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Comfort Ye, My People, December 7, 2008 |
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Written by Rev. Dr. Jeanne G. Knepper
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Thursday, 11 December 2008 |
Today, some of us are feeling pretty good and some of us are carrying secret pain or despair. Some of us are full of hope, and some of us are feeling hopeless. Would you take a moment, inside yourself, to ask what it is that you would like to bring forward to the love of God. Imagine your heart, your hope, your pain, wrapped up as a little child, laid in the manger. See it there, and then imagine the One who is shepherd and counselor and friend and Christ, picking it—picking your heart’s longing up—and holding you and knowing you and loving you, Feel the care and the warmth. Let it sink deep into your soul.
And know, know that today, you are just who you are created to be, enough for this moment, and beloved.
Know it—God is in love with you, today, no matter what. You are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone, not now, not ever.
And here is the other part. You, each of you, you are the one who will bear that message of belonging and belovedness to someone else who needs to hear it. You may never know how badly someone needs to hear the words of life and love that you offer them. You may never know the lives you help to turn away from despair by a simple act of kindness—or a desperate shout of outrage or fear—but rest assured, your love and your care and your kindness will bless lives around you.
COMFORT YE, MY PEOPLE
Isaiah 40:1-11
December 7, 2008
It was a cold day, as Denver winters can be cold, cold and bright. I was teaching a class for the National Corrective Training Institute, a company that specialized in working with people sent to them by the courts. This day, I had a classful of juvenile shoplifters and petty thieves, aged 12-16. We would be together all day, with a break for lunch. They had been told to bring a lunch or money to go to one of the neighborhood restaurants to eat.
Several classes were meeting that day in a Science Building at the University of Denver. It was a midcentury modern building, with outdoor balconies hugging the second floor of a concrete U-shape that surrounded a deep reflecting pool in the center. Of course, in the winter, the University drained the pool, as to leave water in it would be to invite severe damage from the swelling ice.
I decided not to take my whole hour for lunch. I wanted to go back to my room to prepare the certificates that the students would receive at the end of the day, precious pieces of paper they needed to show to their judges in order to receive their diversion from juvenile custody. As I walked back toward the building, I could see a crowd outside, and I could hear that people were yelling something. I walked faster, straining to understand what was in front of me. And then it came into focus, the visual and the hearing coming together. One of my students, 14 year old Jeremy, was standing on the outside of the rail of the second floor balcony, his heels hooked under the rail, right above the empty and deep concrete pool. Other students, my youth and adults from other classes, were chanting, “Jump! Jump! Jump!” as he teetered, let go of the rail with one hand, looked around confused and scared and a terrifying sort of resolved. I raced forward, broke through the crowd around the pool, looked up and pointed at him as I shouted, as loud as I could, “Jeremy, if you don’t get back over that rail RIGHT NOW you won’t get a certificate for this class!”
It was all I could think of in the moment, but as it turned out, it was enough. Jeremy had a reason why he could turn back towards life, a reason that the other kids could respect, because they knew he needed that certificate, just as they did. That afternoon, we talked. Jeremy finished the class, got his certificate, and, as a part of the class work, identified that there was at least one human being, his grandmother, who would be terribly hurt if he were to destroy his life. He chose to live, for her sake.
I thought of Jeremy this week when I read two news stories. One was about another young man, Abraham Biggs, nineteen years old, who trained a web cam on himself and broadcast his suicide by overdose, live, in real time. On-line spectators, like the fools who surrounded Jeremy, sent him messages: “Do it!”, “Stop wasting our time!” And he did. He took the overdose, he lapsed into unconsciousness, he stopped breathing, he died. No one broke into the drama with words of life. No one called the police or ambulances of his home town. No one reached out with the name or voice of a loved one. Abraham Biggs came to his point of despair and many watched, but no one reached through his despair to hear his heart pain and love him back into living. It broke my heart to read of it, just as I know that some of you have been heartbroken recently when a friend of yours, a man who once attended worship here, killed himself when he was alone at the end of a hunting trip.
The second horrifying story was about a father in Saskatchewan who gathered up his two daughters, aged one and three, one night last January and decided to walk to the house of a neighbor, during a blizzard. The wind chill was minus 58 degrees. He was drunk. He got lost in the field between the houses and staggered in, finally, hypothermic and frost-bitten. His neighbor called the ambulance and he was taken to the hospital. Six hours later, recovering, he asked about his daughters. They were lying frozen in the field, wearing only diapers and t-shirts. This fall, their father, Christopher Pauchay, wept as he pled guilty to criminal negligence.
