Sent Out in Jesus’ Name (Copy)
Many of you might remember Jane Leonard, who passed away last Fall. She was a member here for a number of years, active in Adult Forum. The first interaction I had with Jane was during the week following my first Sunday here a year ago. She had just fallen and hadn’t been able to make it to my first worship service here. So she sent me an email to welcome me and let me know why she wasn’t in worship that Sunday. She was in worship the following Sunday, and during the week following, I received another email. In this one, she described a friend that she had who was getting older and was needing more and more help, and talked about this friend’s struggle to accept help. Mind you, Jane was 90 when she was telling me about this “older friend” who wouldn’t let Jane help her. She both acknowledged how frustrating it is to offer help to someone who refuses to accept it out of pride, and asked for advice about how she as an individual might accept offers of help from others. Her question was specifically tied to the story of the Good Samaritan, and was, “how can we learn to receive the blessings of the Good Samaritan?” I would argue that the man in that story who received the blessing from the Samaritan didn’t have much choice in the matter. But I also think that we can pose this question more broadly: “How can we learn to receive gifts, blessings, and help from others?”
Accepting the offer of help, after all, can be embarrassing. It communicates that we don’t have the skills or the physical ability to do something or know something. I’ll always remember the trauma of being placed in advanced math when I was in third grade. I was there for months, struggling to keep up and, eventually, falling so far behind that there was no hope of getting back on track. I never once asked for extra help, and got more and more overwhelmed until one day I had a breakdown in the middle of class and my teacher finally knew just how little I was actually learning. Then I got put back in the regular math class, which was more fun anyway, since that’s where all my friends were. Unfortunately, that experience wasn’t enough for me to deconstruct the feelings and culture that made me think it was better to suffer in silence than admit that I didn’t know what I was doing. And that had to be a lesson I received over and over and over again, and that I am still working on internalizing. But I know that it’s one we all struggle with, because our culture is, generally, not one of collaboration but of rugged individualism. When we’re young, we may struggle to ask for help from overbearing parents, and when we’re old we may struggle to ask for help from over (or under) bearing children. And when we’re somewhere in the middle, parents still might be overbearing, but there’s also sort of an expectation that, at some point, you figure your stuff out and don’t need to ask for help.
It’s this same mentality that is working to dismantle Social Security, that refuses to improve healthcare, and that continues to limit access to SNAP benefits and other forms of social welfare. It’s this same mentality that delights when we ignore the people asking for a dollar on the exit ramp off 490, that rejoices when we ignore the struggles of our neighbors near and far. Because we’re not meant to ask for help. So, why should anyone else get to ask? What do we owe them? What have they done for us? The world would have us ask “who is worthy?” But the gospel doesn’t bother with such a question. It’s not about who is worthy, but about who has need. And at the core of this question is an acknowledgement that we all have need. None of us goes through our entire life completely, one hundred percent self-sufficiently. There may be seasons when we need more help, and some when we don’t need quite as much. But there is not a single person, nor sibling in all of Creation, who can pass an entire lifetime without needing to lean on someone, or something, else. Indeed, the gospel assumes that we all will need help at some point, and quotes Christ as saying that when we help those in need—the hungry, the naked, the unhoused, the sick, the incarcerated—we are helping Christ. That’s 15 chapters down the road from today’s gospel. Today’s gospel, though, puts Christ on those who are seeking welcome, who are seeking cool water. Christ, therefore, is not only in the need, but in the asking. Suddenly, it becomes Christ-like to ask for help, to have the courage and the humility to say “I need help,” or “I’m thirsty,” and ask for something to drink.
To acknowledge our need for help, from one another and from God, is to not only do as Christ commanded, but to do as Christ does. Not to presume that our places of privilege and comfort rid us of any need to seek out help, but to find our faith in the cycles of dependence and that luminous web that ties all of us together. Not to see ourselves only as benefactors, but as those who both give and receive to those in this community and beyond, until the lines of giving and receiving are blurred. To act only as though we have everything is to reject the notion that Christ is still waiting outside to be welcomed, and to pull us out into the world. It is to willfully turn away from the fact that we have need, and that we need to accept help, accept welcome, accept cool water from the places where we go. It is to write off the voices of those younger than us, who often have really important things for us to hear. It is to write off the voices of the women called to preach, the queer people we seek to reconcile with, and the immigrants who, before long, will be detained right in downtown Rochester. Our salvation, our liberation, our wholeness, is tied up in these lives, in their welcome and in the quenching of their thirst. How will we meet the Christ in them? How will they reveal Christ to us? In the humility to lay down our privilege, to cast off the facade of self-sufficience, and to ask what we can do. This is the sharing of gifts and of help to which we are called. What are we going to do about it? How will we respond to such evil, injustice, and oppression?
I want to close with a line from the Gospel According to Ted Lasso. You may have heard of it. It’s a show about an American football coach who gets hired by an English Premier League team to coach soccer. Streaming now on Apple TV. In one episode, one of the characters is asking for advice, and wondering if people are capable of change. In response to this line of questioning, another character posits that “Human beings are never going to be perfect. The best we can do is keep asking for help, and accepting it when you can. And if you keep on doing that, you'll always be moving towards better.” As people who seek to live out our shared faith and sense of call in the Methodist Movement, we are called to move onward towards perfection, towards being made perfect in love. That doesn’t mean we never make mistakes. It certainly doesn’t mean we know everything or can do everything all on our own. It does mean that in everything we do, our instinct is always to love. And loving, both others and ourselves, means sharing of what we have, and accepting when others share of what they have, too. We are called to live communal lives. By stepping foot into this community, we are proclaiming that we are no longer solely our own, that we don’t have all the answers, that we can’t move through this world on our own. That’s not a deficiency, it’s the Church. May we live out this calling, to depend fully on one another, fully on God, and fully on our siblings throughout Creation, until we cast off all delusions that any of us doesn’t need the others. Amen.