"It’s a great life," said one Chautauqua elder hostel participant out of breath as she climbed the hill from the lake to the amphitheatre, "if you don’t weaken."
Ernest Hemingway might have agreed. In A Farewell To Arms, he observed, "the world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
The truth is we do weaken and get broken. But what I want to talk about this morning is how God makes us strong again.
We are talking about equipping the saints today.We are talking about pastoral care and spiritual growth – how we stand by each other at the times when we are broken and how through each other God makes us strong.
The first of our short-term goals we discussed was strengthening stewardship, the second – expanding our membership. Today our theme is equipping the saints – you and me, the church.
It would be hard to say which of these is more important. The church leaders who conceived this vision selected stewardship, membership, and pastoral care and spiritual growth from among twenty possible such goals. Of all the things we could do, these are the building blocks that are right for Westminster right now – to be the church we envision in 2010.
You can do the math yourself. Strong stewardship plus growing membership plus sensitive pastoral care plus spiritual growth equals more than the sum of the parts.
- Those things add up to a church that moves mountains and performs miracles.
- A church that brings transformation to our city and region. A church, I join our elders and deacons in saying we are called to become.
Yes, there is truth to Hemingway’s words: life breaks us sooner or later.
But today’s gospel is also true. Today’s gospel says Jesus came that we might have life and have it abundantly. The purpose of human life, says the Bible, is not to be broken but to know and experience the goodness of creation. "To do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God." Not to be crushed and defeated.
Any decent theology affirms that. We are not creatures of fate or some malevolent, sadistic creator. We are made, says the Westminster Confession, to know and glorify God forever.
The problem is that vision gets clouded. Life turns busy or harsh. We meet what one writer calls the black dog of divorce or job loss or broken dreams. We end up not having the time or strength or heart for much of anything let alone glorifying God.
Someone said recently she attended a church event and saw another woman she has known for years. A woman she has always admired but does not know well.
She confessed to her acquaintance, "if we had the time I think you and I could be really good friends."
It was said half seriously, half in jest but you and I get her meaning because most of us know what she was talking about. Life is hectic, stressful, harrowing sometimes. Wouldn’t it be nice to block out an afternoon to make a new friend!
But who has the time and energy?
We are talking about what it means to be a great congregation. One of the things it means is something very simple. We are not called to be a place where a bunch of busy people can merely be a bunch of busy people together.
Rather, a great church is a place where people connect with one another.
A place where they face together the brokenness in themselves and the brokenness in society. A place where hope and healing are the spiritual soup du jour. A place that fortifies our hearts and minds for living.
I witnessed how the church I served in Pennsylvania fortified one of its families.
Out of the blue, one summer day, we got word that the thirteen year old younger child and son of this family died of a severe reaction to a food allergy.
Eric was on vacation with his sister and parents visiting cousins in California. He and his sister and cousins were walking down the boardwalk in Santa Cruz and purchased ice cream cones – which for Eric turned out to be fatal.
Somehow lethal levels, for him, of peanut oil were in the ice cream cone. He died on the boardwalk before the ambulance could arrive.
You can imagine how this rocked our congregation and small town. At first, there were no words, only tears, then a stream of cards and flowers and casseroles to Eric’s home. Then the quiet presence of the women’s fellowship for Cathy, Eric’s mother; the men of the church for John, his father; and teenagers standing by Katie, his sister.
A circle of men organized themselves and stopped by regularly to see if John wanted to go for a walk or bike ride or round of golf. When he mentioned a major home improvement project, some of the engineers and contractors in the congregation showed up and helped install a new heating system.
Likewise the women of the church consumed more tea that year than Buckingham Palace sitting with Cathy in her kitchen at the breakfast table sometimes talking non-stop, sometimes just in silence. And Katie’s friends – the attendance at the senior high fellowship escalated as teenagers in the community used that opportunity to support her.
Cathy and John began attending Compassionate Friends – a support group of parents who have lost a child. Slowly the fog of agony and grief began to lift – ever so slightly.
Eventually, Cathy and John started leading their own Compassionate Friends meetings. The church restored and dedicated a large second floor space as a youth room in Eric’s memory. The choir commissioned and performed an anthem for All Saints Day on the first anniversary of his death.
Healing came to our church. And something happened that Hemingway does not mention: the ones who were wounded became the healers.
