Sermons

READINGS

Henri Nouwen from “The Way of the Heart: Connecting with God Through Prayer, Wisdom, and Silence” Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (December 2, 2003)

“Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. As busy, active, relevant ministers, we want to earn our bread by making a real contribution. This means first and foremost doing something to show that our presence makes a difference. And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer. Those who can sit in silence with their fellowman, not knowing what to say but knowing that they should be there, can bring new life in a dying heart. Those who are not afraid to hold a hand in gratitude, to shed tears in grief and to let a sigh of distress arise straight from the heart can break through paralyzing boundaries and witness the birth of a new fellowship, the fellowship of the broken.”

“Kindness” - Naomi Shahib Nye 

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, from The Words Under the Words

SERMON

“Where does it hurt?” This is a simple question that make all the difference in how we relate to each other as human beings doing the best we can and still messing up on a regular basis.

Where does it hurt? Do you remember being asked this question as a child? This is a mother’s question, a father’s question, a nurse’s or teacher’s question. I remember the day - October 28^th 1965 – when my Gram asked me this question. I had just turned 10 years old. I was outside playing football with my friend, Janet Bradley. As I attempted a punt return, I slipped on wet grass and fell and hurt my arm.   I came into the house crying. No bleeding. No bruising (yet). My Gram was in charge as Dad was at work and Mom was grocery shopping. My arm hurt without obvious injury. We found out later that night that I had broken my wrist. At the time, however, my Gram knew I hurt and she knew she couldn’t fix it. What she could, and did, offer was comfort and an ice bag.

Do you remember such a time? As kids, we run and tumble and have all manner of cuts and scrapes and bruises. Most of them are not serious, but they bring us to our parents or trusted adults in tears. The first question is rarely asking “What were you doing?” or “How did you get into such a state?” For the loving adult who is responding to a crying child in pain, the main thing the adult is focused on is relieving the suffering, binding up a wound if there is one, and showering the child with love and compassion.

And then we grow up. As we grow up, life gets more complicated. It does not get easier. It does not get less painful. We begin to go it alone most of the time. Then we are often alone – or at least we feel alone or far from the safety of home.

When children are suffering or in pain, we often run toward them.

. . .   Maybe we can help. Children need our protection and care.

When adults are suffering or in pain, we often run away from them.

. . .   There’s nothing we can do. We are uncomfortable with the suffering of others.

Henri Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer and theologian. Henri Nouwen knew about suffering and he knew people. He says that it is hard to be compassionate. Yes, I think it is hard – particularly hard when we do not already know and love, or at least admire or like, someone.

“Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.”

Have you ever found it too hard to be compassionate? Even if we can manage it for a short time, it is really hard to sustain compassion over a long time.

We need to be willing into the broken places with someone else. And that is hard - so hard that we often don’t begin. Part of the difficulty with compassion is that being compassionate doesn’t necessarily mean that our efforts will fix what’s wrong or make the future brighter or better. We are so heavily invested in making a difference that when what we offer or what we do seems to make no differnece we are frustrated. It doesn’t matter what I do, the suffering or pain continues. I am ineffective and therefore either incompetent or wasting my time – or both. Or maybe I already know before I try that my efforts will not bring about change and so I do not try. Or maybe it will take a long time and a lot of effort to begin to make even a small difference and I am worn out before I start.

It’s too hard. And it doesn’t matter anyway. And so, I go away or I never show up.

This has happened to me. More than I like to admit. I am not proud of the times when I might have shown some compassion and I let those opportunities pass by. I suspect I am not the only one here who might remember not offering compassion or a small kindness when it was possible.

Henri Nouwen says that despite our misgivings, our greatest gift is our simple human presence with another without condition.

Two stories.

You heard already the poem, “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye. Here is a bit of the backstory that gave rise to the poem.

NAOMI: My husband, Michael, and I were on our honeymoon in Colombia in 1978. We knew we were in a difficult country filled with drug smugglers, but we were both optimists and felt we would be able to make it through. We ended up being robbed on a bus in the middle of the night. They took everything we had—passports, tickets, cameras, all our money—everything. It was a very stark experience. An Indian on our bus was killed, and there was the feeling that we could be next.

We got back on the bus, and the Indian was just left by the side of the road. We decided that Michael would have to hitchhike, even though it was very dangerous, to a larger city where he hoped he could get our travelers checks reinstated. I was left alone in this unknown town. I had no idea how would I eat or where I would sleep for the days until he returned.

We didn’t have anything. What do we do first? Where do we go? Who do we talk to? And a man came up to us on the street and was simply kind and just looked at us, I guess could see our disarray in our faces.

And just asked us in Spanish, “What happened to you?” And we tried to tell him. And he listened to us, and he looked so sad. And he said, “I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry that happened,” in Spanish.

