VISIT THE SICK

One of the responsibilities every priest fulfills on a regular basis is to visit his or her parishioners who are in the hospital. To be sure fulfilling that ministry is not always a pleasant experience. It is no joy trying to comfort those who are in extreme pain especially because you can do nothing on your own to alleviate that pain. All you can do is be with them and pray for them. And yet, that is all the sick person really desires and expects from you.

Many years ago I was attending a local gathering of clergy. We used to meet once a month to talk shop, catch up on what was going in our small town and, if possible, have a speaker talk to us about something that might aid our ministries. On one of those occasions the chaplain at the local hospital spoke to us. He was rather pompous sort and a little condescending in his remarks especially when he told us that the medical professionals at the hospital looked upon clergy as merely “clowns”. His word.

I was initially taken aback and, frankly, insulted. But later I thought about what he had said and took it as a compliment. Clowns are people who try to uplift those who may be down, give joy to those who may be sad, put a smile on the faces of those who may be grimacing in pain. My presence at the sick bed of a parishioner was and always is meant to try to uplift, as best I could, that person, even for a moment.

When we are ill, sometimes that is all we need and all we want: someone to be present with us to hold our hand, to help see us through the moment. We are not looking for a miracle worker, just someone to be present in love and out of love. Yes, it is my responsibility as a priest to visit the sick, but it is also the responsibility of every Christian to do the same. It is one of those corporal works of mercy that Jesus says will be the basis of how we will be judged, in fact, how we are judged right now.

Visiting the sick, as I have learned from personal experiences of being in the hospital, is a tricky business. I never sit unless am asked to sit. I never stay very long. The sick person needs to rest in order to heal. When I am asked to sit, it is for one of two reasons. The person is on the mend and is feeling much better and has the energy to hold a conversation or the person has a serious question to ask and it does not matter how he or she is feeling at the moment.

When confined to bed, it is easy for loneliness, even fear, to set in. That is why we need personal comforters to uplift us out of the doldrums that can quickly consume us. And when we are well, that is why we need to be those comforters. If nothing else, if we cannot personally visit those who are ill, and it is certainly not nothing, we can pray for them. We know the power of prayer. We know how uplifting it has been for us when we were sick to know others were praying for us. We must do the same for them. If we can, making a personal visit is even better. Doing both is best.

SHELTER THE HOMELESS

Trinity Church in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where I served many years ago, is located downtown. We always had a pot of coffee brewing especially in the winter months because the “street people”, as they were called back then, stopped in to warm themselves in the heated office space and with a cup of that coffee. Today, we simply name these people as “homeless” because that is what they were then and are today.

They are everywhere, living under bridges, in vacant homes, anywhere where they can find shelter. One of our frequent coffee guests was a man named Jerry. Jerry would be with us all year long until the snow fell or it got too cold to live outside. But Jerry always found warm shelter in the winter at the local jail. He would commit some offense that assured him that he was sentenced to at least three months in prison. Whatever works and that worked for him.

If anything, the problem of homelessness has only gotten worse, not just in this country but around the world. With it the Old Testament admonition that the Jewish people must take care of the aliens (read “homeless”) in their midst and Jesus’ command that we will be judged by how well we fulfill our responsibility to shelter the homeless has compounded the problem even more.

The response has not been very encouraging especially from those who insist that we are indeed a Judeo-Christian country. We are not, of course. Nations do not have religion. They have laws. People have personal religion. How well we, the people, fulfill our religious responsibilities is the issue at hand for us as when it comes to sheltering the homeless. We can ignore the problem or hope it goes away. But it won’t go away and ignoring it only makes it worse.

The problem becomes worse when our often gut response to someone who is homeless is to tell them to get a job. The street people who stopped in for coffee at Trinity would love to have been able to work; but the issue for them was not physical, being able to work, but mental, not being able to work. Instead of placing Jerry in a mental health facility, we closed them down and he and his kin became homeless. And still are.

So what do we do? Individually we cannot do very much. To adequately deal with and resolve the issue of homelessness in our country means that the system has to change. Where once the mental health facility in Warren, Pennsylvania, where I served at Trinity Memorial, used to care for over 3000 patients, it now only houses the criminally insane. The rest, like Jerry, were mainstreamed. Society is now paying for this foolishness.

If the Christian Church is serious about Jesus’ command that we shelter the homeless, it had better lead the way by speaking out as a unified voice and get the government to begin to address the issue full force. And we need to support that leadership.

GIVE DRINK TO THE THIRSTY

This morning as I was shaving I suddenly became conscious of a recent public service ad I saw on television. Its message is that we turn the faucet off while we are brushing our teeth because we waste more water in a day than most people have access to in a week. I looked down and the water was running. I turned the water off and only used it to wash the shaving cream off the razor only when needed.

It reminded me of when I was a youngster and watching my Uncle Dom shave. He was an old brush-and-lather man for those old enough to remember when there was no such product as shaving cream in a can. He would put the plug in the sink, fill it with enough water to cleanse his blade and no more. This was the same Uncle whom I once caught patching a patch on his undershorts even though he had a drawer full of new ones given to him by my siblings and me.

Uncle Dom never went to church except when I was in town celebrating. But a more Christian man could not be found. He was a union man to the core who believed that the CEO of Alcoa should not make any more money than he did. They needed each other. Besides, he had all that he needed because he somehow never wanted for anything that he really did not need.

Uncle Dom taught me more about being a Christian than all my Sunday School and seminary classes put together ever did. He always cared for those who were not as blessed as he was. And for him his blessings were not about material possessions. His blessings were his five nieces and nephews, my siblings and me. He did for us what our parents could not. We have college degrees because of him.

