May I Give Her Your Name?

A little while ago, I heard some news about a young person whom I knew quite well – I knew her – Mary - and I knew her family. Mary was in a youth group I led a few years ago. She was at her parent’s home one night for dinner, with her sister, her brother and his wife. In the middle of the meal, Mary suddenly became ill. She decided she'd better leave to go home and, as she said, “just get to bed.”

A few hours later, the parents got a call from Mary's sister. She said, "Mary's just had a baby ... Mary's just given birth to your grandson."

She’d been there for dinner ... they didn't even know she was pregnant!

Mary had kept all of this secretly to herself. She didn't tell her parents, her brother, her friends, or the child's father. As far as anyone can tell, she didn't even go to see a doctor.

Apparently, she had just worked at keeping her weight down and wore loose, baggy clothing.

She was afraid to tell anyone. She was afraid of what they'd think. She was afraid of their gossip at the church behind her back. She was afraid of their stares and their self-righteous remarks. It wasn't until just a couple of hours before the actual birth, she finally reached out to her sister, and told her sister what was going on.

Beyond the delivery room, Mary never saw the little boy she gave birth to. She immediately gave him up for adoption. She was afraid if she saw him, the heartache would be worse and the separation would be impossible. She felt she couldn’t give him the home he deserved … and so she let him go ...

And I think to myself, "How could this happen in that family? ... in that church that I knew so well? How could it happen, there was no one she could trust? Was there no friend, no minister, no elder, no "no one", she could talk to?

What has the church done to create such a community, which is no community at all?

The church is supposed to be a caring family of believers, a group formed around the love, forgiveness and acceptance of Jesus Christ. And yet, there was no one she could tell ... not a single soul to whom she could say, "I'm having a baby ..."

Somehow, I can't help feeling, the church stands condemned because of what has happened here because she was afraid. Afraid of rejection, afraid perhaps of ridicule, scorn and embarrassment. Whatever it was, the church was a failure in its alleged desire to be a caring community of people centred around the love and forgiveness of Christ.

Maybe this incident is the exception, rather than the rule. Maybe there was something wrong with Mary. Maybe this story is abnormal. Maybe this isn't what usually happens in the church ... but it can happen ... and it is what happened in this case. And I'm sometimes afraid this sort of thing is happening more and more. Where the church becomes a community of strangers. Where we only see one another on Sunday morning. Where we've been raised on the saying, "Mind your own business!" Where we may even feel free to judge another person, when we don't really even know them.

I hope and pray we always avoid that trap here at St. Andrew’s ... amongst this family of believers. That we will look after one another, and look out for each other. That we might be a true community sharing with one another our laughter and our suffering, our failures and our success, our joys and our pains.

When Jesus sat down for the last time to eat with his disciples, he gave them a new commandment: Love one another as I have loved you; by this shall all know you are my disciples, if you have love, one for another."

This love and concern does not happen by accident. It does not even happen naturally or with great ease. It happens because we choose to make it happen. It happens because we work at making it happen. It happens because we're willing to make ourselves vulnerable, and in the certainty and security of God's love we may have the courage to take the risk of being rejected or misunderstood.

We are asked to do more than just sit idly by as we watch another person slip into trouble or despair or loneliness. We are asked to do more than just find our old and trusted friends during Coffee Hour after worship on Sunday morning. We are asked to hold onto the edges of a safety net to catch our fellow men and women before they splatter themselves on the concrete sidewalk of life before they shatter body and soul in hopelessness, helplessness or despair.

This means, now and then, we will have to put ourselves on the line. We will have to stick our necks out. We will have to go out of our way to support one another in the love and mercy of Christ. We will have to show that we care …

I remember one Sunday being back in my home congregation during my summer vacation. At that time it was a rather large church. You could kind of get lost ... feel anonymous in that church.

On the day I visited there, I had to get away early because I was going out for lunch. As I passed through the foyer ahead of the rest of the congregation, I ran into a woman – I knew her quite well – she was in the choir. She also seemed to be in a hurry as she grabbed her coat from its hanger.

I said, "I really enjoyed the anthem this morning!"

She said, "Well I hope so, because that's it!"

I said, "What do you mean, that's it?"

"I'm hanging it up!"

I said, "You're hanging it up?"

