March 24, 2019; The Full Fragility of Life; ICCM; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson
When I do hospital visitation, the calls I dread most are not the ones to the emergency room, or the psychiatric ward, or even the morgue. The hardest calls come from the pediatric floor or the neo natal unit, where little babies lay in cribs with bandages closing their eyes or where sweet faced children push IV poles down the hall.
I suppose that is in part due to our own family history. Steve’s youngest daughter was born without a right ventricle and spent her first months in Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis, MN. She had two open heart operations during her first month of life, another a year later, another at the age of 13 and her most recent surgery was a valve replacement 4 years ago. That last one wasn’t open heart, instead of cracking her chest open a fifth time, they were able to do a valve replacement via catheter.
Steve’s brother in law is currently recovering from quadruple bypass surgery and his elder brother is undergoing yet another round of chemotherapy. He recently wrote the following message in a text group with his siblings who were expressing just how hard their current experiences have been. Steve’s a great writer and a deep thinker. He wrote:
I’ve been asked questions about how I dealt with knowing my child could die in any one of her surgeries. I answer, “We All Have a Children’s Hospital.” We don’t know when, what or how it will be. But something that exposes the full fragility of life will happen in each of our lives at some point. Then and only then do we know who we will deal with the crisis. But, deal with it me must. There is no other choice. A gifted counselor once asked me if I was prepared for my child to die? Had I faced the very real possibility that she would not survive me? Through those questions I confronted my unspoken fears and when I did, I knew I was not alone or unique in any way. This path has been traveled by everyone and will be travelled again and again. We all share in this walk. There is no escaping it. Walk strongly, walk with courage, walk with the love and support of those who surround you. Find peace and comfort in sharing your burdens and knowing you are not walking alone.
One of my other favorite writers, Barbara Brown Taylor, writes about her experiences as an Episcopal Priest, visiting the pediatric waiting room. One day, she received a call to come sit with a mother while her five year old daughter was in surgery. Earlier in the week, the girl had been playing with a friend when her head began to hurt. By the time she found her mother, she could no longer see. At the hospital, a CAT scan confirmed that a large tumor was pressing on the girl’s optic nerve and she was scheduled for surgery as soon as possible.
On the day of the operation, Barbara found her mother outside the hospital on the smoker’s bench. She was smoking and smelled as if she had smoked a whole pack right there on that bench. She was staring at the concrete in front of her with her eyebrows raised in that half-hypnotized look that warned her to move slowly. She sat down beside her. The mother came to, and after some small talk she told her just how awful it was. She even told her why it happened.
“It’s my punishment,” she said, “for smoking these damned cigarettes. God couldn’t get my attention any other way, so he made my baby sick.” Then she started crying so hard that what she said next came out like a siren, “Now I’m supposed to stop, but I can’t stop. I’m going to kill my own child.”
Barbara Brown Taylor says it was hard for her to hear. She decided to forego reflective listening and concentrate on remedial theology instead. “I don’t believe in a God like that,” she said, “The God I know wouldn’t do something like that.” The only problem with her response was that it messed with the mother’s world view at the very moment she needed it most. However miserable it made her, she preferred a punishing God to an absent or capricious one. Barbara may have been able to reconcile a loving God with the daughter’s brain tumor, but at the moment the mother could not. If there was something wrong with her daughter, then there had to be a reason. She was even willing to be the reason. At least that way she could get a grip on the catastrophe.
Even those of us who claim to know better react the same way. Calamity strikes and we wonder what we did wrong. We scrutinize our behavior, our relationships, our diets, our beliefs. We hunt for some cause to explain the effect, in hopes that we can stop causing it. What this tells us is that we are less interested in truth than consequences. What we crave, above all, is control over the chaos of our lives.
Luke does not divulge the motive of those who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices. The implication is that those who died deserved what they got, or at least that is the question Jesus perceives in the background. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all the other Galileans?”
It is a tempting equation that solves a lot of problems. First, it answers the riddle of why bad things happen to good people. Next it punishes sinners right out in the open as a warning to everyone. And finally, it gives us a God who obeys the laws of physics. For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Any questions?
It is a tempting equation, but Jesus won’t go there. “No,” he tells the crowd, “but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” It’s a sort of giving with one hand and taking away with the other kind of answer. No, Jesus says, there is no connection between the suffering and the sin. Whew. But unless you repent, you are going to lose some blood too. Oh.
There is no sense in spending too much trying to decipher this piece of the good news. As far as we can tell, it is not meant to aid reason but to disarm it. In an intervention aimed below his listeners’ heads, Jesus touches the panic they have inside of them about all the awful things that are happening around them. They are terrified by those things, for good reason. They have searched their hearts for any bait that might bring disaster sniffing their way. They have lain awake at night making lists of their mistakes.
While Jesus does not honor their illusion that they can protect themselves in this way, he does seem to honor the vulnerability that their fright has opened up in them. It is not a bad thing for them to feel the full fragility of their lives. It is not a bad thing for them to count their breaths in the dark, not if it makes them turn toward the light.
It is that turning that he wants for them, which is why he tweaks their fear. Don’t worry about Pilate and all the other things that can come crashing down upon your heads, he tells them. Terrible things happen, and you are not always to blame. But don’t let that stop you from doing what you are doing. That torn place your fear has opened up inside of you is a holy place. Look around while you are there. Pay attention to what you feel. It may hurt you to stay there and it may hurt you to see, but it is not the kind of hurt that leads to death. It is the kind that leads to life.
Depending on what you want from God, this may not sound like good news to you. I doubt it would have sounded like good news to the mother on the smoking bench outside the hospital. We all have a Children’s Hospital like experience that pushes us to our deepest fears, where we face our mortality or that of our closest loved ones, or where we push through the depths of despair or injustice. It’s the reality we know. We discover that we cannot make life safe, nor can we make God tame. The gospel becomes enough, it is all we really have, the presence of God, who knows our suffering, the love of others who help us through. It is a life-giving fear that pushes us to turn our faces to the light. That way, whatever befalls us, we will fall the right way, into the everlasting grace of God.