Sent! What’s a Lutheran Doing Working at a Catholic Hospital?
Revelation 21: 1 – 8
John 20: 19 – 23
A sermon by Rev. Michael Neils
Good morning Bayshore, I appreciate the invitation to worship here today and the honor to proclaim God’s word to God’s holy people. Uh, before I begin preaching, two words of thanks. First, to your senior pastor who informed me that I could have as many as 17 minutes to preach today. Now, I’m Lutheran and we celebrate Holy Communion every Sunday, so in my home church, if I get to 13 minutes, people glance at their watches. If I get to 15 minutes, they take their watches off and shake them. So 17 minutes, David, is incredibly gracious. Thank you. And also, thanks to you for your support of the food pantry in the care center at St. Mary Medical Center.
By the way, on this Pride Sunday, our president of our hospital, Carolyn Caldwell, is the grand marshal in the Pride Parade. If she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, she could not have been more pleased.
Our care center was founded in the middle 1980s during the AIDS pandemic. Some of you might know that in those days, before we knew what AIDS was, if you had it, you couldn’t be admitted to a hospital. No one knew what it was. That would not stand with the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, our founders at St. Mary. the community and said, “We don’t know what AIDS is, but the people afflicted with it are God’s children, and they’re not going to die on the street. They will be welcome here.” So we founded the care center in 1987. It receives national recognition for the quality of its care, and the food pantry has been part of care since the beginning. We serve about 3,000 clients every year. They come every other Friday. Most of the food, as you would expect, is donated, but we have to purchase some food. So your support—your financial support—is incredibly important to us because, in case you hadn’t noticed, despite promises, the price of food has not gone down. It’s remained high, and your gift to us is doing the work of Jesus. It is feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and the most vulnerable. So thank you. Now, with that, you can start the clock—I’m ready to preach. Please pray with me: Lord Jesus, on the evening of Easter, you came into a room filled with your disciples. This is such a room. Come and make your presence felt here. Give us your peace. Strengthen us, and let my words now become your word to feed and strengthen your people. In your holy name we pray, amen.
So, last Monday was the monthly new employee orientation at St. Mary. The planners graciously allow me 12 minutes to speak about philanthropy. And I began last Monday the way I do every month. I introduce myself by saying, “Though despite my youthful appearance”—and then people laugh—“despite my youthful appearance, I’ve been working professionally for more than 40 years, but I’ve never had a job. I serve a mission, and in the preaching this morning, I am prayerfully going to suggest that it’s a mission we all share. One could argue that if the Bible, the whole Bible was a sermon, the text for the sermon might very well be Genesis 12:1-4. The Lord God Almighty came to Abram and Sarah and said, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to a land that I will show you. And I will bless you and by you I will bring blessing to you and by you I will bring blessing to all the families of the earth, all the families, all the people, all the nations.” The Hebrew is as inclusive as it can possibly be.
Now here, the preaching takes a little footnote: I’m— we’re all living in the age of Google, but I’m old enough to remember Encyclopedia Britannica and so all the people of the earth, well I wonder how many there are these days. So, Google, United Nations says there are about 8 billion of us, 195 different countries. This one is fun. 7,157 recognized languages with an asterisk by the UN saying “Well, there’s way more than that, those are just the ones we know about.” How about the US, the Census Bureau says there are about 350 million of us and in the 2020 census it identified about 1,500 different ethnic and racial groups. The first people, the indigenous people, the native Americans, Native Alaskans, the other 400 belonging to all the rest of us, including my category European racial, little bit of everything. What’s the point of the data? God is the creator, and it would seem from the numbers that God is absolutely committed to diversity and equity and inclusion. Just saying, those of us who have ears to hear let us hear so to this whole vast family God says, “I want to bring the blessing of my love.” And to that end God lays hands on some and sends them on a mission. Jesus identified himself with that sending. We know the story. He went back to Nazareth, to the home synagogue where he had grown up, where he learned to read Hebrew, and he was a young rabbi of some renown.
He was welcomed to Shabbat services. They brought him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and said “Read to us, teach us Rabbi.” And he famously chose this text “the spirit of the Lord is upon me because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, good news to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Jesus was saying that mission, God’s sending that began with Abram and Sarah that continues through me. Only he changed the parameters because by his time his people had come to understand the blessing of God’s love really only falls on those who deserve it. If your life is a mess you’re being punished for something you did. The classic example is in John chapter nine, the healing of the man born blind. Jesus and his disciples are walking down Second Street in Belmont, they’re on their way to the Breakfast Republic. So they’re walking down Second Street and there is a housing insecure person lying on the sidewalk, vision impaired. Only the disciples don’t see a person. They see a topic of conversation. Master, who sinned this man or his parents, that he should have been born blind. That was the prevailing understanding of how God worked in the world and Jesus of course turned that upside down. He gave sight to the blind, he gave hearing to those who were deaf, he cleansed lepers. He ate in the home of a traitor to his nation, a man who was working for the occupying army the Romans and he famously had discourse with a Samaritan woman who was unclean in manifold ways. He made incarnate the idea that the blessing of God’s love really is for all people and on the evening of Easter he gave that mission to u. On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors in the house where the disciples were staying, being shut for fear, Jesus came and stood in the midst of them and said “Peace be with you.” And then he showed them his hands and his side and the disciples rejoiced when they saw it was the Lord and he said to them again “Peace be with you as the father sent me, I send you.” We don’t really know each other before but we have in common a mission. We are baptized for the sake of the world. The church is in the world, the physical presence of the risen Lord Jesus Christ and his mission continues in and through us which is daunting. At the end of a daym, when I sit and reflect, I have to admit often I didn’t do very well representing myself in the world today, let alone the idea that what some other person may know of God’s love is completely dependent on me. It’s daunting but it’s also wonderful because as huge as the idea is of bringing the blessing of God’s love to all people, that’s justice, that’s compassion, that’s mercy. It’s all of that. It’s also really simple and doable.
