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New Testament Reading—Romans 1: 7-12
Joel Schmidt is a psychologist for the VA in Oakland, California. His profession has led him to “hear about some of the worst experiences humans have to bear.” He has counseled a survivor of the Bataan Death March in which tens of thousands of U.S. and Filipino prisoners of war were forced by the Japanese Army to march 80 miles under conditions of abuse and killing. He has sat down with an airman whose plane was shot down over Germany in World War II. He has been with a Marine who was in the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, a 17 day battle in the freezing weather of North Korea in which UN troops were surrounded and outnumbered by the Chinese army before managing to escape and withdraw in heavy combat. He has talked with veterans from our wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He has heard stories of soldiers “who have been assaulted and brutalized by their own comrades.” He has spent time with Iraq veterans who describe “the constant hell of unpredictable” roadside bombs and “invisible snipers.” The veterans talk about being unable to drive on freeways or “be in the same room with old friends.” Schmidt has also been with parents who have lost their children to war.
As you can imagine, Schmidt’s work can take a toll on him. There are days when he goes home and his head hurts from all that he has had to hear and process. He will feel everything from sadness to anger. He will wrestle with worries about his clients and despair over feeling ineffective. What Schmidt experiences is something that some have called second hand trauma. It is when caregivers and people in the helping professions absorb trauma or experience it in an empathetic vicarious way when hearing someone else’s story. On a certain level, all of us can experience this even if we are not listening to other people’s stories for a living. Simply listening to your spouse’s day at work can sometimes be a form of second hand trauma. We may also have a friend who has experienced domestic violence or a family member who has suffered a serious illness.
The focus for this Sunday and for the next couple of Sundays will be modern day saints, and we might think of saints as often earning their stripes by being the ones who are able to be present in the midst of dire circumstances and trauma. The classic saint stands like Mother Teresa amid the broken and the poor. The saint has this seemingly super-human ability to wade into the storms of life and pull people out of the floodwaters. These super-human saints can be inspiring in the same way Olympic athletes can be inspiring. They can do things that the rest of us mere mortals can’t do. At the same time, there is a sense in which there is a limit to how inspiring these saints can be precisely because they are doing things that are beyond what the rest of us can do, but it was Joel Schmidt who got me to think of sainthood in a more expansive way.
Schmidt doesn’t present himself as being able to cope with his job at the VA because of some kind of superhuman strength. Instead, he is able to cope because of the extraordinary strengths of his clients. Schmidt says that he is “continually inspired by the ability of the emotionally wounded to pick themselves up and keep going after enduring the most traumatic circumstances imaginable.” He encounters veterans who have this amazing “drive to recover” and who will find meaning in their lives in ways that are often unpredictable. There is the Iraq war veteran who discovers the therapeutic power of “helping his grandmother keep her small business running.” The job has given him a cause to care about. It has given him someone with whom he can stay emotionally connected. It has given him “a reason to get up in the morning.”
These uplifting stories don’t always fill his day, so when Schmidt finds himself going home with a throbbing head, he frequently recalls the self-care strategies of his clients. They become the ones who guide and inspire his own recovery. Schmidt isn’t sure the people with whom he works realize how much he admires them. He makes a point of complementing them on their strengths and their ingenuity when they sit in his office, but he is not sure it sinks in. Still, he realizes that it is the strengths of his clients that propel him forward. They are the ones who give him the gift of hope that he is then able to share with the next person who enters into his office.
Schmidt’s experience makes me think of our scripture for today. Paul wrote his letter to the Romans after he had already weathered earlier storms. This is the last letter Paul wrote out of the ones we have in the New Testament. By this point in his career, all the problems that he faced with the Corinthians had been resolved. As an apostle, he was a seasoned veteran, and so when he writes to the Romans he says he wants to offer them a spiritual gift to strengthen them, but then he adds that it might be more accurate to say that he is giving the gift so that they might be “mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.” In other words, Paul wasn’t someone who simply relied on his own super-human strength to plant the first churches and keep them going. He was someone who gained strength from the very churches he was helping. Another way to put it would be to say that Paul was able to become a saint because of the sainthood of the people to whom he ministered. Their faith fed his faith. Their resilience and their hope gave him the resilience and the hope he needed to go from one struggling community to the next.
For Paul to be able to do that, however, it required that he be able to fully see and appreciate what was before him. It can be surprisingly easy sometimes to overlook the saint-like qualities people have. The NPR show “This I Believe” once featured the story of Jake Hovenden, a young man probably in his late teens who never completely appreciated these qualities in his step-mother until five years after his father died of ALS. When he looked back on this time, he recalled how “for three years she juggled work,” caring for his father, and raising him “with virtually no breaks.” Each day she would come home from work and cook them dinner. She would hand feed his father, administer treatments with needles, and during the night she would stay up with his father to insure that he didn’t suffocate while sleeping. Early the next morning, she would go back to work. As Hovenden looked back on this, he thought about how his stepmother had this profound inner strength, how she was determined to never give up, and how she “almost single-handedly” kept his father alive. Each of us can think of people who have been caretakers like this step mom. I can think of a number of people in this church who have displayed similar saint-like qualities.
Paul recognized not only the strengths of individuals but the strengths displayed by entire communities. I encountered a striking reminder of the importance of having this outlook some years ago as a seminary student. I happened to be attending a meeting with community leaders from the lower income neighborhoods of Boston—Dorchester and Roxbury. During the meeting, one of the community leaders made an observation that has always stayed with me. He talked about how non-profit organizations would come into their neighborhoods and conduct these studies that tabulated and documented all of the problems and deficiencies of their neighborhoods. Yet, with all of this extensive research, he found their approach to be problematic and not at all what was needed. What was needed, he said, was an inventory of the community’s strengths and assets. What were people in the community good at doing already? What resources did they already have? These were the questions that needed to be answered in order to start building a better future.
If one is always looking at the world with a critical eye, one misses what one sees with an appreciative eye. Paul had an appreciative eye, and I think there is a lesson to be learned in this for us both as individuals and as a church. On an individual level, I think it is tremendously inspiring to be able to realize that we are surrounded by saints. We are surrounded by people who have confronted hardships in their own lives and have revealed an amazing capacity for faith, hope, and resilience. They themselves might not even be fully aware of the strengths that they have.
As a church, I think it is also extremely important to realize all of the strengths and assets we have as a community. This past week we had the first meeting of a long-range planning taskforce at our church. Our council has created this taskforce to think about what strategies we might implement to become a financially sustainable church once the money we currently have runs out. How are we going to be able to pay our mortgage anywhere from three to four years from now? One of the things Trent Corey pointed out in our meeting is that if we just look at the current financial numbers it can feel awfully limiting, if not rather gloomy. The only way out of this is to focus on our potential. In other words, how can we build upon our strengths and assets? How can this body of saints fully realize what it is capable of?
We are all mini-saints in the making, and when we look at it that way, we can begin to be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. We can begin to find inspiration sitting right next to us in the pews. We can begin to find a goldmine of untapped potential and possibility. We seldom write letters these days like Paul did, but maybe years from now some historian will be looking at the emails of a Joan Blair, a Ken Rowe, or a Trent Corey, and they will say, “They faced some problems during these years, but they kept at it. They didn’t give up. They started to realize what they could do as a church and that made all the difference.” Now is the time to realize that those among us possess the qualities of saints, and we can all be encouraged by what we have come to fully recognize and appreciate. Amen.