Good Old Joe

“Good Old Joe” The Dover Church
September 6, 2009 Scripture: Mark 7:24-37

Once upon a time, there was a man named Joe. Joe was no Reagan or Kennedy, but he was possessed of a certain small town charisma. About 70 when I knew him, Joe had a charming smile, a twinkle in his eye, and a slicked back hairdo from the 1950s. The Brill Cream was not something I would try, but it really looked quite debonair on him. Joe was homebound due to a crippling disease which made his arms and hands curl up to the point of uselessness, and which weakened his legs and ankles to the point where walking without help was dangerous. Joe had been a prisoner in his own home for probably 25 years by the time I came to town. Before that, he had owned the only service station in town. He also drove the town dump truck and snow plow for the highway department. In other words, Joe had gone from being a guy pretty much everyone in town knew, his name was on the sign of the only service station in town, to a guy that no one knew, except his wife, his home health aides, and me. Only a very few of the older long-time residents even remembered Joe from back in the good old days.
I spent a fair amount of time with Joe, as he was a member of the church I served. My visits were probably the only visits Joe received which he was not paying for. In short, as Joe’s pastor I felt responsible to visit him regularly and stay awhile.
There was one big problem with visiting Joe for me, however, a problem I have only confessed to my wife until now. I just could not like the man. A shocking thing for a minister to admit, isn’t it? Especially for your new minister to admit in his first sermon?
“Uh oh,” you may be thinking to yourselves. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”
That’s a fair question. After all, we ministers serve the Church of Jesus Christ and Jesus was all about unconditional and indiscriminant love, so how could any minister admit to not liking a person,? Let alone your new minister not liking a member of a congregation he served? Let alone not liking a church member who was poor, old and homebound? It might sound like hair splitting to you, that I am trying to justify my narrowness of heart (which, perhaps I am), but I would like to point out that Jesus commanded us to love one another, not necessarily to like one another. There is a world of difference between liking and loving, but I’ll come back to that later.
So why was I unable to get all warm and fuzzy with good old Joe? Why couldn’t I even like him? Well, I know this will make the bad light I am putting myself in shine even more brightly, but Joe was a real downer. I have no way of knowing how much of Joe’s personality was just who he had always been and how much was a result of his chronic illness, but Joe complained all the time about everything. Complaint and fault finding, criticism and blame were the air Joe breathed. As Joe’s pastor, my duty seemed to call for first compassion for his pain and suffering and then guidance, to try to help him live into a greater peace and spiritual well being. That peace and well being, in my opinion, were to be found in a shift of focus for Joe. For his own good, Joe needed to let go of all his negativity and try to celebrate the abundance of blessings which he did enjoy, even in his limited circumstances: the whole “Attitude of Gratitude” thing. After all, I reasoned to myself in my perfect health which allowed me do as I pleased and go where I wanted, it seemed to me that things could be much worse for Joe. Joe’s worst case scenario was a nursing home. Death did not scare Joe compared to his fear of nursing homes. Because of Joe’s substantial Medicaid entitlement, all of which I approved of as a born and bred Massachusetts Democrat, Joe was able to stay in his own home and maintain a relatively comfortable standard of living. I thought the state was doing alright by Joe, with all the home health and cleaning aids, all the rent subsidies and the free medication and health care. I thought to myself that Joe ought to be a little more gracious and thankful that he was still able to do what he wanted most, which was to stay at home with his wife. No matter what I said, however, no matter how I tried to open his heart and mind, I could never shift Joe from his negativity. Except for his wife, Joe was not thankful or appreciative of anything or anyone in his life. Everyone and everything came in for criticism and derision. One of Joe’s favorite conversation topics was how the minorities, particularly the blacks, were mooching off of the system and were ultimately the root of the problems in our country. That always struck me as particularly ungracious, considering the help he was receiving.
When I confessed that I did not like Joe, I was just sugarcoating my feelings. The truth is that I found Joe to be a despicable human being. I could not stand his racism. Joe was a racist through and through. He rationalized his opinions to me as wisdom or insight, scientifically supported by the facts. He never used the “N”-word, this was New England and I was his minister after all, but everything came down to race for Joe. Any and every conversation always came down to racial differentiation and white superiority. Sports, society, religion, politics, somehow the blacks were always the problem for Joe. Joe was an older man at this time, so I didn’t think anything I might say would shift something that was so thoroughly engrained in him. It was a challenging pastoral care situation, so I just sat there for the most part and listened to what Joe had to say. This had the unfortunate effect of leading Joe to believe that I was in at least tacit agreement with him, all of which left a bitter taste in my mouth. I did not like Joe and I did not like who I was when I was with Joe. I knew that I was a bigot about his bigotry, a self-righteous bigot, but still a bigot.