In our own ways my sibs and I were thirsty, thirsty for higher education. Both Uncle Dom and my Mom left school after eighth grade to help support their immigrant family. Dad, well he was asked to join the army after tenth grade and I will leave it at that. They thirsted for education. We drank till we were sated.

Thirst comes in many forms. We thirst for water. We thirst for knowledge. We thirst for companionship. We thirst for…well, we each know what we thirst for, truly thirst. There are needs each of us has, needs we thirst for. Some of those needs we can fill on our own. Others can only be filled with the help of others.

Everyone thirsts for something, some true need. It is our responsibility as Christians to help give whatever drink is necessary to those who thirst. It may be by conserving water. It may by helping with their education. It may be by being present in their sorrows. It may be by contributing to organizations that purchase water purifiers for those whose water, little as it is, must be cleansed to prevent disease. This world thirsts for those who will give them drink. We must be one of those in our own way as best we can.

TO FEED THE HUNGRY

We were taught when we went to Sunday School or parochial school or maybe even sitting on our mother’s or grandmother’s lap that one of our responsibilities as a Christian was to help those who were in need. Our teachers helped us understand what being in need really meant because we never needed anything. We were very blessed even if we did not know it t that time.

Oh, there were lots of things we wanted, that is true. And so or teachers first had to help us understand the difference between wants and needs. The truth, of course, is that we are still learning that difference even in our older ages. We still struggle within ourselves fighting over if what we desire is truly a need or simple a want that we can do without and know we can do without. It is a life-long struggle that even the most sainted deal with until the last breath.

Being blessed as we were, and still are, we have to imagine what it must be like to be in need even if only to understand what Jesus was talking about when he commanded us to take care of the needs of those who are less blessed than we are. And those needs and the people in need are many and simply overwhelming. Yet, even if our own response to those in need barely makes a dent in relieving the suffering of others, we still must do what we can. As a Christian, we have no choice, do we?

The greatest need that anyone has, rich or poor, is to be fed, to have enough food simply to live from one day to the next. Personally, I do not know what that is like. Even when I have been on countless diets and think I am starving to death, I not only have enough to eat, I have more to eat in one day than millions of people around the world have to eat in a week. I cannot imagine what that must be like.

But I have to; we have to. That is our Christian responsibility and one of the corporeal works of mercy Jesus preached about and responded to. He fed the people with real food when he could and fed them with spiritual food when that is what they needed. For people, all people, you and I, need to be fed spiritually as well as physically. But we cannot be fed spiritually if our stomachs are empty.

My suspicion is that the reason Christianity has not succeeded in winning the world over is that we Christians spend an inordinate time preaching the Gospel, even tending to spiritual works of mercy, while neglecting to take care of the corporeal needs of the people. Our Gospel has been rejected by those who see us living in prosperity, having more than we need, wasting what we have, while doing relatively little to take care of their needs by sharing what we have in abundance.

The Gospel message, even if it is a bumper-sticker one, reminds us to “Live Simply so that Others May Simply Live”. That is a difficult message to hear and an even more difficult to live out. But it is the basic message of the Gospel and the basis for truly living out our faith. So how are we, how am I, responding?

THE CATECHISM WAS/IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

When I was growing up and going to Sunday School (I had to because I did not go to parochial school, my punishment for that being twelve years of seminary [joke]) the curriculum was the Baltimore Catechism. It was a question-and-answer text with three sections and thirty-eight subsections. Boring.

My peers in the Lutheran Church had to memorize Luther’s Small Catechism that was twenty-eight pages long. My Presbyterian friends’ Sunday School text was the Westminster Catechism consisting of 107 questions and answers. I didn’t have any Episcopal friends back then but their text from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer was, and I quote, “A Catechism that is to say, an Instruction to be Learned by Every Person before he be brought to be Confirmed by the Bishop.” . It was six pages long. The Catechism in the latest Book of Common Prayer is eighteen pages long. I’ll say it for all of them: boring, boring, boring.

Now don’t get me wrong, the information about our faith in its many manifestations is important and it is important for any Christian or would-be Christian to know even if it is not memorized as was often demanded back then. But the lessons learned back then and even today were then and are now only the beginning. Learned lessons are only truly learned when they are lived out in the real world outside the Sunday School classes.

What all of us discovered back then and what we learn even today is that living the lesson is often very, very difficult. But that, again, is the only real way to learn. We can read a book on how to ride a bicycle, know it by heart even; but it is only when we get on that bike and ride it that we really know how to ride a bike. It is the same in every aspect of life. Book knowledge is only the beginning. It is necessary knowledge but it is not the end of learning.

Back in my day and even today the message given was that it is relatively easy to be a Christian, to follow Jesus. All we had and have to do is try it sometime and we quickly learned back then and learn today how difficult it often is. Yes, catechisms aside, it is a simple message: love as Jesus loved, love as Jesus commanded us to love. What does that love look like? Read the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel: fed the hungry, cloth the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned.

My Catechism called these actions the seven “corporeal works of mercy”.  In essence they are very simple commands. In practice they can be difficult to fulfill because they put demands on us that we often would rather avoid. They make us go out of our way, out of our comfort zone, and we don’t like to do that. Those catechisms told and continue to tell us what it means to be a follower of Jesus. But they are only for starters. To really know what it means and to really be a Christian we have to live what we have learned in our daily lives. There is no other way. But we already know that don’t we?