Earlier this week I found myself in the wrong part of a hospital room. Usually I am the one who goes and visits hospitals, but last Monday, I was the one needing help, because I had landed myself in the ER.
It started like any other Monday. I woke up, poured some coffee and began to think about the things I needed to get done. Mother Ede’s sermon from last week kept echoing in my head as I remembered her telling us how she begins each morning praising God, as opposed to asking Him for help with everything she needs to get done. Yes despite my best efforts to follow Mother Ede’s example, I was focused on what I had to get done. I had a Christian Ed meeting to plan, hymns to work out for the service, phone calls to return, paperwork for the diocese and so on. I sat there in my home office, a half cup of coffee away from full alertness with all these tasks running through my head.
Then it happened, I started to get itchy under my eyes.
I have an allergic condition called idiopathic hives. It’s a big word that means that every once in awhile I have an allergic reaction to something that swells my face, and the doctors have no clue what causes it or how to prevent it.
It can go one of two ways, either I will just be a bit itchy that day, or like twice before in my life, my throat will swell up and I will be in danger of my throat closing up. So I went off and took some Benadryl and hoped it would do the trick. Unfortunately, I began to feel my tongue tingle, and that means my throat closing could be next. So I did something stupid…I tried to ignore the feeling. You see, to my stubborn mind I had too much to do last week to have my tongue tingle. For if my tongue really is really tingling, I have to get to the ER. Going to the ER means hours in the hospital followed by a few days of anti allergy drugs that make me sleep for a few days straight.
All that was not in the plan. I had things to do, places to go, people to see. Yet after 5 minutes I could no longer deny what was happening. I told my wife what was going on, and we called 911.
When they ambulance wheeled me into the hospital I could see my reflection in the sliding doors. There I was on the stretcher, arms crossed, mouth frowning, eyes glaring. I was not a happy camper and I was showing it to everyone .
Once they put me in my room I quickly realized how lucky I was. You see I had the luxury of being a frowning, glaring and all around bad hospital patient because I knew what was going to happen. Having gone through this before, I knew the questions they would ask, what drugs they would give and the fact that this would be about a 2 hour stay in the ER.
The people in the rooms around me didn’t have that luxury. It turns out that my visit to the ER wasn’t all that different from my pastoral visits, because in both cases I know before I go through the hospital door what will happen, so I can make a plan of action. When I go to visit someone in the hospital I have been given a basic run through of what happened to whomever I am seeing. Then when I get there I can speak to the nurse, I can then begin to plan my visit. I mark my prayer book for the right pages, I select the appropriate reading and then I go in. In the same way, as a patient, I went in with a plan. Once they put me in the room at the ER I began to give notes to my wife. This is my healthcare info. This is who you call for this. Once the nurse speaks to me I can than call someone and tell them an estimate of when I’ll need a ride. It’s all very ordered and according to the plan of how things work for Matt Venuti.
After I had given my wife my instructions to carry out my master plan, she went to go call people, leaving me with nothing to do but to listen to those in the rooms around me. It took me about thirty seconds to realize how lucky I was. Those of you have made a visit to an Emergency Room know it’s not a great place to visit. By very virtue of what an Emergency Room is, if you are there, you didn’t plan to be there. Something went wrong, you need help, and you can’t wait for it.
The people around me did not have a plan, because they did not know what was going to happen next. They were uncertain of what the next few hours, let alone what the next few days would hold for them. I heard someone next to me groaning in pain. In the way I saw people bleeding with doctors crowded around them. When I heard and saw this all this around me, I couldn’t help but realize what the priorities in Christian life and ministry actually really are.
In today’s Gospel Jesus tells us about the folly of focusing on things in our life that only pertain to us, and not God. In some ways, that message is a repeat of what I dealt with in my sermon two weeks ago about the Gospel story of Mary and Martha.
The fact that Holy Scripture reminds us again and again to pay attention to God instead of ourselves is a testament to the fallen human condition – we need to be told this over and over again in order to get it.
My story comes to an easy conclusion with this message. I woke up on Monday morning, and instead of saying Thank You God for another chance to be in the world You made, I instead said help me Lord, help ME get MY lists of things done. So God knocked me upside the head and gave me a lesson in who’s really in charge here and whose plans I should be focusing on, the end, amen!
Yet, if I am honest, that’s not what I heard from God on Monday. Sure, it would make a perfectly sensible sermon, yet that is not what really stuck with me on that day.
You see, when I was waiting for the nurse to come with the drugs I needed after the doctor evaluated me, in one last act of trying to control the situation I asked my wife to read me the readings for this Sunday so I could start my working on my sermon in my head. So she got out my phone, looked up the readings and began to read them aloud. As soon as she said the first reading was from Hosea, I thought, boy, I don’t want to hear this. The term “children of whoredom” was used in last week’s reading, so I braced myself for another blast of God’s displeasure with the people of the Northern Kingdom of Israel after the glory of David and Solomon’s reigns had begun to fade, and the apostasy and heresy began.
Yet, instead of words of rebuke, I heard the loving words of a parent to a child. “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms…I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.”
That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. The heartbroken voices of those who were hurting were still be whispered all around me, and this was an answer to my prayer. While I was waiting there for the doctor I had prayed that God would be with all those who were in pain, to let them know He loved them…and then came those wonderful words from the Prophet Hosea.
That’s really what my job is in the end. To love people. Like God told Hosea. My job is not to order the universe despite that fact that that appears on my to do list. Yes, sometimes in order to bring this love to people I have to start by making to-do lists and making phone calls, but these are just the means of doing my job, not the sum total of what I do. My job is to show people that God loves them and to love them in turn.
That is the good news of Christ. Despite all the wretched things we can to do God and to our fellow man, God still wants to remind us that He made us, and He loves us. Don’t hear me wrong, the book of Hosea is not easy to read, and Hosea is not done registering the Lord’s complaints with the leaders of Israel. In the same way, we are not done doing stupid things here in the Church and in our lives to God and to those around us, yet God will always remind us: I love you. And sure, part of my job, just like Hosea, is to tell people things they don’t want to hear, to remind them of the way God wants us to live our lives, but these are secondary to the main mission of the Church, to bring God’s Holy love to all around us.
In the midst of my dashed plans and slightly arrogant beginning to my prayers on Monday, when I asked Him to be with me and those around me, my Father and yours reminded me that he delights in us. Regardless of how much we are doing to ignore Him in our daily life, or how hard we find it to believe in Him in bad circumstances, His compassion for us never changes.
In the end, I think that’s what the take home message from my experience was on Monday. My primary reason for getting up each morning should not be to get things done and to make my to-do list smaller or to impose my control on those around me. My reason for getting up each morning is that it gives me another chance to delight in God’s Love, and to share it with His children.
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