An anonymous man who saw that this couple was in pain. He saw the fear, the sorrow, the loss, the suffering on the face of these foreigners, sitting alone on a city bench. This one man, whose name and story they will never know, saved them from the suffering of aloneness. He saw their pain and he paused in his daily routine, whatever it was, to stop and look into their eyes and ask, “Where does it hurt?” And then, perhaps even more astonishing, he sat with them and listened to their story. He couldn’t fix anything and he didn’t offer to. He couldn’t make the pain go away and he didn’t offer to. Two things he gave them that day. He listened. He said, “I’m very, very sorry that happened.” That willingness to enter into their place of pain, was enough. It didn’t turn loss, deep loss, into gain. It did give them a connection to the universal love we all share but often cannot find.

The words of the poem, Kindness, came to Namoi all at once, as if it wrote itself and came to her only for the writing down in her small notebook. These words . . .

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Second story. Ruby Sales is a civil rights worker and a preacher and a lover of the uniquely American Black folk religion. When she was young, her God disappointed her in big way. God did not come from the sky and rescue demonstrators for equal rights and God did not reward the righteous and punish the unrighteous.

She left God behind and became a Marxist type community organizer.

But a defining moment for me happened when I was getting my locks washed, and my locker’s daughter came in one morning, and she had been hustling all night. And she had sores on her body, and she was just in a state, drugs. So something said to me, “Ask her, ‘Where does it hurt?’” And I said, “Shelly, where does it hurt?” And just that simple question unleashed territory in her that she had never shared with her mother.

And she talked about having been incested. She talked about all of the things that had happened to her as a child, and she literally shared the source of her pain. And I realized, in that moment, listening to her and talking with her, that I needed a larger way to do this work, rather than a Marxist, materialist analysis of the human condition.

That day, something happened and Ruby Sales found her way into profound compassion, simple kindness, and back to her true God – a God that does not interfere in human events to perform a dramatic rescue but a God that shows up as compassion.

Where does it hurt? Four words. A simple question that invites a real human connection. Asking this question requires courage and offers the possibility of making a real difference in someone’s life.

It’s relatively easy to ask a ten year-old crying and holding her arm where it hurts. We think the source of the pain is physical and can be fixed. And usually we would be right.

For most of us, however, our pain is not a broken bone or a skinned knee. Our pain is psychological, spiritual, existential. It is deep and we’ve carried it for a long time.

What would you do if someone looked into your eyes and your soul and asked you, really asked you and waited for your full answer, “Friend, where does it hurt?”

Pain manifests in all sorts of ways. Many of those ways are misplaced expressions of anger, fear, distrust, even hate. What if we reacted to their suffering and not their anger and shouting? What if someone turned to their neighbors who are depressed and angry about a deep loss in their lives and instead of cajoling them to buck up and carry on, stopped and sat down with a cup of tea or a glass of cold water and calmly and quietly asked, “Where does it hurt?” She might cry and talk about incest, or a miscarriage that still hurts every day or the death of her father before she found a way to tell him that she did, after all, love him. He might bang his fist on the table and shout about the unfairness of job loss and economic ruin and the pain of not being able to take care of his family. They might look right into the eyes of their neighbor and ask that neighbor if he or she has any idea how hard it is to be transgender in world that punishes them for things they themselves don’t understand and can’t control. He might say that he used to know who he is and where his place in society and with his family was and now none of that seems to matter and he feels lost and useless. She might talk about how her mother is slowing slipping away from her and everything she ever loved because of advancing Alzheimers and how she has had to move her mother into a memory care facility where she is locked in and knows no one. With tears streaming down her face, she says that no one has asked her how she is doing and that she is just so tired and sacred and unhappy.

Henri Nouwen says that it is hard to be compassionate. It is hard because it will bring us face to face, heart to heart, soul to soul with another’s suffering. And, he reminds us, this is the greatest gift we can offer another human being. Each of us has known and probably now knows pain. Each of us can make a difference in someone’s life by offering the simple though astonishing kindness of caring. Not to make the world different. Not to expect a supernatural god to come down from heaven to make things right. Not to fix whatever is wrong. The gift is our willingness to enter into the broken places and sit together in tears or in silence or even in rage, but to be there and to care.

Those who can sit in silence with their fellowman, not knowing what to say but knowing that they should be there, can bring new life in a dying heart. Those who are not afraid to hold a hand in gratitude, to shed tears in grief and to let a sigh of distress arise straight from the heart can break through paralyzing boundaries and witness the birth of a new fellowship, the fellowship of the broken.”  

As we come to the end of the campaign season, I am noticing the pain in myself; the weariness of the constant barrage of campaign rhetoric and advertisements; the disquiet I feel when hearing the words and claims and anger and outrage of those on the other side of the political spectrum. Now I wonder: Where does it hurt? Does anyone care about the things I cannot control that cause me to suffer? Do I care about the things others cannot control that cause suffering, or what they have lost and deeply grieve? We are more alike than we are different. Can I, can you, can any of us, reach out in human tenderness? It might save someone. That someone might be us.

My dear Spiritual Companions, we are presented with infinite opportunities to practice compassion and kindness. To be willing to look into the eyes of another soul and ask them, “Where does it hurt?” is an act of radical compassion. May we practice from time to time that radical compassion. It makes all the difference.

Blessed be. I love you. Amen.