William Yagel
Grace Radford
March 19, 2023
Lent 4, Year A
Holy and living God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing in your sight O Lord. For you are our strength and our redeemer.
Amen
Almost 2 years ago now, in the Summer of 2021, our country was unsure of what was coming next. We seemed to be emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. There were vaccines available to everyone and folks were experiencing some sort of normalcy, albeit in masks and at a distance. Hopes were up and people were cautiously optimistic about the future. But that was also the summer of the Delta variant, if you remember. So there was no way to say we were out of the woods. If another, more dangerous variant appeared, we might need to go back into a full lockdown, as some other countries were doing at the time. I remember clearly because a dear friend of mine was fighting for his life against the Delta variant. I was completing the intense requirements for my chaplaincy residency that summer while he was so sick that he was even struggling to lift his head off his pillow.
My relationship with Mike matched the public debate at the time. I was convinced that everyone should be wearing masks, distancing all the time, and getting vaccinations early and often. Mike, my friend, was opposed the vaccine. Neither he nor anyone in his family had received the vaccines. They all wore masks, but that had not been enough and the whole family had gotten sick. I’m sure we all remember what that time looked like. And whether one engaged in the debate or not, we all knew that it had become too polarized to touch. Everyone was sure that they could see what was right. Folks were even happy to talk about religion if only they didn’t have to talk about vaccines.
As I mentioned, this polarized landscape was the backdrop during the summer while I was fulfilling my intensive chaplaincy requirements for ordination at a retirement facility called Goodwin House in Alexandria. Marcella was a staff member there who distributed food, cleaned up, or generally helped the residents as needed. Not a nurse, therapist, or a caregiver, but she was just one of the many people who kept the facility going every day. Her accent and behavior revealed the preference of many first-generation Latina immigrants not to be the focus of attention. Goodwin House was big enough that it was easy to fade into the background.
Marcella, then, was largely invisible, like a blind man on the side of the road. And like the interaction in our Gospel today it was a little miraculous that we even bumped into each other by chance and started a conversation. Our instructors always told us that we should be available to everyone in the facility and should be open to speaking with the staff, even though the staff rarely had time for (or maybe interest in) a conversation. It is probably fair to note that I was running on a bit of Sophomoric confidence at this time in my residency, as often happens when we become and little to comfortable in our role. Maybe I was a little presumptuous in thinking I had something to offer rather than something to learn. Thankfully, the Spirit interceded and we started talking.
As I recall I just asked her how it had been there during the pandemic. She told me how very hard it had been to see all these residents forced to stay in their rooms. All of them isolated for everything. Meals and medicines were left at their doors. Maybe a quick wave through gowns, masks, and shields for the first year, but little else. They were in extreme isolation. Thousands of individuals with no community. Then I asked how her family was through the pandemic? Did she have kids at home from school all day? Yes, she said, it had been hard but she, her husband, and both kids were OK and she told how lucky she felt that they were all healthy. The apartment was small, but they had managed.
It seems her husband was also a healthcare worker, but at another facility. He had worked second shift the whole time while she worked first shift to mimic the school day. She would make meals and spend the evenings with the kids and he would help them during school to keep them on track. That meant there was someone with their children almost all the time, but very little time together.
“And of course, the masks”, she said.
(huh) Yeah, I was getting used to them by that time. Thinking maybe she was opposed to them, I struck first. They were inconvenient, but I told her that I was sure they were really important. I thought masks and vaccines were essential.
She read my response perfectly, she knew where I was headed when Marcella said, “yes, and we wore them at home too.”
In their apartment, masked, all the time.
Well, they took them off when they slept.
I assumed their concern for their children led to this. That they were really motivated by self preservation. But no, not so much, not that she wanted them to be sick, but the kids were young and healthy. What they couldn’t stand was the thought that they would get the residents of either of their facilities sick.
Marcella went on to say that she and her husband were so concerned with the populations they were caring for that they didn’t even sleep in the same bed.
It seems every night before she would go to sleep Marcella would make an air mattress in the closet with sheets for her husband when he got home. And he would pack it up first thing every day when he got up. They packed it up because they didn’t want their kids to think that there was a problem between them. They spent the year apart, together, caring for those who never even saw them, who likely didn’t even know they existed. They provided safety and comfort and love to all of those residents who never knew what she was doing for them.
John also taps into a polarizing debate in our Gospel this morning. He begins and ends this entirety of chapter 9 with a question about suffering. Particularly, he raises the question of suffering as a punishment for sin. Why is this man blind? Could it be his fault that he was born blind? Was it a way to punish his parents? Whose fault is it that this man is suffering. Let us know so we can fix it, so we can avoid God’s wrath!
These questions of God persist today. What did I do to deserve this? Why are bad things happening to good people? How could a loving God let this happen? In parallel to that is the notion of God rewarding the good. This is at the foundation of what is called the prosperity gospel today. Popularized by Oral Roberts and his peers, this is a reading of the Gospel where the more faithful you are, the more God will give you what you ask for. The more money you give to the church the more God loves you and rewards you. Supporting the church in itself becomes the way to reach salvation. Is life a giant karma vending machine? Do we get out what we put in?
In short, No.
You can probably tell I struggle with that concept. Not the notion that we should lead a faithful and compassionate life, not that we should support what is important to us. I believe, obviously, that the church is an important way for us to draw closer to God, to seek justice and Love in the world, but let me be clear, I don’t have a line upstairs and neither do they. I beleive that God is not looking to hand out rewards or punishment for our behavior. That can lead down a slippery slope that can lead people to believe that those who are less fortunate are “getting what they deserve”.
The entire narrative of Christ’s life in all the gospel accounts denies a vision of God who is looking for transactions. As Paul says today, we are to live as children of the Light, and the fruit of that is “all that is good and right and true”. We are promised a companion through our suffering, not a way to avoid it. When we are in pain, depressed, anxious, mourning, and lost we are told that God came to experience that with us and that God remains with us through all of it. We are children of the light because Christ came into the world. Christ does not come to us because of our particular illumination. As we heard a couple of weeks back from one of the most famous verses in John: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
This is what the Pharisees, the holy men, missed. And what every priest would do well to hear in this passage each time they hear it. When our vision matches the Pharisees vision of the kingdom which was blocked by their insistence that they knew what the kingdom looked like we become blind. They were certain they knew the terms of God’s love, but Jesus broke through all of that. Their blindness was in believing that they had the answers, that they set the terms.
Jesus heals that one blind man so that all of us can see God’s glory revealed in that loving act. Just as God was revealed to me in Marcella and her husband’s willingness to truly care for and love those in their lives. She became a vision of Christ to me in a bleak and anxious and frightening moment. She allowed me to see how God was calling us to love, not to be right. It is always about being a child of light, and reflecting that light to all. Amen