Sermon of the Week:
No Insignificant Question-When It’s Better to Keep Silent
A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on September 5, 2021.
Part Two of a eight-week sermon series inspired by questions submitted by the Kirk community.
Special Music: Talking to the Moon
Hymn: All Things Bright and Beautiful
Keywords: Sitting With, Still Small Voice, Zechariah, Some Help isn’t Helpful, Centering Others. #pcusa
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Luke 6:39-45
and Philippians 3:4b-14
Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.
I completed my seminary training at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
When you go to seminary and prepare to become a pastor
The coursework is almost like a smorgasbord,
Such a variety of subjects you might take:
some of it is what you would expect,
classes in the Old and New testaments, for instance,
but also the languages, Hebrew and Greek,
the original languages of the Bible.
We study the art and the history of Interpreting the Bible too,
Along with all sorts of classes in theology—
Systematic theology, liberation theology,
Reformed Theology, for the Presbyterians,
Theology from the margins.
We study Christian history and maybe some ethics.
Presbyterians might study church polity,
The particular way we run our churches,
Roberts Rules of Order and the Constitution of our church and all that.
There were classes in leading worship, and in preaching,
You know, how to craft a sermon
that is both grounded in what the Bible actually says,
And relevant to the era we’re reading it in,
And, hopefully, meaningful enough
so as to not make everyone fall asleep along the way.
We also look at church systems, the dynamics of a community, right,
As well as the basics of pastoral care,
maybe looking over a balance sheet,
Some cultural and political analysis,
And, of course, the fine art of setting up tables in a fellowship hall.
Ok, we never actually studied that last one
But there’s really so much to cover in three years worth of work
That they leave the important things like chair and table management
for you to pick up in your first post.
So there’s a lot.
But in addition to the formal coursework
we also have a practicum or two
an assignment at a church, if it is a pastoral internship,
or as a student chaplain, for what is called clinical pastoral education, or CPE.
You learn a lot in these practicums,
Maybe as much as the book learning in the classroom.
I’ve talked about my chaplain work before.
It might have been the most meaningful part of all those years in seminary.
I worked as a student chaplain at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago
A major teaching and trauma hospital serving the entire region,
Similar to KU med or St Luke’s hospital here in Kansas City.
It was a wildly diverse, incredible place,
Kind of like the city of Chicago itself.
And I was assigned two units,
One that treated patients with multiple, complex conditions,
And another unit for those in orthopedic care,
often pre or post-surgical care—back, knee, or hip.
My time was focused on nurturing the spiritual and emotional health
Of all sorts of people who were in those units.
When you are a chaplain at a hospital,
Your job is to see beyond your own particular confessional perspective
And, instead, to seek to meet people where they are,
That is, If they’re open to working with you.
Not everyone wants to see the chaplain.
Not everyone is religious, of course.
And that’s fine. There are good alternate options the hospital might offer.
Or they might be religious,
But they might really want to just speak to someone of their own tradition.
That’s fine too,
even though we are prepared and adept at
working with people of all sorts of backgrounds.
Or, then again, they might be religious,
And they might be open to talking with a chaplain
But they might not know YOU, you know,
Might not know what you’re going to do, or say, or bring to the table,
And they might not be in the place, at that moment,
to deal with something that,
they worry, might not be what they need right then.
We all know what we mean by that, right?
Have you had those moments when you are hurting,
And someone tells you: don’t worry.
God never gives us more than you can handle.
When you’re broken and bereft,
And someone says
This is all part of God’s plan.
These trite statements of faith might be uttered by someone who means well,
But they cut so deeply,
and at just the wrong moment,
As if to say:
If you have more than you can handle,
then maybe God has given up on you.
As if to say:
It must be God’s plan
for your love to have an inoperable tumor.
A good chunk of my time as a chaplain, actually,
Was spent with people who were struggling
emotionally, spiritually,
Because they had internalized just that sort of message,
Rooted in bad theology.
God doesn’t micromanage our life that way.
God doesn’t send suffering your way.
But you can see why some people may not want to speak with the chaplain,
In those moments,
If that’s maybe what they think the chaplain is going to bring to the table.
We weren’t.
When you accept a chaplaincy position,
you learn basic counselling techniques
Like active listening,
And compassionate mirroring.
And in the hospital most chaplains provide an essential service
Walking alongside a patient, praying with them or their family,
Or the staff that is working there,
Assuring them of God’s love and God’s care.