She said, "Yep! I'm hanging it up!"

And I said, "Well, what's the matter with you?"

And she said, "This is my last Sunday."

I thought maybe she was retiring, she'd been in the choir for about a hundred years. And her voice was beginning to crack a little.

But she said, "No, I'm not retiring. I'm quitting."

"Well, why are you quitting?

She said, "I finally faced up to it this morning. It's been haunting me for years. I sat up in the choir this morning, and I just looked at all the people out there, and I looked at the minister, and looked at the elders around the Communion Table, and all the ushers doing things, and it finally just sunk in on me, "WHO CARES?!"

I said, "Who cares?"

And she said, "Who cares? Who cares whether I'm in the choir or not? Whether I'm even here or not?"

I said, "Oh, you're just feeling bad. Go on home, Maybe you’re just tired. Fix yourself a nice lunch."

I left, but I couldn't get it off my mind because, you see, for years, I had been a member of that church and what she had just done was indict us all, because whatever our accoutrements, however beautiful our choir, mammoth our organ, big our budget; if we didn't care for her, we were not a church. We could not assemble in the name of the one who did not, as the prophet Isaiah tells us, “break a bruised reed.”

It worried me to death. I went out for lunch ... didn't have my mind on it ... came home, called her that afternoon: "May I come over and talk to you?"

She said, "If you want to."

I said, "Well, I want to!" So I went over there. We talked.

I said, "You're wrong."

She said, "I'm not wrong."

I said, "Do you know what you did? You said to me this morning, we are not a church."

"Well!"

I told her a little church history. I said, "What you said of our church used to be called one of the seven deadly sins "acadia". It's translated as "sloth" in church history. But that's not a good translation. That's like lying in the bathwater too long or something. It's not sloth, the word "acadia" means "I don't care". We commit this sin when we walk by the old man among the pigeons in the park and say, "He's not my dad." When we see a child ... cold, curled up in front of a store, hungry, and say, "Well, he's not my kid." When we see a recent widow, staring out from beneath a gray shawl, upon a grayer world, and say, "Well, she's not my mom." It is possible to hurl one final insult at the world, "I don't care!"

I said, "Do you realize what you did? You have charged me and our church with one of the seven deadly sins."

She said, "So?"

I had heard the criticism before, not from her. I heard it, I think, most forcefully from a friend of mine.

His father didn't go to church. His mother took them. But once in a while the minister came to the house, and tried to talk to his father. My friend said, “That always made my mother very nervous, because she knew that my father was capable of talking like a Philistine if he got a little pressure.”

“And always,” he said, “my father's expressions were the same. I heard them a thousand times: "The Church didn't care anything about me. Another name! Another pledge! What's the matter? Is the budget a little low? Another name ... another pledge! Thank you very much Reverend!"

He went on, “I heard him say it a thousand times while my mother wept in the kitchen.”

Apparently one time he didn't say it. He was in the hospital – the Veteran's wing. He'd dropped down to seventy one pounds. Cancer of the throat.

"Too late," they said.

"Shouldn't have been smoking," they said.

They had taken out everything put in a little metal tube. He could put his finger over it and make some noises. But mostly he wrote.

My friend said, “I walked into the room, having flown in there to see him. In every window - flowers. By his bed - a stack of cards twenty inches deep. Even that thing they swing over your bed to put food on is adorned with fresh flowers.”

My friend looked at the cards sprinkled beside his father’s bed. And every one of them, are you listening, every one of them, from groups or persons in his mother’s church.

His father couldn't speak, so he grabbed a Kleenex box and wrote on the side of it. He wrote there a line from Hamlet, "In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story."

My friend said, "I will. What is it?"

And he wrote, "I was wrong." ... he was wrong …

I got up to leave the house of that woman from my home congregation – the woman who was quitting the church – and I said to her, "You're wrong. I’ve been in churches all over Ontario … and I don't care how big or how small, but wherever you find need, wherever you find a house in distress or pain or bereavement ... if you look, you'll see the footprints of Christians who came with something a word, a pie, a gift, something.”

I said, "People everywhere care."

And she said, "Really?"

And I said, "Yes."

She said, "Name some. Name some."

She wants names ...

May I give her your name?

May I give her your name?