HE HAD COMPASSION FOR HER

A Sermon on the Seventh Chapters of First Kings and Luke

A decade ago, when my life suddenly changed and I left parish ministry for a few years, I became a chaplain. In some ways it was a difficult adjustment, giving up parts of ministry I love. In other ways, though it was life-giving. I was able to focus on just one, important thing: caring for others in times of need. A visit I made, as a chaplain to a patient, was often the only moment I had to care for someone. That’s true in all of life, of course. This moment, right now, is always the moment that really matters. Yet I learned about being present for people in a deeper, more powerful way when I spent nearly eight years focusing on pastoral care – first as a chaplain, then as a parish priest again, helping create what we here at All Saints’ have come to call our CareTeams.

As I reflected this week on today’s two stories about women who first lose their husbands and then their sons, I remembered a time when I visited a woman while serving as chaplain in a continuing care retirement community. Her fifty-two-year-old son, who lived far away, died suddenly, and it fell to me to bring this unsuspecting mother the very bad news. I remember two things about that visit. Somehow I was given to say, “I don’t know what it’s like to lose your child.” Then came her response: “It doesn’t matter how old your child is. They’re still your baby.”

The grieving widows of Nain and Zarephath had lost their sons, their babies. But they had lost even more. They first lost their husbands, which meant that any surviving child was considered an orphan, since fathers had far more societal privilege than mothers. Then, they lost their sons, which meant they could no longer count on any protection society offered. As a result, they had lost everything. Widowed and childless, they would automatically become a permanent part of the poorest, most powerless population.

I don’t have a clue about what it’s like to be so bereft and marginalized in this kind of way. And yet, it happens throughout history. The Bible is full of stories about those whom Jesus calls “the least of these.” What does Jesus say? That we are to respond to them as if they were family. “As you did it unto on of the least of these,” – the hungry, the thirsty, strangers, the naked, the sick, prisoners, any “who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). And what does Jesus do? Today’s gospel says this about what Jesus does for the widow: “He had compassion for her” (Luke 7:13).

Unlike Elijah, Jesus did not have to be convinced by the mother who lost her son. He did not have indifference for the widow of Nain. On the contrary, Jesus had compassion for her. Jesus was willing come alongside her, to meet her where she was, to comfort her, to walk with her, to be present to her. And he had something else for this widow. Like Elijah before him, Jesus was also able to work a miracle for her. He gave that mother back the son she had lost and loved. But the miracle before the miracle, Jesus’ first wonderful work was something so obvious, we can miss it altogether. First, Jesus simply saw this woman as God saw her, a precious, beloved child. And Jesus responded to her as God responds.

Jesus did the God thing, the right thing, ignoring all the societal or religious taboos of his day. For Jesus to touch a dead body or even a funeral bier, for him to respond to an unprotected woman, for him to give her any kind of attention, which seems gracious or empathetic or even normal to us – this would have been seen as wrong, unrighteous behavior. Jesus’ first miracle was that he, a man, stopped and gave his undivided attention to this woman.

My friends, what Jesus did for her he has promised to do for you and for me. Wherever we are, Jesus meets us there – if we want to be met, if we are willing to be touched. And there is no time in our lives when we are more willing to let Jesus find us, no day when we are more ready to receive his healing touch, than when we find ourselves at the bottom of life’s barrel.

Whenever I have hit bottom, whenever I’m in one of my worst times, that’s when it’s time for me to meet the God I know in Jesus – again, as if for the first time. I have found that I meet and find Jesus most often in the face or the voice or the simple presence of someone with compassion. In my times of trial, I need a human being who is willing simply to be with me in my suffering.

To have compassion for another human or any other being begins with an open heart. And how do hearts open? Often it is the case that they get broken open. It is our own suffering that makes it possible to stop, look at, listen to and think about what someone else is going through. What is it like for the poorest of the poor, who wake up every day wondering how they will feed their children today? Just think about them. What is it like for the families of our servicemen and women to have their loved ones serve another tour of duty abroad, only to come home, less than whole? Just listen to their stories. What is it like to live on the Gulf Coast these days? To have your livelihood taken away? For that matter, what’s it like to be a heron, suffocating in oil? Sisters and brothers, are you looking for images of compassion? Just stop and take a good look at those people who are painstakingly cleaning our coastal wildlife.

What keeps them going? How do folks do it? What can we do for them? These are questions of compassion you may be considering. Or maybe not. Maybe your questions are more like these: How can I keep going? How can I suffer with others when I am in a place of so much pain, I can’t even suffer or tolerate myself? What if no one really, truly has compassion for me?

One of my spiritual teachers is a chaplain in a men’s maximum security prison. As we were talking on the phone one night this week, she told me of a recent series of violent episodes—five men taken to the ER for assaults in one night, followed by, on a Sunday morning like this, an attack on one inmate by another. This particular victim required 185 stitches in his neck.

Prison violence is a terrible thing of course, and there are protocols in place to contain it. But the real story about this episode is what happened next. First my chaplain friend visited the guy who was slashed. She said he looked pretty good considering. And then yesterday I asked for special permission to see the slasher guy. Three officers had to escort him to the conference room. I got permission to talk to him alone, with the three officers on the other side of the door. Of course the guy was fully shackled . . . There wasn't anything that he was going to do to me. So we had our conversation. I told him how incredibly sad I was. He apologized. He said that he had no choice. I said, "You had no choice? Those are some of the saddest words that I've ever heard. Is that really true?" He started crying.

My friend the chaplain had compassion, not only for the victim, but for the perpetrator. It’s one thing to suffer with widows and orphans and even strangers. It’s quite another to have compassion for someone who tries to take someone else’s life. And yet, she did. Her stories of prison life—of life with one group of society’s discards—are hair-raising. Her heart is broken again and again, as she tries to care in an environment where no one cares. I see Jesus’ compassion in what this brave and open-hearted woman does, day after day.

Whenever our hearts are broken open by pain or grief, we who follow Jesus need to look for Jesus, wherever we can find him. All of us hurt, all of us suffer, all of us need the compassion of Jesus. And all of us are called to share the compassion of Jesus to others. It’s the bottom line of our faith. Wherever suffering is, God is there. God knows what it’s like. God knows what it’s like to lose a son. God knows what it is like to suffer rejection, to be betrayed and abandoned. God knows what it’s like for us, whatever our suffering may be. And so does Jesus, God’s precious, beloved son.

That’s the real miracle. God gave us someone who miraculously meets us, all the time, in the person of Jesus. We can see Jesus in the people we meet – wherever we are, whatever we’ve done or left undone, however great our suffering may be. The real miracle is that Jesus is always right here – willing to find us, to meet us, to stop and listen to us, to be present to us, to suffer with us, to take our suffering from us, to heal us, to love us. Jesus has a gift for us, the gift of compassion. And the compassion of the God who heals us and loves us, no matter what – God’s compassion is a gift we have been given to share.