There was an older lady in the first congregation I served who
was elegant, generous, and aloof. She was liberal in all senses
of the word, but, despite regular encouragement from her pastors,
rarely participated in the hands-on work of the church she supported
with her dollars and her occasional presence in worship. She didn’t
have time to get personally involved, she said, handing over a
check for the Thanksgiving turkey dinner for the homeless, but wanted
to do her part. She was the widow of a prominent citizen of the
city, and spent most of her time golfing, or walking in the woods,
mostly alone, and seemed to my eyes, to be a little depressed.

It happened one day that this lady, I’ll call her Gladys, was in
the midst of a long walk on an unusually hot afternoon when she
lost her balance and fell down a slight incline. When she came
to rest, she was dirty, scratched, and to her irritation, limping
from a twisted ankle. Because she was closer to the country club
than to her home, she made her slow way through the field and up
to the steps of the country club restaurant, intending to call a
cab to return her to her home. She approached a nice looking couple
who stood nearby to ask them for a quarter to use the pay phone,
and was shocked when they averted their eyes, hurried into their
waiting car, and drove away without acknowledging her. Shrugging,
she continued up the stairs toward the restaurant, and was met at
the door by the manager, who spoke before she could open her mouth:
You’ll have to leave immediately, lady, this is private property.

I know what it is, Gladys snapped, my husband had his membership
here for thirty years. I’ve fallen, and I just need to make a phone
call to get a cab. I’m Gladys Wilcox, don’t you know who I am?
And the man replied, I don’t care who you are, lady, I
just don’t want you upsetting our guests. You’ll have to leave
immediately, or I’ll call the cops. And he shut the door in
her face. And Gladys looked at her reflection in the glass, dirty,
disheveled and upset, and thought to herself, why, I don’t look
like myself at all… I look like some homeless person, a crazy
woman from the street. And on the two mile walk home, she
had a lot of time to think, and pray.

A funny thing happens down at the bottom of the list of what we
call the “Beatitudes” in the gospel of Luke. We know
them best in Matthew’s version:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for there is the kingdom of heaven;
and eight more blessings, most as inclusive as the first, follow.
In Matthew’s beatitudes, there is plenty of room for all of us to
stand waiting on line in the kingdom of God; there is plenty of
room for grace, room enough for everyone. All blessings, no curses.
Matthew makes of the kingdom of heaven a place so inclusive that
no one will be left out in the cold. For we have all been poor
in spirit, hungry for righteousness, merciful and meek, at least
once in a while.

But mostly, we’re doing okay. And we feel compassion for those
who have not, and we do what we can to help them. But if we found
ourselves, like Gladys, mistaken for one of those others…we would
be like she was, uneasy, angry, and not a little diseased.

And that is where Luke’s beatitudes begin: with a crowd of people
who can’t be told apart.Some are disciples, chosen and special;
others are mentally ill strangers. Some are rich, patrons of good
works, others are desperately poor and terrified. Some run three
miles a day and eat green leafy vegetables, lightly blanched but
without too much salt; others are sick, and tired, and hungry, rooting
in garbage cans for supper and longing for a healing touch.

In Matthew’s gospel, we know who’s who, because the disciples are
Up on the Mountain, safely removed from the dirty crowds, quietly
on retreat with their Teacher. But in Luke… they are all together
on a level plain, jostling and juggling for position, trying to
get close enough to hear, close enough to touch. They are in a level
place, and, in addition, the gospel notes, they are on a level playing
field as well. For this race is handicapped, and those who have
the natural advantages are carrying a lot more baggage, so that
all might have an even chance at the kin-dom of God.

And Luke says:

and all in the crowd were trying to touch him,
for power came out from him and healed all of them.

How do we need to be healed? When we are the ones who Have, called
with Jesus to serve the Have Nots: to feed the poor, to care for
the suffering, to stand up for the excluded, the imprisoned, the
forgotten. What’s so wrong with that, after all, that Jesus should
in this gospel of Luke not bless us for participating in spiritual
hunger, but rather, burden us with Woes just because we aren’t at
the bottom of the human heap, desperate and forlorn?

A friend of mine, John Robinson, has been hired to serve as the
Presbyterian Church’s Refugee and Asylum Advocate. He came to this
work from thirty years in the pastorate, and out of his experience
as a disaster volunteer. It came to him to examine a case of a
congregation in New England requesting disaster assistance funds
from the 9-11 Fund of the PCUSA. One of the fallouts from 9-11
and the Patriot Act has been the increased scrutiny and tightening
of laws regarding would-be immigrants.

