Everybody Hurts, Sometime
This is my sermon text for Sunday, March 7. You can look up the lessons. The Gospel is from Luke and is about people questioning Jesus regarding some recent events. The Epistle's last line (from the Lectionary) is cited here.
When I entered her hospital room, she did not look up. That was fine with me, because, I really did not want to be there either.
It was my third week at the Hershey Medical Center, and I was not having a good time. One of the steps we must go through during our pursuit of becoming a pastor is something called CPE.
CPE stands for Clinical Pastoral Education. Most students do as I did, and spend the summer between your first and second years of seminary as a chaplain at a hospital, or nursing home, or some other facility. You are under the supervision of a trained chaplain, and you get to experience hands on pastoral situations.
You visit with patients and their families and talk with them. It is one of the times seminarians fear and dread, because throughout your time in CPE, as well as before and after, you realize that you are going to be confronting your emotions as you hopefully help the people you meet. You cannot help but be drawn into their pain and suffering. Part of the process is learning how to deal with feeling their pain, but not letting it overwhelm you. That was the part I did not do well with.
I did not want to be there because I had my own emotional baggage to deal with. At the end of January of that year, my parents were in a car accident. I went back to Saginaw from Gettysburg and a couple of days after I got home, my dad died from his injuries. I stayed home for a few weeks, and when I returned to Gettysburg, I was way behind.
When I got back to campus, all of my classmates were applying to CPE sites and were finding out where they would be. For me, the thought of spending the summer in a hospital made me physically ill. But I was encouraged to do CPE that summer and allow it to help me deal with my grief. There were no CPE sites in the Saginaw area, so I applied to some around Gettysburg, and was lucky to be accepted at Hershey. It is the premier hospital in central Pennsylvania; it is a top trauma center and the location of the Penn State Medical School.
I had ten days off between the end of the semester and the beginning of CPE, so I was heading home to Saginaw to spend it with my mother. But before I got home, she was hospitalized with double pneumonia. She had stopped taking care of herself. She got better and was discharged. We had a couple of days together at home before I drove back to Gettysburg at the last minute, and began CPE the day after Memorial Day.
Three weeks later, I was knocking on the door of this lady’s room. I volunteered to see patients in both the cardiology and trauma departments. So each day, I would visit with people who came to Hershey because they were brought in through the cardiology & trauma departments. So I was seeing a lot of people who were in car accidents. I thought if this is going to help me deal with my grief from my dad’s death from a car accident, I might as well dive in the deep end. All I knew about the lady I was about to meet was that she was in her 60’s, and had been admitted over the weekend.
I knocked on the door, introduced myself, and asked if I could visit. She had her left leg in a spiral brace, and was hooked up to what I later came to realize was a normal amount of monitors and IVs, but at the time, looked like the entire hospital’s storeroom was placed in her room. In talking to her, I soon discovered that she had been in a car accident, but it was back in January. She was readmitted because her leg broke again from the severity of the damage done to it in the accident.
While she was in the hospital, she suffered a massive heart attack and had open-heart surgery. I was just stunned. I summed up what she had told me (this is one of the techniques we had been taught, to repeat what we had heard so as to present the patient’s situation back to them). She said that is what had happened to her, but then included that she had just retired from her job days before the accident, had 6 surgeries on her leg prior to this one, and had had a mini-stroke.
This entire time, as we were talking, she had been looking down. But then, she looked me directly in the eye, and said, “I just don’t understand why. Why is this all happening to me? Why has God let this happen?”
When she looked me in the eyes and asked me, “Why?” I was hoping for divine intervention. I was the on call chaplain on that day, so if there was a trauma call, or a patient coded (went into cardiac arrest) my pager would go off. I hate to admit this, but before I answered her, I prayed for the pager to go off. I would not have been that upset if I was the one who coded. Anything, but having to answer that question. Because that was the question I had for God. “Why?”
I left a good job that I enjoyed to go into the ministry. I left behind family and friends to go into the ministry. I chose to follow Christ and go into the ministry. And what do I get in return? My dad is dead, and my mom is sick and not taking care of herself. “I just don’t understand why. Why is this all happening to me? Why has God let this happen?”
A friend, a dear and close friend, sent me a long email when I returned to Gettysburg to start CPE. We were not able to meet up when I was home, because I was at the hospital a lot, and so we were keeping in touch with calls & emails. He sent me an email with the verse from 1st Corinthians, “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” [1Corinthians 10.13]
I had heard this verse before. I wrote back that I don’t want God to think that much of me. Because I felt I was being tested beyond my strength. I felt I was being given too big of a burden to carry. I thought I deserve better. We ALL deserve better. I was angry with my friend for sending me that message, but even more so, I was angry with God.
