PROPER 12 - B, July 27, 2003

I’d like to tell you about a woman we all know. Her name is Joanie or Susie or Amanda. It does not matter. We all know her. She lives here in Cedar Rapids and Spokane and Chicago , in big and small towns all over North America . My Canadian cyber friend Molly Wolf reminded me of our mutual acquaintance a while back. Joanie or Susie or Amanda is a young woman who is also a single mother, which is not the problem. The problem is that Joanie, and let’s stick with that name, is also a real handful: needy, demanding, ungrateful, rude, unpleasant, and manipulative as hell, with a strong sense of permanent entitlement. Joanie is the sort of person whom the most rabid anti-welfare, anti-single-mother, neo-conservatives would point to and say "Ha! She proves our point!” This, of course, is embarrassing and sometimes maddening to us liberal do-gooders.

The obvious sensible response to a person like Joanie when she comes to the church asking for help, is to tell her in no uncertain terms to go pound salt. The problem is that Joanie has a whole brood of little ones, two of each: girl, boy, girl, boy, 8, 6, 4, and 2, and she is thinking about going for #5 in spite of the fact that she is doing a really rotten job with the first four. The older girl, Mary, is the real mother in the family. The older boy, Joe, is a lost soul, the scapegoat, constantly belittled by Joanie perhaps because she blames the men in her life for her problems.

I don’t know that much about the younger two children, but offhand I would predict that life doesn't bode well for them. Sometimes the older kids get to school. Sometimes Joanie can't be bothered. Joanie deposits the kids as much as she can with some of the kind women in the parish who want to help her but often Joanie doesn't remember to pick them up. Every town has a Joanie or two, and they drive everyone crazy.

I am always trying to figure out what to do with the Joanie’s in my life. On one hand, I am sensible enough to know that there's not much I can do with or for Joanie. Joanie is quite happy just the way she is and, when challenged, she turns into the human equivalent of a mad dog.

Molly reminded me that the Department of Welfare is of no help with the children because they only apprehend children in imminent danger of severe physical injury, not children who are being squished like bugs, children who are slowly going down the tubes. I guess it is easier (if not more cost-effective) to jail them when they get older and the damage surfaces in antisocial ways. So you hurt, watching the children knowing there's nothing you can do.

It's human to want to fix things. We'd like to fix the people we see who obviously need the benefit of our loving correction to help them deal with their problems; we especially like doing this when we're busily not dealing with our own problems. As an aside: find me a persistent people-fixer and I'll show you someone who most likely has unacknowledged personal issues out of whack.  (This, I suspect, is what Jesus had in mind when he was talking about splinters in others' eyes and logs in our own.)

But we also want to fix people because their brokenness bothers us so much. It's disturbing and unpleasant to watch someone else yelling in pain, or curled up in a ball on the floor, or otherwise being in trouble. It hurts, if we care. And you and I care, and we care deeply about those who suffer. We care about them even if much of the suffering is self-inflicted.

This is such a terribly broken world, a world in which children maim each other, a world in which war and starvation and persecution are normal and aggression is thought to be a sign of strength. This is a world in which narcissists like Joanie produce babies they quite casually destroy as people. And there's so little we can do to stop it all.

If we're going to be a Christian and live in this world according to the Great Commandment, we are going to do a fair bit of hurting. We will continually witness suffering we can't do a thing about, except to suffer with the sufferers. I remember reading about the general who was the UN commander in Rwanda , watching the slaughter without being able to stop it. He had begged for reinforcements, but the UN had said no. He could have asked for himself and his men to be pulled out; that would have been quite legitimate. He didn't. They hung on helplessly through the atrocities, and they will suffer the rest of their lives from post-traumatic stress disorder -- and they will know that what they went through was peanuts compared to what the Tutsis went through.

The "sensible" thing to do is to disengage emotionally. I can't take on the whole suffering of the world and still keep up with the Christ Church and keep my yard up so that the neighbors won’t complain. No one can. But some bits of compassion seem to be mine, and I find I can't ignore them. They are mine for a reason, even if I sometimes don't know what the reason is.

The comfort, if comfort it is, is that God does exactly what we're doing, except on a much larger scale. I would like to think that the hurting I do for Joanie’s kids does something to take a little of the hurt off God, but I don't know. What I do believe is that this sort of suffering in love is an inevitable part of caring, of being a Christian. And I do believe that in the end, when God is completely done with things, the love will still be there, but the suffering will be gone.

In today’s Epistle Paul reminds us that we are all part of the Body of Christ. The Joanies of this world are part of the Body too. They don’t make life in the Body any easier. But they are part of us. As much as we want to ignore them, throw them out, or even punish them in some way, we can’t. As Paul says, with all humility and gentleness we have to be patient with them, bearing with them in love.

Paul also reminds us that each one of us has gifts, gifts given to us by God, to help make this Body, this church, this community, this world, what God intends it to be. Some people are called to deal with the Joanies of this world. Others are called to take care of Joanie’s kids. Some are called to help change society so that there are less Joanies and no more Columbines and never again Rwandas .

But all of us are called to have compassion and to try to understand why there are people who have children and neglect them, why children kill other children, why adults destroy one another. In this life and in this world we will never understand why people act the way they do. We don’t even understand why we act the way we do.

Sometimes all we can do is pray for the Marys and Joes and their siblings; pray for the Joanies of this world, who are like they are because they themselves are so terribly and badly damaged; pray for all who suffer and who inflict suffering, and for all those who are willing to walk along with them and try to do whatever love can do.

It’s not pleasant to think about the Joanies of this world, the social issues that seem so complicated and so unsolvable, especially on a beautiful Sunday morning like today. But sometimes we have to remind ourselves of our obligation to do what we can do for them, if it’s just to pray for them. And sometimes we have to, if only to remind ourselves that, there, but for the grace of God, go I.