The Presbytery of Northern New England had, in the late 1990’s,
established a new church development in the midst of an Indonesian
immigrant community that had sprung up to serve the needs of a local
industry. This church, the first Indonesian Presbyterian Church
in the US, had grown and thrived, was self supporting and pointed
to with pride by the church as a model of diversity and Presbyterian
integrity. Until thirty men in the congregation, some of them
elders, all of them hardworking family men with US-born children
baptized in the church and growing up American, received word that
their visa status had been reviewed and they were being detained
pursuant to impending deportation. The church, the community, the
presbytery were devastated. They appealed to the General Assembly
for help, and John went to find immigration attorneys who could
build a case to secure the legal admission of these men into resident
status. For information, the report went to an advisory body of
the denomination, and then was referred up to the General Assembly
Council.

And what do you suppose their response to these dispossessed brothers
and sisters was? That they should have attended more carefully to
their legal status. That the church couldn’t afford to get embroiled
in an immigration controversy during wartime. That the denomination
ought not give the appearance of trying to help illegal aliens. That
it was too bad that the congregation was so strong and a flagship
of its kind and that families would be split, but really, we just
need to trust the government and not spend disaster funds on such
persons… because maybe someone might get upset and won’t give
money later for a ”regular“ disaster like a tornado
or a hurricane.

Luke’s Jesus handicaps the beatitudes, dealing out blessings and
woes in equal measure, because getting a little woe in our lives
is sometimes the only way we get the big picture, and get that we
are all in the same boat, people longing for healing and wanting
to touch the hand of God. If we don’t experience a little exclusion
ourselves, we aren’t gonna be horrified when we hear stories like
the one I have just told…and the best we’ll be able to muster is
a small check and a prayer on Sunday morning, and friends, that
just isn’t going to be enough to bring forth the kindom of God.

Friday and Saturday, Sally and I and our church staff participated
in a 16 hour compassion fatigue training event. It’s theme was
to explore why all of us, from time to time, get worn out, burned
out, and want to leave off doing this work to which we have all
been called, this work of healing and helping.

Eric Gentry, who
ran the workshop, spoke eloquently about these symptoms of compassion
fatigue we all have felt and then looked hard at each of us and
said: If you’re burned out, if you’re stressed, if you feel threatened
by what you hear and want to run away, good. I wish upon you symptoms.
We need to feel this way, he said, because if we don’t have symptoms
to remind us to care for ourselves, then we can’t genuinely care
for others. We need Woes, we need symptoms of compassion fatigue
and burn out to wake us up to the vitality of the work we are called
to do, and our need to remain healthy, nourished, and available
with our best selves to serve our mission of reflecting the path
of Christ in the world.

Our woe and discomfort is the symbol, the symptom of the dis-ease
of our lack of kin-dom health. We are woeful because we know things
aren’t right… we know we can’t be healed by covering up and denying…we
know we need to see things as they really are if we are to be healed,
and the kingdom is to come, and we are to be well.

So…to feel tired of listening, of caring, of putting time into someone
else’s need…is not a sign that it’s time to quit, but rather a sign
that this work you are doing is so important, and so important to
YOU, that you must bring to it your healthiest and best self.

We have to feel the woes in order to attend to our own health…to
know we too need healing, and to enter with genuineness and compassion
into the needing world of others. And that requires us not just
to hear the preaching of the beatitudes, but to go on beyond preaching,
as the old southern phrase has it, on beyond preaching into meddling.
Meddling with our lives, and with the lives of our companions in
this work, to make sure that we have just enough Woe to equip us
to bless others.

The holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankl, a man who’s
suffering has earned him the right to tell us what suffering and
serving should feel like, put it this way: That which is to
give light must endure burning.

I imagine you can guess what happened in Glady’s life after she
finally limped home and saw herself not as she believed she was,
but as others saw her. What happened for her personally in her sad
isolation, and in her life in the church, and in her view of helping
and healing. I’m not going to finish the story for you, because
I hope you will finish it for yourself. And for us, working together
for the kindom at Riviera. And for the Christ of symptoms and blessings
and woes, who loves you as he loves each child of God, and wishes
that we would all know God’s power, and be healed. Amen.