"Sipping Diet Pepsi and Pondering Eternal Life" - a sermon for the community of Zion Lutheran Church

Hello everyone -

I hope this finds you well! Here's the text from my sermon two weekends ago (the 10th) at Zion.

Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Creator and Jesus our Salvation. Amen.

It was early on in my chaplaincy experience at Unity Hospital in Fridley, Minnesota – I’d been there about a month, visiting with patients who had spiritual or religious concerns, or many times I went around doing cold-calls and knocking on doors. On the orthopedic/extra medical floor that took care of mostly knee replacements and other non-life-threatening concerns, the need for spiritual care wasn’t as prevalent as, say, the emergency room or the cardiovascular unit. That being said, many wonderful conversations about God and suffering and life were still to be had, there is no doubt about that. The people I talked to were curious; questioners.

I was still wet behind the ears as a chaplain when I met a woman named Bernice. She was in her mid-fifties, and had an evident Texan drawl. She was in for knee surgery, she said, but there was more going on with her. Cancer. She told me she had a year left to live, that the prognosis wasn’t good. She was a Minnesota transplant from Texas, with a son and a daughter of her own and two grandchildren, both boys, who were sometimes troublemakers she said but you know that really they love their parents. Bernice told me she would call her grandchildren often, and tell them to be good, “but it’s hard to be away from them. I try to teach them. Now I have to teach them how to be without me.”

She and her husband, who stopped in often, had just bought a farmhouse in the Texas countryside. She wanted to go to Texas this last year of her life and live in her farmhouse with her husband and be surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She wanted to plant a garden one last time and sip Diet Pepsi and watch one last summer’s sunsets. She wanted to cook some more and read some more all the while planning her funeral and thinking about eternal life. “I know God loves me,” she said, as tears formed around her eyes, “but sometimes it’s really difficult to see.”

We visited five more times together while she was at Unity. Bernice left the hospital after a week but three weeks later she came back, at the urging of the doctors, when managing pain became too much. “It was too much for my husband to take care of me”, she said, “So I’m back for a while. We’re still planning on Texas.”

This is, sadly, where our paths diverged. After she left for the second time, I don’t know what happened to Bernice. I pray she made it to Texas, and that she got to spend time with her family and plant her garden and teach her grandchildren a thing or two about kindness. Through Bernice, Christ was in our midst. A dying woman came into my life and taught me a thing or two about grace, about shattered expectations, about doing something new. A dying woman wanted to plant a garden and design her funeral, to love the people around her and also show them life without her. When I thought she would be so preoccupied with questions, with fear, with doubt – she shattered my expectations and proved the exact opposite. In the face of death, she was living.

This story illustrates today’s Gospel. Jesus comes to teach, heal, and eat – but to the Pharisees and scribes and people who think they know better, he’s doing these things with all of the wrong people. Jesus heals a paralytic, a man lowered through the roof, and shatters expectations. Jesus calls Levi, a tax collector and sinner in good company, and destroys convention. Jesus eats with sinners and is called out as going against the order of things. Jesus calls you and me and Bernice, and starts doing something new. Christ, through his life, death, and resurrection, is calling each of us to defy the expectations of this world and to lean into our Christian life as we have been claimed children of God. I was taught this by Bernice, and I have been taught this by you all. We have a whole world out there to surprise. Let’s start by walking out the door. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Dean