I think many of us have an issue with God because God is not consistent. If God was always a vengeful God, if God was a hard taskmaster; that could be ok. If God said here are the rules, this is what you need to do, do good and you will be rewarded, do bad or evil, and you will face my wrath – if that was our relationship with God, I think many of us would be all right with that. We would know where we stood.
“Hey, did you hear what happened to the Johnsons?”
“Yeah, he got that promotion at work and a big raise.”
“Of course, they do all of that charity work, so God had to reward them.”
“But did you hear about the Smiths?”
“Yeah, it’s a shame, but if you work on the Sabbath, and your kids talk back to you, you gotta expect some smiting.”
“But a plague of frogs?”
“Rules are rules.”
But that’s not how things are. The wicked prosper. The good suffer. Not all the time. But we don’t get what we deserve. But we know that God is a loving God. God cares for us. God suffers with us. That’s a hard concept to understand. We all suffer. We all have our own baggage to deal with. It may be our health, or the health issues of another. It may be loss and grief. It may be disappointment. It can be any of a hundred feelings of our own.
But there is the empathy for the suffering of others. We feel for the victims of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. We feel for the victims of war and violence. We feel for the victims of crime, injustice and poverty. We see all of this suffering. “I just don’t understand why. Why is this all happening? Why has God let this happen?”
That is what the people are asking Jesus. Herod defiled the Galilean travelers and their sacrifices by mixing their blood with the blood of their sacrifices. Eighteen people were crushed when a tower collapsed. By the way the question is framed, the victims of these events seem to have been good people. Where is their protection? Where is the love of God? How can God love us and let bad things happen to us? “I just don’t understand why. Why is this all happening? Why has God let this happen?”
We live in a world that is broken and we are the ones who broke it. Because of our sinful nature, we have damaged the world. We have damaged the very fabric of creation. The world does not operate as it should. The world could have been a perfect place. God could have created humanity so that we could only love, honor and praise God. We could have been in a world where nothing bad could happen because we had no choice in the world.
But God does not want our love, honor and praise because we had no choice. God wants our love, honor and praise because we choose to, because we want to, because we need to. So God gave us free will. We can choose to love, honor and praise God, or not. What we do is up to us. It is our choice, and sometimes we do not choose wisely. When we choose to act contrary to the will of God, when we choose to sin, we break the world.
Because the world is broken, it does not operate as it should. Bad things happen. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to people. Towers fall and crush people. Earthquakes occur. People get sick and ill. There are car accidents. Bad things happen because our world is broken, and we are among those who have broken it. Some people believe that tragedies occur to those who deserve it, that this is their punishment. The people of Haiti practiced voodoo and the devastation from Katrina came because of the wickedness of the people who lived there. Some people think they got what they deserved.
Let me ask, do you really want God to give you what you deserve? On the Day of Judgment, do you really want God to give you justice? Do you think you can pay for your sins?
In truth, we deserve much, much worse than we receive because we are broken people living in a broken world we have helped to break. We are flawed and fallen.
When I look back at the email my friend sent, and the verse from 1st Corinthians, I realize I looked at the message, and not the support. ‘No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.’ [1Corinthians 10.13] I focused in the middle that God will not test you beyond your strength. But what I missed was the beginning and the end of that verse.
‘No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone.’
Everyone suffers. Everyone suffers because everyone is broken. The testing, the temptations, the problems of this life occur to everyone. The sun shines on the good and the bad. The rain falls on sinners and saints, and the snow comes for everyone. Our suffering is worse, because it is ours. I am not trying to say that you should not feel pain, or grief, or loss or any other emotion because of our suffering. But we all have our share of suffering. We all feel pain. Everybody hurts.
‘But with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.’ While everybody hurts, God hurts right along with us. God wants to be loved, honored and praised by us. But God wants that to be our choice. When we choose unwisely, God suffers with us, and our choices. When bad things happen to us, God suffers along with us. But, in the midst of our suffering, we see others suffering. While we are dealing with the trials and tribulations of our lives, we see others who are in trouble, and we reach out to them. In so doing, we chose to love, honor and praise God.
The way out of the testing, the way we may be able to endure it is through one another. We may be able to endure the testing by helping one another. We can take up part of their burden, and they may take a portion of ours. We may simply be there so that they are not going through their problems by themselves. We can help to lighten their load with a conversation, a smile, a hug, holding their hand, saying a prayer, by just being there.
What did I tell the lady in Hershey hospital?
I was fortunate. I found myself saying basically what I just said. The words just came to me. I told her this wasn’t a punishment, or a test, but it was just life. We talked about all of the people in her life, and beyond her circle of family and friends, who had reached out to her. People picked up the phone, stopped by, wrote a note, or remembered her in prayer.
When we suffer, when we hurt, when the tragedies of life come to us, we are not alone. We are surrounded by those who know us and love us, by those who feel our pain. At the front of the line is God, who feels our pain, and will dry our tears, and whom will never leave us.