And because Rush University Medical Center, in the heart of Chicago
Was so diverse,
I would often pray with or sit beside
Protestants, Catholics, Coptic Orthodox, Unitarians, Jews,
Sheiks, Muslims, agnostics, and more.
It was a deeply rewarding experience.
And, I think, I hope, for the patients and families and staff I worked with,
Hopefully a helpful part of their healing as well.
Sometimes, though, the work of the chaplain isn’t to engage a problem.
Sometimes the chaplain just needs to be still,
To sit there,
offering another helpful presence in what can be, for many, a very difficult time.
I mention all of that because I remember that it took work to get there,
To learn to just sit with others.
Sometimes all that we were asked to do was sit with them.
Not to work through problems to offer solutions
Certainly not to offer answers to their medical issues—
we weren’t doctors or therapists—
but to just be, to just pray, to offer, through our presence,
compassion and companionship.
///
One of the first things I remember doing as a Student Chaplain
Was what is called the chaplain verbatim.
A verbatim is essentially a written report of an encounter with a patient,
Where you take out names and identifying characteristics, of course
But you narrate what happened in the encounter,
Along with how you, the chaplain, engaged in that moment:
What did you say, how did you feel, what did you see,
Did your encounter cause you to reflect, in your memory,
some similar experiences you had had,
and, if so,
did that impact what you said to the patient,
and so on.
Have you ever done anything like that,
Considered some encounter of yours,
What was going on inside of you when you had it
How that impacted things, for good or for…well, maybe not so good?
The verbatim is one of the centerpieces of a chaplain’s training,
Because that verbatim would be shared with a small group
And we would dig into it,
Exploring how and why we said what we said, did what we did.
Did we find ourselves trying to get out of the room sooner
Because some memory made me feel uncomfortable?
Did something we said not have the impact we thought it would, and why not?
And after you do that work for a while,
After more than a handful of verbatims,
You start understanding your presence a bit more clearly.
You hopefully start nurturing the ability
to react a little bit less out of your emotions
A bit less out of what you need,
and a bit more out of what the patient might need.
It isn’t that your emotions don’t matter,
or what you need isn’t important.
Chaplains are also BIG on self care,
And they urge self care, too,
For doctors and nurses and orderlies and family members and patients.
But when you’re in that moment,
taking your ego out of it,
if that’s possible, insofar as possible,
gives you more of an opportunity to be helpful,
and not to say or do something that is more, well, for you, about you,
to calm your worries or your anxieties or your hurts,
because that moment is not about you, chaplain,
it is about the patient.
If you are in a helping profession,
or if you are more formally trained as a therapist
This is all familiar to you.
But I think for most of us, this is hard for us to work on.
It is often when we are wrapped up in our own head
Wrestling with our own grief, our own pain,
That we say or do things to help deal with THAT.
And, in my experience, so often
Those who think they mean well
When they say to you, when you’re down:
Oh, God has a plan for all of us,
That’s often more about them, right,
More about THEIR difficulty just being there,
with you, in that moment, as you hurt.
Let’s face it, it’s hard to accompany someone when they’re down.
To see a friend in pain.
To comfort someone who is crying.
To watch someone searching for answers.
And the instinct, at least for me,
And maybe for some of you,
Is to try to solve things, to give answers,
To just make things better….
But chaplaincy isn’t about that.
It is about the ministry of presence,
Of being there, accompanying, supporting,
Listening, bearing it with them.
It is about talking through things
Maybe buttressing the coping mechanisms that we all have
And through that presence,
We in our faith tradition believe,
We offer the presence of our God,
Who loves us and cares for us and nurtures us though all things
and through every challenge.
///
I’ve come to appreciate chaplains so much,
And really all of those who do this sort of work
Where they can center the needs of those they’re trying to help
Rather than primarily their own needs,
their own reactions to the hurts of the other.
While my experience with this is rooted in that practicum,
I know that I still have room to grow here.
All of us do. No one does this perfectly,
But it does help to think about
why we react the way we react
to things that are happening,
And how that reaction is making us feel,
So we can choose our next steps accordingly.
Today’s No Insignificant Question topic is
“How do we sit in silence with someone when we have so much to say?”
That wasn’t meant to be a loaded question.
The person who asked it mentioned that they want to help
But they know that it can be hard
Hard to just be there
Hard not to know what to do, or to say, or how to help.
Important, but hard.
And, in asking this question this way, they acknowledge
That often silence is one helpful way we do this.
We just sit there. With them.
Just there.
Now, this isn’t the only way to help.
