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| How Can You Really Care? |
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(please feel free to email a question or reponse) March 8, 2009 Psalm 22 (from The Message) May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen. Remember the opening words of Psalm 22 that we heard a few minutes ago? “God, God ... my God! Why did you dump me miles from nowhere?” The more familiar translation is “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s familiar, in part, because those are among the last words Jesus spoke as he was dying on the cross, reflecting his near despair as he was gasping for air. We’ll hear them again as we gather here on Good Friday. These words, in whatever translation, are also familiar because they are words that reflect our own anguish as life seems to crash in around us. A job gone away. A relationship disintegrating. A diagnosis that could mean death. Ellen and Tom Foley know that sense of anguish. So do the HIV-positive children at the Nyumbani Village orphanage in Kenya. I’d like to share their stories with you this morning. But before I’d do, I’d also like to remind you where Psalm 22 ends. It ends with a hymn of praise as the psalm writer realizes that God “has never let you down, never looked the other way when you were being kicked around. He has never wandered off to do his own thing; he has been right there, listening.” That’s part of the story of Ellen and Tom and of the children at Nyumbani as well. If Ellen Foley’s name sounds familiar to some of you, it is because she has been a very public person in Madison. She was editor of the Wisconsin State Journal from 2004 to 2008, coming back to the state where she grew up and to the city where she went to college. This was her dream job. And her husband, Tom, a mental health therapist, cheered Ellen along every step of the way. But in January of 2008, he began to have excruciating headaches. They went to the hospital, went through a battery of tests and the news was devasting. In early February, Ellen sent an email to friends that said in part: “Tuesday doctors found three tumors in Tom's brain. They believe they are metastasized from a primary tumor somewhere else in his body. They are having a bit of trouble finding that primary tumor... God has sent the Foley family another curve ball. We know with your support and prayers that we will hit this one out of the park.” The prognosis was not good. The doctor told them that patients in Tom’s condition typically did not live for more than a few months. It was not the first curve-ball for the Foley family, as Ellen suggested. Twenty years earlier, a serial rapist had murdered her sister Mary in a parking ramp outside her workplace in Minneapolis. This is a family that knows about grief. This is a family that knows that feeling of abandonment by God. It’s also a family for whom things like God and spirituality were a bit distant in their own lives. In the early stages of this journey with cancer, they were not interested in talking with chaplains or trying to make much sense out of where God was in the midst of this horror. All they could do was try to cope with their own fears and try to devise a plan that might save Tom’s life. In early April, a cousin in New York reminded Ellen of the Serenity Prayer, that lifeline that Reinhold Niebuhr offered the world more than a half century ago: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” At the same time, Libby Case, a chaplain at University Hospital where Tom was undergoing chemotherapy, began to bond with Ellen and Tom. Ellen wrote this at the end of that April day: “Libby talked to us about how the Israelites were sent out into the desert with no food or tools or protection and they had trouble remembering that God was with them. We are having trouble with this also. She reminded Tom that God is speaking to us through the docs, the nurses and through my work to get us to Sloan Kettering (a cancer center in New York) and we needed to understand God will not abandon us no matter what road we end up taking. “We cried, and I am crying as I write this. I want the other story in which there is a resurrection after a whole lot of suffering. I want to be saved from this cancer. I do not want to endure it and survive Tom. We know there is great wisdom and comfort in Libby's ministering. We know we need to work on acceptance.” Ellen and Tom – and anyone who has gone through cancer treatments themselves or with a loved one – have experienced in a visceral way some of the words in Psalm 22: “Every joint in my body has been pulled apart. My heart is a blog of melted wax in my gut. I’m dry as a bone, my tongue black and swollen. They have laid me out for burial in the dirt.” Tom was getting some of the strongest chemo ever administered at UW. Later he would go through a very difficult bone marrow stem cell transplant that would take his body to the edge of death. In the middle of July, Ellen wrote about a particularly significant night for Tom. It had come early in the journey, back in February, when he thought he had only weeks to live. “He was up all night with Nurse Meredith holding his head and his hand as the chemo attacked the brain tumors and the steroids made his body shake. ‘It felt like death,’ he said. Tom explained that faith can feel illusory but when you stare down ‘the end’ of life, you face a choice about whether life is some sort of sick joke or whether it is a random shot at joy and meaning. “He chose the latter that night. He said he's realized that getting the best from the rest of his days is all you