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1/15/12

It’s very good to be back with you.  I’ve been impatient to get back—and preaching—since I started receiving that flood of cards y’all sent.  Wow!  It seemed like hundreds of them.  I was very much amazed, and lifted up.  After all, I’d only been here—what?—three times?  And here I was being love-bombed like I’d been among you forever.  And I thought, well, these people are going to be okay in spite of their recent painful stuff because they know how to care.

‘Course, I was loaded on morphine and other narcotics at the time, so my perception might be skewed.  But I don’t think so.

I want to think some today about God and cancer.  That’s because I lived in the land of morpheus—death—and I’m not the kind f the guy that can than get in pulpit and pretend it never happened.  And I think everybody has to deal with the disease—either as its prey or knowing a loved one with it.  How many here have had cancer?  Know somebody with cancer?

So, a brief rundown of what happened:  on Nov. 2 I went to the emergency room for a three-month old bellyache which left me increasingly unable to eat.  In the evening the doc said, “I have bad news.  I think you have pancreatic cancer.’  This left me pretty breathless because from my pastoral experience I knew pancreatic cancer to be especially vicious.   A medical team was put together and the next day was a whirlwind of consultations, including the decision to go  through a particularly brutal surgery called ‘the Whipple procedure’.

The day after that they did surgery to drain  my abdomen of the several liters of sludge there.  Five days later—a  week after I went to er—they did the six-hour Whipple surgery, cutting and sewing and redoing  the whole thing down there.  After the surgery I was on a respirator for a week, keeping my family and friends very much on edge; and not having much of a good time myself, either.

I had a couple of what I call psycho moments.  The first came about three weeks in, when I determined I was going home while everybody including my family tried to stop me.  It got very nasty, with security being called.  I stayed there that night, but they let me go home the next day.  Within just a few hours I stared vomiting and begged to go back to the hospital.  Somewhere in there I had a slight heart attack and caught pneumonia.  (One of the docs:   you thought this was like other surgeries, where you get stitched up and go home.  That’s not the way it is.’)

My second psycho moment came when I managed to corner about three of my doctors at one time and demanded ‘straight answers’.  I kept at them about this for awhile, until it sunk into my morphine-soaked brain that with cancer everything depends on the individual.  One of the docs who is a friend said, ‘Larry are you angry?’  ‘You’re doggone right,’ I shouted, though not with pulpit language.  ‘Good,’ he said,  ‘Then you’ll have a chance to survive.’

I spent 43 days in two different hospitals, and came home on Saturday, December 18th.  Since then I’m thoroughly ensconced in what I call ‘the cancer lifestyle’ of daily radiation treatments, and chemo, and wearing a nutrition bag and seeing doctors two and three times a week.  Oh, and vomiting.

Okay.  That’s enough to move us along to the ‘whys?’ of cancer.  I’m thinking particularly of the questions ‘why is there cancer?’ and ‘why did this happen to me?’

I have to say that I do not recall wrestling with those questions this time around.  I might have.  But I was so blitzed on narcotics that I have no memory of things.  My wife Sue has had to tell me what went on.  (And by the way, everybody’s name whom I’d learned here got wiped out in that blitz, too.)  I also think it’s because about ten years back I went through a very traumatic experience that took me into the ‘why’ questions—why this?  Why me?–for about two years.  And here’s how it got resolved for me:  stuff happens; and I won’t know why.  It is hidden in God.

That’s why when my pastor came to see me I asked him to read from the divine speeches in the OT story of Job.  Job, who is an innocent and righteous man suddenly loses everything and undergoes terrible suffering.  His friends keep telling him it’s because of some terrible sin.  Job insists he has not deserved this.  The argument intensifies over 37 chapters until Job demands a face-off with God:

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? “Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?— when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?

And he goes on like this for the next two chapters, setting Job in his place in the universe.  He never does give Job a reason for his suffering.  Here’s what he does instead:  he draws near to Job.  He blesses Job  with his presence, justifies Job’s claim to innocence, and shows him his love.  Job doesn’t know why he suffers but he experiences the presence of a caring God, and that’s what made the difference.  We don’t need to know why so much as we need someone to walk with us.

But I didn’t have a cozy time with God in the hospital; in fact, pretty much the opposite:  what I experienced of him was profoundly frightening.

As I mentioned I was on a ventilator for a week.  They keep you unconscious with morphine and other narcotics.  Morphine—the name is related to the Latin word for death—is a land of darkness.  Most of the time you don’t know you’re there.  But sometimes you come up to a kind of self-awareness.  That happened, and I had the terrifying experience of knowing myself as nothing against this mighty and all-powerful darkness.  I call it the cosmic indifference, because this power—some thing like a god—just didn’t care about me.  History would move on; I was already forgotten.

Martin Luther made the comment that God and the devil would look a lot alike were it not for Jesus Christ.  Unlike a lot of people’s spiritual experiences, Jesus didn’t show up in the middle of this for me.  Instead I spent my ‘aware’ time in the fearful presence of this omnipotent cosmic indifference.  Of course, physically I was very much hovering between life and death, so that might have something to do with it.

In a book called The Idea of the Holy, the theologian Rudolph Otto calls this the experience of mysterium tremendum.  It’s that encounter with the overpowering omnipotence and, again, indifference  of an unknowable power and my own insignificance that leads to a sense of dread.  It was within this dread that I lived those days.

Jesus didn’t show up.  But I began to open my eyes and come to the light, and my darling Sue was sitting there.  And this guy who’d rather have a heart attack than cry broke into sobs as grand as a baby.  And another time I woke to my daughter, and then each of my sons, who were all taking turns to be with me and all I could do was sob.  I was back among the living; no longer floating in that terrifying darkness.  I was back among those who cared and for whom I cared, no longer a nothing of cosmic indifference.

Then your cards were coming and I received wonderful emails from friends and acquaintances, a few visits from friends, and phone calls from folks around the country offering to come and help.  One sister spent 6 weeks with us, and her husband came for several and did all sorts f house repair.  I sent out work to my other two sister and other families and my mom and step dad, ‘Let’s all gather in Houston for Christmas’ and they came from CA, OR, AZ, and TN.

And Christ showed up.  And my soul was healed. I was no longer lost in the darkness.  Christ showed up in you and them.  That what it means that God chose to come to us as a man:  the heart of God will always be revealed through the human.  As Martin Luther put it, we become ‘little Christs’ to one another.

So good job and thanks to all you little  Christs out there.  And as you look toward your future as a congregation, let me leave this question with you:  how can you be Christ to the people around you to whom the world is indifferent?  How can you find the ones who are lost in the darkness?

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