preach the Gospel without ceasing; use words when necessary.  The trick now will be finding safely secular words.

When I went upstairs to sign out, I ran into a social worker who usually works in the ED.  I briefed her, and she said, “We’re going to need advocates, big time.”

So that’s sounding like a plan, but I won’t believe anything until it happens.  I have no idea how long it will take for the new volunteer training to happen.  In the meantime, I’m going to call hospice and check on their training schedule, since they only do trainings once or twice a year and I’d hate to miss out.  I’m hoping that their training will be far enough down the road that I can try the patient-advocate role first, see how I like it, and switch to hospice if it doesn’t work out.

Over the weekend, I got supportive, sympathetic responses from two of the clergy I e-mailed.  Today the third, my rector, called.  He told me that he always needs pastoral-care help in the parish, people to help with hospital and home visits.  So that’s another possibility.

I really do love the ED, though.  I love the clinical setting, the snippets of Cool Medicine I get to overhear, the sheer diversity of the department.   So I’m really hoping that being a godless patient advocate will fill the bill for me, although there will certainly be challenges.  Today – as happens fairly often – a patient recognized me from a previous hospital visit, and thanked me for praying with her then.  What will I do if that happens after the changeover and the patient asks me for prayer now?

“Point at the ceiling,” said Gary, my creative nondenominational pagan.  “Use the Voldemort strategy:  Pray to He-She-It Who Must Not Be Named.”  

Actually, I’d probably break the rules, say the G-word, and hope that no one called the cops.  But it’s going to be very interesting to see how all this works!

Unexpected Shepherds

Here's today's homily. The Gospel is John 10:11-18. After you read this, please do follow the link to the Times story and watch the video; it's disturbing, but also very moving.

*

As the video begins, we watch two men walking across a fenced field. The taller man, Secel Montgomery Sr., has put his arm protectively across the back of his companion, who asks in a puzzled voice, “Why are we here?”

“Why are we here?” Secel says. “We’re going back to the building.” 

“Oh. Where’s the building?”

“That way.” Secel points with his free hand. “See that yellow building all the way over there, with all those windows on it?”

“Way down there?” The smaller man sounds baffled and slightly alarmed. “That’s where we’re going?”

“Yeah!” Secel’s voice is kind, patient. “That’s your building!”

“We’re going to go directly there?” 

“Di-RECT-ly,” Secel assures his friend. “NON-stop!”

Secel’s friend has Alzheimer’s, and Secel is his caretaker. In addition to guiding his charge home from walks, Secel helps him eat, helps him make his bed and brush his teeth and shower, changes his adult diapers. Secel takes his job seriously, and when he talks about the work, he emphasizes the importance of relationship. “You have to bond with them,” he says of Alzheimer’s patients. “They have to trust you, or it won’t work.”

Now, let me ask you a question. Does Secel sound like a good shepherd?

Yes, he sounds like a good shepherd to me, too. And yet many people would be shocked to hear him praised as a good shepherd, because Secel -- and his patients -- are also convicted murderers. The men are inmates of the California Men’s Colony, where specially trained prisoners like Secel take care of fellow felons who have developed dementia. The video clip is part of a New York Times story about the challenges of caring for these prisoners.

I think that most of us, when we think of the Good Shepherd, imagine perfect, sin-free Jesus carrying adorable fluffy lambs. But in the California Men’s Colony, both the shepherds and the sheep have done terrible things. They have brutally taken life. They are part of a despised underclass in our society, a group many of us would think twice about trusting, a group often deprived of civil rights even after release from prison. In many states, for instance, paroled felons are no longer allowed to vote.

If the idea of a convicted murderer as a good shepherd shocks you, consider the following. According to Lutheran theologian Joachim Jeremias, first-century shepherds were also a despised underclass, sneaky trespassers who grazed their herds on other people’s land. Because shepherds often pilfered the herds they were paid to tend, it was forbidden to buy wool, milk or animals from them, because whatever they sold was probably stolen property. The Mishnah, Judaism’s written record of the oral law, said that no one should feel obligated to rescue a shepherd who had fallen into a pit. Deprived of civil rights, shepherds could not fulfill judicial offices or be admitted in court as witnesses.

In Jesus’ day, the idea of a Good Shepherd would have been every bit as startling, even scandalous, as the idea of a Good Murderer is now. Jesus was trying to shock his audience. The Parable of the Good Shepherd, like the story of the Good Samaritan -- another tale about a scorned outcast defying stereotypes -- is designed to make us rock back on our heels and reexamine our assumptions. Jesus acknowledges that some shepherds are very bad eggs, but he asks us to withhold automatic judgment. What really makes people good, he asks us: their social standing, or their behavior? Their past deeds, or their current ones? Who better to protect the sheep: the upstanding judge in town, or the stigmatized shepherd who lives with the flock? Which will the sheep trust more?

There’s a reason why we hear this parable during Easter, the season of resurrection. The story reminds us that nothing we have done, however seemingly shameful, is useless. Everything can be redeemed, made holy, used for healing. The parts of our lives we most want to hide may be what someone else needs to know to trust us. The places in our lives we most hate -– prisons literal or metaphorical, bottomless pits of despair or misfortune -– may be where we can best help people still trapped and suffering. This is the principle of peer support that has made 12-Step groups so successful. “They have to trust you,” Secel says, “or it won’t work.” And Jesus says, “I know my own and my own know me.” 

Here’s another example. Quite a few years ago, during one of my volunteer shifts in the ER, a registration clerk begged me to help a particular patient, a young woman taking Methadone to kick a heroin habit. The Methadone clinic had decreased her dose too quickly, and now she was in withdrawal, in tremendous pain, screaming nonstop. The clerk said, "Junkies feel so horrible about themselves, and I'm scared this kid will just go out and use again. Please go talk to her."

But when I went into the room, the patient wouldn’t even look at me, and the young woman’s mother, tight-lipped, just shook her head. I realized that because I was a chaplain, they expected me to shame or lecture them.

The second bed in that room held someone else from a stigmatized population: a burly biker with prison tattoos, including swastikas. He'd been brought in by a woman -- wife or girlfriend -- who looked as if she'd had a hard life of her own. The Filipino nurse assigned to the room wanted nothing to do with those swastika tattoos, and the relentless noise from the screaming addict was unbearable. It was a terrible room, and I found myself avoiding it.

And then I went by the room on my way to somewhere else, and heard . . . nothing. Silence, sweet peace. My ears rang from the lack of noise. I ducked inside and found the tattooed patient’s female companion leaning over the addict. She was giving the young woman a backrub. The patient, now quiet, had finally relaxed, and so had her exhausted mother.

"Thank you!" I said, amazed and grateful, and the woman smiled up at me.

"I'm a masseuse,” she said. “Massage really does help people calm down."

The screaming patient accepted that backrub because the other woman was a peer, an equal: someone else dealing with real or perceived staff judgments, someone who wasn’t going to lecture or shame or judge an addict in withdrawal. In that place, at that moment, she – not the highly trained medical staff or the well-meaning volunteer – was the Good Shepherd. “They have to trust you, or it won’t work.”

While I’m certainly not encouraging anyone to become a murderer or an addict – or even the consort of a swastika-emblazoned biker – the Good Shepherd reminds us that Good News begins not with status and success, but with the cross and the tomb. We are called to remember that God creates new life and light from death and darkness, from our places of pain and failure. Like Jesus displaying his scars to Thomas, we are called to be wounded healers. We are called to honor the lowest moments of our lives, and to reach out in love to those who live there still.

Amen.