Referencing the decline in religious affiliation these days,
poet Christian Wiman commented, “In my experience every church nods to doubt
but has little to say to despair.”[1]
Perhaps he has a point. We’re proud to be open to all kinds and shapes of
“beliefs” in the Episcopal Church; we reassure you—I hope—that questions and
doubts are a normal part of the life of faith. But do our tidy services, our
coffee hours, our guarded smiles, our carefully reasoned sermons … Do they
speak to the waves of despair that can wash over human beings in this world? Do
they reach down into our private pits of meaninglessness? Do they reach out to
those desolate places, far from our doors, in which despair dwells and even
thrives?
I’m not so
sure that they do. In contrast, though, today’s lessons from Scripture show us
a God who deals directly with despair. No one in the ancient world knew more
about despair than the widow did. It’s not just that she grieved for her
husband. It’s not even that she faced poverty. A woman in the ancient Near East
depended upon a man for her very survival, for her personhood. If her husband
died, and he had no brothers to marry her and keep her a place in his family,
then she and her children were thrust out on the margins of society, without
status, without income, without hope that things would ever change. Thanks to
God’s law, a widow in Israel could glean leftover crops in the fields to scrape
together some sustenance for herself and her children. But she was powerless
and invisible in her plight. Her only hope was that a son might grow to
adulthood and give her food, shelter, and an identity in her old age.
The two widows that we meet in
today’s readings have lost even that hope. The widow from Zarephath, to whom
the prophet Elijah is sent, is literally starving during a time of famine in
the land; yet she has a son. When her son dies, she cries out to God in total
despair, convinced that her own sin has brought such doom upon her. The widow
in Nain, whom Jesus meets on the road, has also just lost her son, her only son
and her only hope for survival. No wonder Jesus’ heart goes out to her. In
bringing these two sons back to life, God is doing more than alleviating grief
and putting on miracle shows: God is reaching down into total despair and
turning it into joy. In both stories, it is the healing of the despair of the
mothers that is emphasized, rather than the healing of the sickness of the
sons. In both stories, we see God’s compassion—and more importantly, God’s
action—in the face of the greatest human desolation imaginable. We see Elijah
do more than heave a sigh of grief. We see him throw himself down on the dead
son’s body and angrily challenge the Lord God, until God changes his mind. We
see Jesus do more than console the grieving mother; we see him charge into the midst
of the funeral procession and touch the unclean bier, daring to make himself
ritually unclean.
Recently in Louisville, there has
been a great deal of talk about compassion. Our city is the largest city in the
country to have signed a “Charter of Compassion, and Louisville has embarked on
a 10-year campaign for compassion which will be implemented by a new local
group, the Partnership for a Compassionate Louisville. We mainline Christians
are comfortable talking about compassion. The recent visit by the Dalai Lama
and the recent Festival of Faiths centered on an interfaith discussion of what
it means to be compassionate, to “suffer with” the suffering, to lift up the
marginalized. I was proud of myself for attending a few
lectures in this festival, and for advertising it in our bulletin. However, I
must say that I do a lot more listening to talk about compassion than I do
actively engaging in it. I do a lot more opening my heart to sad stories than I
do risking my own neck by reaching out to heal what is broken.
I read a story in the paper on
Tuesday that has haunted me all week. Perhaps you saw it, too. It is the story
of a local family, members of Northeast Christian Church, who have just adopted
a toddler from China with stage 4 cancer.[2]
This family already has four children and is going through financial hard
times. Before adopting the little girl, they even had to sell their nice,
upper-middle-class home to move into a smaller rental home. Yet their eldest
child, when she was only six years old, heard about all of the Haitian children
who were orphaned in the earth quake there. She wanted to adopt an orphan, to
share her family’s blessings with a less fortunate child. Her parents did what
we all probably would have done under such circumstances: they tried gently to
dissuade her, to distract her, to satisfy her with doing less momentous acts of
Christian kindness. Children, after all, don’t understand the practical,
real-life difficulties that follow generous impulses. When their daughter kept
begging and praying, year after year, for an adopted brother or sister, the
parents even found an international Christian organization that offered the
opportunity to pray and to send money to unfortunate children overseas without
going through the huge step of adopting them. But that is when the family met
Mya, the little girl all the way over in China, who was dying of a rare cancer
of the pelvic bone. The Chinese doctors had already done everything that they
could for her. The Louisville family heard a call from God to take care of this
little girl; they tried to ignore that call, to rationalize that call away, but
they couldn’t do it. And this family did what I wouldn’t have done: they
reached out in spite of the risk of financial ruin, in spite of the risk of
heartbreak, in spite of the risk of traumatizing their own four children, and
they adopted the sick child. They acted with God’s compassion, the kind of
compassion that suffers with the suffering, the kind of compassion that not
only bows the head before despair but that actively addresses despair—the worst
kind of despair that we know—the despair of a dying, abandoned child. Mya now
lives with them in Louisville, where she receives free top-notch medical
treatment from doctors at Kosair hospital. She smiles and plays and holds tight
to her new mom’s fingers, and she might even see the miracle of a cure or
remission of her cancer. For all accounts and purposes, Mya, like the
despairing widows and their sons, has been, at least for now, raised from the
dead.
It all made me wonder: what made
Mya’s new family do more than shake their heads over the shadow of a little girl
in despair, half a world away? What made them do more than pray for her, more
than send a few left-over dollars her way? What made them overcome their fear
to reach out and take action?
A friend of mine pointed to an
answer. In the newspaper interview, this family emphasized the support of their
church. This family knew that, whatever misfortune they might incur in helping
Mya, their church would be right there with them, lending them whatever aid
they might need. Indeed, in order to pay for the adoption, Northeast Christian
collected some $15,000. This family’s call became the whole community’s call.
They felt the backing—the spiritual and emotional and practical backing—of an entire
community. This family was not acting alone. They were not making the decision
alone. They had the support of a Christian community.
We saw something similar here at St.
Thomas, too. When I found out about the needs of a single-parent family from the
Congo and shared them with you, we were able to take a step together that I
doubt any of us would have taken on our own. We did have one family step up
courageously to take the lead, but the financial and emotional and spiritual
support that we have been able to give to Ortance and her family have been the
result of a whole community coming together, and it has exceeded my wildest
expectations.
In our scripture lessons, there is
another interesting common thread in the two miracles. In both stories, the faithful
are experiencing a spiritual high at the moment that they are confronted by despair.
Elijah has just seen God feed him and the widow and her son for days with one
small jug of oil and a handful of meal in a jar. It is after this miraculous
sustaining act that the widow’s son suddenly falls ill and dies. In Luke’s
story, Jesus’ disciples have just seen him cure the centurion’s slave, and they
are entering the town of Nain in triumph, with a whole enthusiastic crowd of
believers at their side. It is then that the parade of happy disciples meets
the funeral cortege, and joyful life comes face to face with tragic despair.
We in the Church today, as we rejoice
in Jesus’ deeds or reap the fruits of God’s sustaining blessings, we too run smack
into despair. Sometimes it is in our midst and sometimes we only get wispy
traces of it, floating to us from dark places far away. As followers of a
compassionate God, we are called to take compassionate action. We are called to
adopt that dying baby. We are called to give away money that we think we might
need. We are called to take risky action. But if the Church is doing its job, we
know that we have a community to support us. We know that we don’t go out on a
limb alone. It is my prayer that we at St. Thomas can grow to be that kind of real,
authentic, and priceless community for one another—a community that dares, in
the name of the compassionate Christ, to speak life, in word and in deed, to
despair.
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