can expect. And he is very much at peace with this. When he falters, he goes back to the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the sick..." And then Ellen tried to make some sense of it for herself. “We will continue to try to understand what role a higher power plays in this journey,” she wrote. “How does God transform our faith from a life boat to a life force that propels us to lead the lives we were meant to lead?” For Ellen, for so many of us, for the writer of Psalm 22, this quest to figure out where God is in the midst of suffering often brings far more questions than answers. As she wrote last August, “Cancer provokes so many questions. The only thing Tom and I can tell you is that when death is close, myth and faith take on large roles.” She found comfort in hymns like “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” He found strength in making the sign of the cross. And they found strength in the network of friends who helped with the tangible tasks of every day life – grocery shopping, shoveling snow, mowing the lawn – and in the intangible support that comes with words of prayer and encouragement. Last month, Tom was back at the hospital for more tests to see if all of the medical interventions had beaten back the cancer. On Feb. 24 – just a couple of weeks ago -- Ellen wrote this in her CaringBridge blog: “Here's Doc Kahl's email: “ ‘All's good. Have a drink tonight.’ “I reached Tom on his cell moments ago at a candy store buying mint meltaways. I was sitting at my desk bloated from eating a chocolate chip cookie, which I rarely do. I guess we go sweet when we need to medicate with carbos at the Foley house. “ ‘Thank God,’ Tom said. “Yes, thank God.” When I was corresponding with Ellen about this sermon, she wrote that she is still confused about why Tom got better and others have died. “The only way I can explain this to myself is that God is sending me grace,” she wrote. “Why he doesn’t send it all the time to all people is something I just will never understand. I have come to peace about that.... I do wish I had answers. I can tell you that there is some force outside of me. Whether is it God or karma or chi, I cannot tell you. Someone, something, helped me through this. Someone, something, helped Tom be brave and strong. Even if he dies tomorrow, I will always feel this way. We are just so grateful for every day now.” The children at the Nyumbani orphanage know a bit about fear and suffering as well. Susan Gold told me their story. She is with us this morning to talk with our teens about her experiences in Kenya a couple of years ago. And she will be back on March 25 to talk about global hunger during our Wednesday night Lenten series. But this story is really a Psalm 22 story. It happened at Mass on a Sunday morning at the orphanage, where over 100 young people who are HIV positive live, many of them having lost their parents to AIDS. These young people have been traumatized by what life has dealt them and they don’t talk much about it, Susan said. They don’t have the support systems around them, there is little chance for emotional healing in their lives. But on this Sunday, the priest at Nyumbani, Fr. Ludwig, was talking about sadness. He had just come back from Sudan, where he experienced the devastation of the war there. Everyone was aware of the sadness following the crash that week of a Kenyan passenger plane. And then he asked the children: “When was a time when you were sad?” There was silence. Finally, one child said, “I was sad when my mother died.” Susan said it was like a dam broke open. Child after child spoke of the sadness when their parents left them, when a brother died, when they realized they had been left alone. For 10 minutes, the stories poured forth. And then there was silence. Fr. Ludwig looked at the children. He looked at the adults who were stunned at the grief they had just witnessed in the children’s faces and voices. And he spoke these words in the midst of this time when they were gathered together in worship, just as we are here today: “At the moment when you were most sad and most frightened, you were not alone. God loved you.” As the psalm writer said, Here’s the story I’ll tell my friends when they come to worship and punctuate it with Hallelujahs: God has never let us down, never looked the other way. No matter how it feels, God has not abandoned us. I’d like to end with a song that has sustained me in those moments in my life when everything seemed to be coming unhinged. They have not been moments as devastating as what Ellen and Tom or the children of Nyumbani have faced. But when my work situation was in turmoil in the mid 1970s, when my first marriage was ending in the mid-1980s, when my mother was dying in the late 1990s, I kept coming back to this song for comfort. It’s a song based on Psalm 22. How can you really care with fury everywhere? I look for help but I can only see a wall I turn to see the sun, but he is on the run Just like the stars at night, my heart is going to fall. Chorus I am alone, I may be crying But God is always there I yell, God, where are you? O where can you be? But I know after all is said and done That my God has know me from before all time And I’ll see God’s face. Come now and rescue me, alone on a heavy sea If I should perish now, no one would even know I lie awake at night and all I know is fright And do you care if I am dying down below? Chorus Some people come along and say that I was wrong To put my trust in you, for you don’t even see But I have known a year when you were very near I felt your hand upon me, come to set me free. Chorus |