When I entered her hospital room, she did not look up. That was fine with me, because, I really did not want to be there either.
It was my third week at the Hershey Medical Center, and I was not having a good time. One of the steps we must go through during our pursuit of becoming a pastor is something called CPE.
CPE stands for Clinical Pastoral Education. Most students do as I did, and spend the summer between your first and second years of seminary as a chaplain at a hospital, or nursing home, or some other facility. You are under the supervision of a trained chaplain, and you get to experience hands on pastoral situations.
You visit with patients and their families and talk with them. It is one of the times seminarians fear and dread, because throughout your time in CPE, as well as before and after, you realize that you are going to be confronting your emotions as you hopefully help the people you meet. You cannot help but be drawn into their pain and suffering. Part of the process is learning how to deal with feeling their pain, but not letting it overwhelm you. That was the part I did not do well with.
I did not want to be there because I had my own emotional baggage to deal with. At the end of January of that year, my parents were in a car accident. I went back to Saginaw from Gettysburg and a couple of days after I got home, my dad died from his injuries. I stayed home for a few weeks, and when I returned to Gettysburg, I was way behind.
When I got back to campus, all of my classmates were applying to CPE sites and were finding out where they would be. For me, the thought of spending the summer in a hospital made me physically ill. But I was encouraged to do CPE that summer and allow it to help me deal with my grief. There were no CPE sites in the Saginaw area, so I applied to some around Gettysburg, and was lucky to be accepted at Hershey. It is the premier hospital in central Pennsylvania; it is a top trauma center and the location of the Penn State Medical School.
I had ten days off between the end of the semester and the beginning of CPE, so I was heading home to Saginaw to spend it with my mother. But before I got home, she was hospitalized with double pneumonia. She had stopped taking care of herself. She got better and was discharged. We had a couple of days together at home before I drove back to Gettysburg at the last minute, and began CPE the day after Memorial Day.
Three weeks later, I was knocking on the door of this lady’s room. I volunteered to see patients in both the cardiology and trauma departments. So each day, I would visit with people who came to Hershey because they were brought in through the cardiology & trauma departments. So I was seeing a lot of people who were in car accidents. I thought if this is going to help me deal with my grief from my dad’s death from a car accident, I might as well dive in the deep end. All I knew about the lady I was about to meet was that she was in her 60’s, and had been admitted over the weekend.
I knocked on the door, introduced myself, and asked if I could visit. She had her left leg in a spiral brace, and was hooked up to what I later came to realize was a normal amount of monitors and IVs, but at the time, looked like the entire hospital’s storeroom was placed in her room. In talking to her, I soon discovered that she had been in a car accident, but it was back in January. She was readmitted because her leg broke again from the severity of the damage done to it in the accident.
While she was in the hospital, she suffered a massive heart attack and had open-heart surgery. I was just stunned. I summed up what she had told me (this is one of the techniques we had been taught, to repeat what we had heard so as to present the patient’s situation back to them). She said that is what had happened to her, but then included that she had just retired from her job days before the accident, had 6 surgeries on her leg prior to this one, and had had a mini-stroke.
This entire time, as we were talking, she had been looking down. But then, she looked me directly in the eye, and said, “I just don’t understand why. Why is this all happening to me? Why has God let this happen?”
When she looked me in the eyes and asked me, “Why?” I was hoping for divine intervention. I was the on call chaplain on that day, so if there was a trauma call, or a patient coded (went into cardiac arrest) my pager would go off. I hate to admit this, but before I answered her, I prayed for the pager to go off. I would not have been that upset if I was the one who coded. Anything, but having to answer that question. Because that was the question I had for God. “Why?”
I left a good job that I enjoyed to go into the ministry. I left behind family and friends to go into the ministry. I chose to follow Christ and go into the ministry. And what do I get in return? My dad is dead, and my mom is sick and not taking care of herself. “I just don’t understand why. Why is this all happening to me? Why has God let this happen?”
A friend, a dear and close friend, sent me a long email when I returned to Gettysburg to start CPE. We were not able to meet up when I was home, because I was at the hospital a lot, and so we were keeping in touch with calls & emails. He sent me an email with the verse from 1st Corinthians, “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” [1Corinthians 10.13]
I had heard this verse before. I wrote back that I don’t want God to think that much of me. Because I felt I was being tested beyond my strength. I felt I was being given too big of a burden to carry. I thought I deserve better. We ALL deserve better. I was angry with my friend for sending me that message, but even more so, I was angry with God.
I think many of us have an issue with God because God is not consistent. If God was always a vengeful God, if God was a hard taskmaster; that could be ok. If God said here are the rules, this is what you need to do, do good and you will be rewarded, do bad or evil, and you will face my wrath – if that was our relationship with God, I think many of us would be all right with that. We would know where we stood.