Revelation 21 a passage that pastors know so very well. A vision of a new heaven and a new earth and a voice cries from heaven “Behold the dwelling of God is with mortals among mortals and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” How do we go about living God’s mission. Bringing the blessing of God’s love to others. Look for eyes filled with tears
So I’ll conclude with a personal story for this Pride Sunday. My wife Dr. Mary Tabata and I have been married 19 years. I have two adult children from my first marriage, she has four from her first marriage. Together we have Violet who’s going to graduate from high school on June the 5th. Thanks be to God. Not like I’m looking forward to the empty nest thing or anything. But so Mary’s fourth is Nick, Nicholas, 25 years old, partnered with Emmett. They just moved into their first apartment. We gave him an old couch of ours. They have a cat. Life is just great for them. Emmett graduated from UCLA, has a job. Nick is finishing up an associates degree in Japanese language and will go from Santa Monica City College to either UCLA or one of the Cal States, going to become a Japanese translator. Life is good for the these two but it was not always so for Nick was born Naomi. Like her mother, a beautiful little girl, sweet and happy and kind. Adolescence was tough, dark, but who wants to go back and live through puberty. And then came that day Naomi was 16 years old. Mary got a phone call from the nurse’s office at the hospital. “Mom you need to come get me, I’m in the nurse’s office because if I hadn’t come here I was going to go out on the street and throw myself under a bus.” So phone calls were made and that afternoon we drove to the adolescent site unit at UCLA. Naomi spent the next six weeks in residence there, the next 10 weeks every day we commuted from her home in Rancho Palos Verdes up to Westwood so she could have ongoing care. And then when she came home ongoing psychiatric care. And it was about eight or nine months later that she sat us down and said “I figured it out and I’ve accepted that in order to be happy I need to live as a man.” And that’s what Nick is doing. When Nick changed his name he chose a Japanese word I can’t pronounce as his second name, it means favored so I was thinking this week about this. That first afternoon at UCLA we were in a waiting room, a little cubicle really. The walls were completely smooth, there was no light fixture, the light was built into the ceiling, there were no windows, there was no furniture, there was no handle on the inside of the door. We were in there waiting for admission for about two hours. I have been ordained more than 40 years. I’ve been in dozens of hospitals across the country. I’ve been with thousands of different people in times of crisis but only on one day in my life have I ever been in a waiting room with a member of my own family who was at risk for self harm. No furniture so we sat on the floor and there were lots of tears. There were tears of fear, they were the kind of tears parents shed when our kids are in trouble and we just can’t help but feel responsible. And there were tears of love and eventually tears of gratitude when Naomi was going to be admitted and we knew she was going to be safe at least that night. Somewhere in the middle of that 2-hour waiting period there was a knock at the door and a student chaplain asked if she could come in. Oh my she looked so young to me. She immediately came over and sat down on the floor next to us. She listened very well and after a while she asked if she could pray with us. So we put our hands together in a big pile and she took them and hers, and she prayed. And I don’t remember a single word of what she said. I just remember the incredible feeling of being blessed by God’s love.
Every day the world is filled with joy and happiness, peace, gratitude. Every day the world is filled with pain and people whose eyes are filled with tears. And to this whole great world and all the people in it, God sends us and says “Bring the blessing of my love to all.” God bless our living and serving. God bless our mission this week. Amen.
Rev. Neils is the President and Chief Philanthropy Officer for St. Mary Medical Center Foundation, Long Beach. His formal education includes a B.A. (philosophy) from Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA magna cum laude; an M. Div. from The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, magna cum laude; a Master of Sacred Theology (ethics) from Union Theological Seminary, New York (with distinction) ; and a Certificate in Fundraising and Community Relations from U.C.L.A. Extension, with distinction. Most recently Michael completed the Inner MBA with SoundTrue, Linked In and Mindful NY; and a Coaching Qualification Certificate with Erickson Coaching International. He has held senior positions with Saint John’s Health Center, Santa Monica; Good Samaritan Hospital, Los Angeles; and Providence Little Company of Mary Foundation, Torrance and San Pedro. Prior to working full time in philanthropy, Michael served Lutheran congregations in New Jersey and Arizona. A native of Klickitat, Washington, Michael is married to Mary Tabata PhD, a leadership scholar. They are the proud parents of Violet Neils, an 12th grader, and two Havanese dogs, Gracie and Emma.