Often there are words, comforting words:
I’m sorry.
I hear you.
I am here for you.
That sounds like it really hurts.
How can I help?
But the question wants to know about silence,
When we have so much to say.
///
Beyond the wisdom of professional chaplains and maybe other caregivers
Which encourages us to think about that difference
Between our needs and the needs of others
And to try to center their needs in our response,
Not to suggest that their suffering is a good or warranted or expected thing…
We might also learn something from these two readings before us today.
I love this advent story from the Gospel of Luke
Where the priest Zechariah has so much to say
But can’t say it,
Because he loses his voice in an encounter with the Angel Gabriel,
Who told him that he and Elizabeth were going to have a son,
And that they would name him John.
That’s the John who would become John the Baptist,
The one who prepared the way for Jesus.
Sometimes an encounter with the holy changes us, impacts us, says Luke.
For Zechariah, it meant he was no longer able to speak,
Not through his wife’s final months of pregnancy, or the birth
Or the first seven days of John’s life.
I told the Bible Study group I wouldn’t make a joke
About how relieved that must have made Elizabeth,
so I won’t make that joke.
And the time comes for their boy to be named,
And Elizabeth declares that they will name him John
And everyone scoffs at that… no one in your family is named John
So they turn to Zechariah, remember, this is still a very patriarchal time,
And they want to know what he has to say, so to speak,
And he writes on a tablet “his name will be John”
And they’re astonished… His name is going to be John…
And, suddenly, he can speak again, and speak he does
And now they’re not just astonished they’re aware that this is a God thing
And Zechariah breaks into song at this birth, at what God is up to.
We don’t know what being mute meant to Zechariah or Elizabeth
during those months.
We can only speculate.
But we do know that it ended up just fine. It was ok,
That any anxiety or worry that it must have caused Zechariah
Wasn’t something for them to fret too much about.
It might actually have been a blessing.
For him, it wasn’t apparently voluntary, though.
For the rest of us, we often have so much we can say,
so much we CAN say, so much we WANT to say,
But it isn’t always right for us to say it.
I know that wise people have suggested one set of questions
That we might ponder:
is what we want to say true,
Is it kind,
is it necessary?
That’s a helpful exercise in thinking about what we say, before we say it.
But sometimes we think we ought to say something,
But we don’t even know what would be helpful,
what words to choose.
That’s something closer to what we heard today
from Paul in his letter to the Romans.
Paul observed a world groaning, aching,
And, sometimes, we’re struck by not knowing what to do, or to say.
IN those moments, Paul says, the Spirit can help us
And prays for us even when we do not know how to pray,
With sighs too deep for words.
That is such a powerful image for me:
Sighs too deep for words
Things that leave us speechless,
Moments where we are struck silent.
Actually, come to think of it,
it might be something like awaiting the birth of your child that could do that,
or preparing for surgery,
or dealing with the long term effects of a medical issue.
What I love about Paul
Is that he tells us that we don’t have to speak all the time
That we can just be there,
And the holy spirit will be there, too,
Helping us, praying for us, not with words sometimes,
but with sighs deeper than words.
Paul goes on.
Paul tells us that all things end up for our Good
That nothing will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
And that’s all true,
Even if that’s not always what we need, in the moment,
If what we need in the moment, instead, is silence,
Is the loving presence of someone who cares for us,
Someone who reminds us that we are not alone,
Even if we can’t speak right now.
You don’t have to be a chaplain or a pastor or a professional either.
This is just something we do when we care for each other.
We are there for them.
We resist making our own feelings the main thing.
We don’t tell people that our experiences are the same as theirs,
Because we’re all unique
We don’t tell them that all the hurt will go away, we don’t know that.
We just join them, walk with them, show them we care for them,
And we pray, sometimes with words, sometimes in silence
For the soothing presence of the holy spirit.
Later, maybe, there will be time for talk, and listening, and words.
At the right time, that often is the right thing to do, too.
Later, maybe, the words will come to us,
Or the person we’re with will have words that invite us into conversation.
But sometimes, just having someone who can shoulder the weight of it all
Is what we need to help us get through it.
So may we not shy away from being with people in their hurt
But also, may we know that it is ok not to fix it all
But just to be there, in love and in solidarity
So that people know that they are not alone,
And may we lean on the spirit
To help us pray when we don’t have the words
And trust that it will all be ok, in God’s good way,
Because God is always with us,
And because God is good
All of the time.
May it be so.
Amen.
Leave a Reply