Henri Nouwen calls this phenomenon "the wounded healer." Kent Groff our men’s retreat leader last month put it another way. He said we are all beggars and that he came to us not as an expert but as one beggar to others with information where to find food.
The story about Eric and his family is a dramatic example of pastoral care in one church. I know that Westminster has some stories of its own. What I like about such stories and what we can learn from them is that in addition to clergy presence with people in their time of darkness – what makes healing complete is the presence of regular church folks with one another when they suffer.
When that occurs what takes place is what Matthew describes as people ministering to Christ by ministering to one another.
You don’t often find that depth of care and sustained support today – even between next door neighbors in many of our communities.
You could make a case given our overly structured lives from early childhood to retirement that we have forgotten the basics of relating to one another.
I do not mean as committee members or as potential customers or clients but simply as human beings. Taking time to notice, to listen, to reach out.
David Letterman’s recent open heart surgery is a telling illustration of how difficult it is for us to deal with our humanness.
We worship Hollywood’s celebrity pantheon like Greek gods – where the wrinkles of old age and the palor of terminal illness are air-brushed away – because it helps maintain the fiction that we will never die.
Imagine David Letterman treating his upcoming heart surgery like a national security secret – even from his mother. This is a philosophy of life based on hiding human weakness and mortality.
But the church, at its best, is based on another view of life. The church is based on the view that it is precisely because we are mortal that none of us can survive without God’s grace or each other.
That is what Matthew wanted us to realize. And so when Jesus says, "when you did it to the least of these you did it to me," Matthew is reminding us how interconnected we are. Embracing and strengthening the connectedness rather than denying or discounting it is the mission of the church.
The great insight of this story is if it is Christ who is helped when we reach out to others it is Christ or God who suffers when we fail to recognize and respond to human need. The good news of this story is the God we worship is not some invincible, eternally youthful Hollywood star but a God of mercy and compassion and tenderness.
Nor is life a matter of keeping some stoic façade in the face of tragedy – because sooner or later we all break.
Rather dealing with life is understanding that living, as Scott Peck says, is a process of death and rebirth, of pain and joy. And that, ultimately, for all we have given up much more is gained.
It may take a few deaths and rebirths before you understand that. Which is why middle-age can be so liberating because, depending on your learning curve, it takes about 40 years for most of us to see Peck’s point. But once you do and let it shape your life you will have entered the ranks of the wounded healers.
Life is a process of death and rebirth. The gospel today calls us to be midwives, wounded healers, beggars, accompanied by Christ, accompanying one another into wholeness.
When that begins to happen miracles occur in a congregation. People may not have all the answers to the challenges they face but they know with God’s help and one another’s support anything can happen.
You can have lots of members and plenty of dollars and wonderful program.
But the presence of God’s love in a congregation makes the wounded whole and equips the church with the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
With gifts like that all the other things a church needs will follow.
So we say in our vision statement – "pastoral care and spiritual growth at Westminster will equip more church members to live their faith more fully." It’s that simple.
It does mean establishing a spiritual life committee to provide opportunities for faith development. It will mean establishing a serious men’s studies program. It does include a non-paid parish associate to over-see our small group ministry.
And, yes, there is a plan for an Associate for Pastoral Care and Faith Development. A person who would orchestrate, like a conductor, all of our systems and people delivering care – lay care-givers, parish neighborhoods and pastoral staff.
In a congregation of our size and geographical reach we need a comprehensive plan to enable us to grow into wounded healers. Given the forces of our busy weekday lives and all the other demands upon us it will not happen by itself.
You understand that. For several years, every time a survey is conducted in this congregation pastoral care rises to the top. There is a hunger for us to be a healing, nurturing, caring community.
I understand that too. Years ago when I was just entering the ministry I had to meet before a committee of our Presbytery. The meeting was a disaster. I was convinced this group of clergy and church members from Western New York only wanted to find something in me to criticize. So I told them very little – least of all any struggle I had experienced in life… the difficult adjustment to my parents’ divorce or my father’s death.
I was summoned to return – all the way to Olean. Before the trip, a member of the committee, a wise older minister Dick Nygren said to me, "Tom all we want to know is what makes you tick – where God might be at work in your life."
Which is what I told them that night in John Kipp’s living room. In response to which the floodgates of their lives opened and they shared with me their journeys of faith – their brokenness and woundedness, their joy and restoration.
From that night on I understood the power and strength and possibility that is born when we share our stories of grace with one another.