John
3:16-17
One of my favorite writers and
preachers was a man named Walter Wangerin, who died a few years ago, way too
soon. For awhile he was pastor of Grace
Lutheran Church in Evansville, Indiana, a struggling church in a struggling
town, but one where the people knew and loved the Lord. In one of his books, he tells a story about
his own struggles.[1]
Across from the church lived a woman
named Marie who, like most of the neighborhood, fought to make ends meet. Wangerin felt for her, and also for her young
son, but wasn’t quite sure how he could best help her, and she didn’t make it
easy on him when she regarded him with a mix of resentment and suspicion. He later realized that she made her living in
the world’s oldest profession. He began
to look askance at her, too. Then, one
night, Wangerin was working late in his study and all the lights were off
except the one at his desk, when he heard suspicious sounds outside. The church had been broken into a couple of
times and he got nervous, so he peeked out a window. He saw Marie filling water jugs at the spigot
on the side of the church that was itself having trouble paying its bills. “Geez!” he wrote,
“the presumption griped
me. She was busy stealing. She was reaching into the very heart of the
building, even to frighten me in the privacy of my study. I felt very, very vulnerable.
…She’d shut the water
off. When she passed the window, I saw
her from the knees down, lugging in each hand two plastic jugs of water, and
then I was alone again – and full of anguish.
…I had no idea what to do
about Marie’s little theft – or the arrogance of it. Well, well, well: water isn’t communion ware,
after all. What do you pay for
water? Pennies. So let it go.
That’s what I said to myself.
Just let it go. And I thought: if
the city has turned off her water, you can bet they’ve turned off her gas and
electricity too. The woman’s without utilities. And she’s got a kid who needs to drink and
wash and use the bathroom. So calm down
and call it charity and let it go.
Yeah, but that kid nagged
at my mind. What was she teaching her
child? That he could take whatever he
needed – whatever he wanted, for heaven’s sake.
Any child, I don’t care who or whose it is, deserves better than this
poor kid was getting.
And then that’s the next
thing that nagged: what is the ethic for supporting a prostitute, even by
inaction and non-involvement? This is a
church, after all. We have a covenant
with virtue, after all, a discipline, a duty, a holy purpose, a prophetic
presence. Shouldn’t I talk to the woman?
Precisely at that point
all my abstract inquiry skdded against reality.
Talk to the woman? Why, the woman doesn’t talk! She stares at you with a moribund stare. She scorns you with murderous scorn.
… ‘So let it go.’ I said that out loud in the doorway of my
study.”
So far, so good. But it continued to rankle him. Then one day, again working late and hearing
the tap running, he took action.
“I thrust my face
to the window and looked into midnight and squinted to make my eyes
adjust. I saw the figure beneath the
street light. I saw the body bending at
our faucet. Two feet from mine I saw a
concentrating face. …who was this drawing water from the bowels of Christendom?
One of the prostitute’s johns!”
He
saw things getting out of hand, so he ran into the boiler room and shut off the
valve.
I
feel okay using this story in a sermon, because so did Wangerin. It was a situation where it was important to
draw the line and to do it in a way that was considerate.He wrote that
“Even so in the
end did a cleric and the church prevail, by cunning, not by confrontation, and
no one was hurt, and no one’s feelings or reputation was wounded, neither the
church’s nor the prostitute’s. We could
coexist on opposite sides of Gum Stree
Most
of the people who heard it understood that.
Most.
At the church door he spoke with Miz
Lillian Lander. “Pastor?”
“Her voice was both
soft and civil. It was the sweetness of
it that pierced me. … ‘You preached
today,’ she said, and I thought of our past conversation. ‘God was in this place,’ she said, keeping my
hand in hers. I almost smiled for pride
at the compliment. But Miz Lil said, ‘He
was not smiling.’ Neither was she. Nor would she let me go.
… ‘Her grandma’s
name was Alice Jackson,’ Miz Lil said, staring steadily at me. ‘Come up from Kentucky and went to school
with me, poor Alice did. She raised her
babies, then she had to raise grandbabies too.
She did the best she could by them.
But a body can only do so much.
Pastor,’ said Miz Lil, ‘when you talk about skinny Marie, you think of
her grandma. You think of Alice Jackson
by name. You think to yourself, she died
of tiredness – and then you won’t be able to talk except in pity.’”
Wangerin’s story is a warning to
preachers. It is tempting to thunder
against the dark, hoping that lightning will give a moment of clear vision
where there is no daylight. But those
bolts do not belong in anyone’s hands but the Lord’s. What human being would even be certain to aim
them at the right target? Who would not
end up sending one straight through their own heart? But
“God did not send the Son into the world to condemn
the world, but that through him, the world might be saved.” [John 3:17]
It
is a warning to all Christians, because in good faith and in truth we may want
to follow God’s will, and want to see others do the same. Only, where do we see God’s will if not in
Jesus? It cost Jesus more than we will
ever comprehend to follow through on his mission. It cost far more than any of us could ever
give. We get a glimpse of it when more
is asked of us than we are ready for, especially if it is asked of us again and
again and again, and we are ready sometimes to “die of tiredness”. Even if we do, it is not the whole story.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
[John
3:16]
Until
then, God grant us all grace to look beyond ourselves and to see people in such
a way that we won’t be able to talk except in pity – or to act except in mercy
and in love.
[1]
Walter Wangerin, Jr., “Miz Lil” in Miz
Lil & the Chronicles of Grace (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). Quotations here occur from pages 44-48.
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