“Hey, did you hear what happened to the Johnsons?”
“Yeah, he got that promotion at work and a big raise.”
“Of course, they do all of that charity work, so God had to reward them.”
“But did you hear about the Smiths?”
“Yeah, it’s a shame, but if you work on the Sabbath, and your kids talk back to you, you gotta expect some smiting.”
“But a plague of frogs?”
“Rules are rules.”
But that’s not how things are. The wicked prosper. The good suffer. Not all the time. But we don’t get what we deserve. But we know that God is a loving God. God cares for us. God suffers with us. That’s a hard concept to understand. We all suffer. We all have our own baggage to deal with. It may be our health, or the health issues of another. It may be loss and grief. It may be disappointment. It can be any of a hundred feelings of our own.
But there is the empathy for the suffering of others. We feel for the victims of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. We feel for the victims of war and violence. We feel for the victims of crime, injustice and poverty. We see all of this suffering. “I just don’t understand why. Why is this all happening? Why has God let this happen?”
That is what the people are asking Jesus. Herod defiled the Galilean travelers and their sacrifices by mixing their blood with the blood of their sacrifices. Eighteen people were crushed when a tower collapsed. By the way the question is framed, the victims of these events seem to have been good people. Where is their protection? Where is the love of God? How can God love us and let bad things happen to us? “I just don’t understand why. Why is this all happening? Why has God let this happen?”
We live in a world that is broken and we are the ones who broke it. Because of our sinful nature, we have damaged the world. We have damaged the very fabric of creation. The world does not operate as it should. The world could have been a perfect place. God could have created humanity so that we could only love, honor and praise God. We could have been in a world where nothing bad could happen because we had no choice in the world.
But God does not want our love, honor and praise because we had no choice. God wants our love, honor and praise because we choose to, because we want to, because we need to. So God gave us free will. We can choose to love, honor and praise God, or not. What we do is up to us. It is our choice, and sometimes we do not choose wisely. When we choose to act contrary to the will of God, when we choose to sin, we break the world.
Because the world is broken, it does not operate as it should. Bad things happen. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to people. Towers fall and crush people. Earthquakes occur. People get sick and ill. There are car accidents. Bad things happen because our world is broken, and we are among those who have broken it. Some people believe that tragedies occur to those who deserve it, that this is their punishment. The people of Haiti practiced voodoo and the devastation from Katrina came because of the wickedness of the people who lived there. Some people think they got what they deserved.
Let me ask, do you really want God to give you what you deserve? On the Day of Judgment, do you really want God to give you justice? Do you think you can pay for your sins?
In truth, we deserve much, much worse than we receive because we are broken people living in a broken world we have helped to break. We are flawed and fallen.
When I look back at the email my friend sent, and the verse from 1st Corinthians, I realize I looked at the message, and not the support. ‘No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.’ [1Corinthians 10.13] I focused in the middle that God will not test you beyond your strength. But what I missed was the beginning and the end of that verse.
‘No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone.’
Everyone suffers. Everyone suffers because everyone is broken. The testing, the temptations, the problems of this life occur to everyone. The sun shines on the good and the bad. The rain falls on sinners and saints, and the snow comes for everyone. Our suffering is worse, because it is ours. I am not trying to say that you should not feel pain, or grief, or loss or any other emotion because of our suffering. But we all have our share of suffering. We all feel pain. Everybody hurts.
‘But with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.’ While everybody hurts, God hurts right along with us. God wants to be loved, honored and praised by us. But God wants that to be our choice. When we choose unwisely, God suffers with us, and our choices. When bad things happen to us, God suffers along with us. But, in the midst of our suffering, we see others suffering. While we are dealing with the trials and tribulations of our lives, we see others who are in trouble, and we reach out to them. In so doing, we chose to love, honor and praise God.
The way out of the testing, the way we may be able to endure it is through one another. We may be able to endure the testing by helping one another. We can take up part of their burden, and they may take a portion of ours. We may simply be there so that they are not going through their problems by themselves. We can help to lighten their load with a conversation, a smile, a hug, holding their hand, saying a prayer, by just being there.
What did I tell the lady in Hershey hospital?
I was fortunate. I found myself saying basically what I just said. The words just came to me. I told her this wasn’t a punishment, or a test, but it was just life. We talked about all of the people in her life, and beyond her circle of family and friends, who had reached out to her. People picked up the phone, stopped by, wrote a note, or remembered her in prayer.
When we suffer, when we hurt, when the tragedies of life come to us, we are not alone. We are surrounded by those who know us and love us, by those who feel our pain. At the front of the line is God, who feels our pain, and will dry our tears, and whom will never leave us.
Comments
Also, I hope your internship is going (went?) well. Mine ended at the end of May and I enjoyed it a lot