Now just so you know something about me, my aversion to racism is not just some knee-jerk, Massachusetts liberal, politically correct response. Nor is it even one of Christian propriety. No, it’s much closer to home for me, because it is home. One of my sisters adopted three boys, one black, one Hispanic, and one a little bit of both. Another one of my sisters was married to a fellow from Honduras, with whom she has a daughter. Marie-Laure’s sister adopted two girls from Tahiti. Marie-Laure’s cousins adopted two boys from Vietnam. My feelings about racism do not emanate from some high flown position that makes me morally superior to anyone else. Rather racism is about my family, which you wouldn’t know looking at me, my wife or my kids, who couldn’t be whiter, blonder or more blue eyed if you painted them that way.
You may not think much of me as a Christian for not liking Joe because he came across as a racist ingrate to me, but there you have it. As his minister, I had to visit him and I did, but not with the enthusiasm or frequency which I visited other folks from the church. The truth is, I dreaded our visits and left them feeling drained. To use a good Biblical concept, I felt “unclean.” I knew that I was not being honest and I felt like a sham.
Then, one day the chaplain at the local hospital called to tell me that Joe had been admitted. I did my duty and went to see Joe. He had fallen and broken his ankle. The original injury had been complicated by a serious infection, all of which meant Joe would not be going home. Joe was on his way to a nursing home. Joe was barely able to get that out before his normally charming face just crumbled and he broke into tears. Through his sobs he poured out his fears. “If I go into a nursing home, I’ll never get home. They don’t really care about you at the poor peoples’ nursing homes. I don’t have any money so I have to go where they send me. I know I’ll just die and no one will really care.” And then he said it. “No one loves me except my wife. I just want to get home to be with her. She’s all I have. We only have each other. I’ll get better at home. I just know it.”
In that moment, my heart broke open. As it broke, I started to move from not being able to even begin liking Joe to being able to begin loving him. There he was, the real man opening himself to me so that I could open myself to him as I really was. Because Joe had put all his racist stuff out there with me right from the beginning, I had been stuck in the not liking stage. Likes come down to preference, compatibility, and attraction; and Joe was not my flavor, which got right in the way of what I was there for, which was love. Where our time together before had always been constrained, uneasy, jarring, dishonest, at least for me, suddenly we were in a very spacious, easy, inviting, honest place together. Here was something we shared. We both knew that only our wives loved us. For the first time I saw Joe as he really was, a beloved child of God, just like me, just like you, just like everyone. I was completely convinced that God loved Joe too and I told him so. Don’t misunderstand me. Racism is a great evil responsible for much of the misery in our world and is absolutely opposed to everything Jesus taught and lived. If that was all there was to Joe, we would have had no place to meet, no basis to learn to love, which was everything Jesus taught and lived.
So why I am telling you this story on my first Sunday as your new minister? Why? This, my new friends, is the Good News of Jesus Christ for us this morning. Our lesson this morning starts off with Jesus in a bad light. He calls this desperate, foreign woman who is seeking healing for her daughter, a dog. Because she is not deterred, Jesus is moved from not liking her to loving her, to living more fully in a new and unexpected way into what he preached.
You and I are just getting to know each other. All of us have our rough edges, maybe not as rough as Joe’s and mine, but we all have them. Joe and I had our axes to grind. Because we began our relationship with both our axes out on the table as it were (….well, his was on the table. Mine remained hidden in my heart), we were never able to get to the much more important thing, which is love. I would like our life together, yours and mine, to begin in that spacious, easy, inviting, honest place that Joe and I knew in that hospital room. I would like us to begin from that primary knowledge of one another as the beloved children of God we truly are, so that when the rough edges threaten to get in the way down the road, which they most certainly will, when the axes start grinding, which is just something we human beings tend to do, we will already have that foundation for a life of love and faith together.
Joe did get home. He is probably still there with his wife, complaining about life and blaming the blacks for everything that is wrong with Joe’s world. I never was able to truly like the face Joe showed to the world, but I am thankful I was given the chance to see the heart that God knows, to have a Kingdom of God moment. I try to think about that whenever I meet someone new. How about you?