People come to places of despair when they can no longer hold on, for themselves, to their reasons for being alive. Something happens that seems so overwhelming that they can’t see their way through. Sometimes, it is something that seems trivial to the rest of us—Jeremy didn’t want to lose face in front of the other kids—and sometimes they are facing pain that might make all of our hearts despair. And in that moment, in that time of crisis, they—we—need to know that there is someone willing, as the lyrics of a Holly Near song put it, to “Sit with me, through the night, and tell me it’s all right to fall apart with you. For I’m so tired, and I’m so scared. I need to grieve and weep and scream and moan. And sometimes I feel I can’t defend myself, my life or my light. The thought of surviving just makes me want to cry. But won’t you please sit with me through the night and tell me it’s all right to fall apart with you.”
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, says your God. And God will gather the lambs into his, into her arms and gently lead the mother sheep. Oh, can you hear the comfort in that? Have you longed for that, in your times of despair, for the One who would gather you up and hear you and understand all the pain and hold you close? Can you believe that the One who knows all the pain and worries in our hearts longs to hold us through our pain and to bring us home?
Can you see the double dynamic—sometimes we are, any of us, the ones who need to be gathered up, who need to be sat with and listened to and held through the night. And sometimes it is us, we broken and foolish ones, who can be the listeners and the holders and the voices that see the light of God, even in eyes darkened by despair.
We come together to be the arms of God, to be the shepherd, the Christ, to one another. Together, we can weather storms and pain that might destroy us individually. And together, we provide a setting, and occasion to come together to celebrate Christ’s presence among us with a meal, our service of communion. Yesterday, in a break in the work of creating this Christmas tableau before you, Scott and I talked about communion, about the wonderful intimacy of this meal. Remembrance, recreation, incarnation—we understand it different ways, even as we share the belief that this is a time when Christ comes close among us and enters into our community as we share a symbolic meal and bring our full hearts into the presence of God.
Today, some of us are feeling pretty good and some of us are carrying secret pain or despair. Some of us are full of hope, and some of us are feeling hopeless. Would you take a moment, inside yourself, to ask what it is that you would like to bring forward to the love of God. Imagine your heart, your hope, your pain, wrapped up as a little child, laid in the manger. See it there, and then imagine the One who is shepherd and counselor and friend and Christ, picking it—picking your heart’s longing up—and holding you and knowing you and loving you, Feel the care and the warmth. Let it sink deep into your soul.
And know, know that today, you are just who you are created to be, enough for this moment, and beloved.
Know it—God is in love with you, today, no matter what. You are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone, not now, not ever.
And here is the other part. You, each of you, you are the one who will bear that message of belonging and belovedness to someone else who needs to hear it. You may never know how badly someone needs to hear the words of life and love that you offer them. You may never know the lives you help to turn away from despair by a simple act of kindness—or a desperate shout of outrage or fear—but rest assured, your love and your care and your kindness will bless lives around you. Some of us can reach out to the ones like Jeremy, and some of us can invite Christopher into healing sobriety. Some of us tend the nets of care so that hold our friends, families and neighbors tight and secure in their hard times. It all counts. It all helps.
I was at the store one night recently. There was a parent, angry, drunk, shouting at her daughter, who looked to be about 16, and who just wanted to disappear. She was so mortified, trying to mollify her out-of-control mother, trying to calm her down. A few minutes later, I came upon the daughter, away from the mother. Taking a chance, I reached out, touched her shoulder and said, “It won’t go on forever. You’ll come through. I’ve been there. You’ll be on your own soon, and life can be so much better.” I saw gratitude in her eyes, and maybe hope. I’ll never know more than that about her life, but maybe it was enough, in that moment, enough to nourish hope, enough to let her know that she isn’t alone. I hope so.
And this is our message, for the mortified teens and their out of control parents, for the confused boy and the foolish and cruel ones who egged him on, for Jeremy and for Abraham, for Christopher and for all of us who weep for the pain of it all—we are not alone. And, no matter who we are, no matter what we have done, we are known and we are beloved. Always. Amen.
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