A Shortness of Breath   a sermon preached by the Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V

at First Unitarian Church of Alton, February 26, 2006

Two readings:

“I've Been To The Mountaintop” — On April 3, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ended a public speech with these words.   The next day, he was assassinated.

 

Well, I don't know what will happen now.   We've got some difficult days ahead.   But it doesn't matter with me now.   Because I've been to the mountaintop.   And I don't mind.   Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.   Longevity has its place.  

But I'm not concerned about that now.   I just want to do God's will.   And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain.   And I've looked over.   And I've seen the promised land.   I may not get there with you.   But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.   And I'm happy, tonight.   I'm not worried about anything.   I'm not fearing any man.  

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

 

 

“When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver

(From New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St, Boston, MA 02108)

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;


when death comes 
like the measles-pox;

when death comes 
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:


what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

 

And therefore I look upon everything 
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, 


and I look upon time as no more than an idea,


and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
 as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something 
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say:

all my life 
I was a bride married to amazement.
 

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder


if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
 

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

 

 

A Shortness of Breath

Sometime after 2 a.m., the beeper went off.  I was called to meet with a family in a waiting room at the hospital.  It was the middle of the night and the lights were dim in the open space.  A snowstorm made its presence felt outside the 11^th floor window, some of the large flakes were falling down but some were being lifted back up by some unseen force - perhaps it was just a cold wind.

The family was seated in chairs along the walls talking amongst themselves, and they looked up almost as one as I entered and introduced myself as the chaplain.  A chorus of voices said in unison, “This is our mother…” and they pointed me to the woman in one corner.  At the woman’s invitation, I pulled up a chair and sat down in the middle of the room facing her, not ignoring the others in the room, but offering her the deference that the rest of the family seemed to afford her.  I asked her how things were going this night, and she began to talk.

She said she had been called to the hospital many hours before when the police came to her home to tell her that her thirty-something son had been hospitalized.  When she arrived with one of her daughters, she was told that the young man, her youngest child, had collapsed at work and was being tended to by emergency personnel.  She demanded to see him and was ushered into a room by a very nice nurse.  Her son was there, hooked up to many machines, but he was unresponsive to her or to anyone else. 

As the family began to gather in the waiting room, they learned from the doctors that the situation was quite grave.  The woman’s son had apparently suffered an aneurism of some sort, the same thing that had killed the father of the clan some 20 years earlier.

Over the next two hours or so, tests were performed to find out the extent of the son’s injuries.  It was finally determined that the young man’s brain was beyond repair - he was pronounced dead just after midnight.  In the midst of their grief, the mother had discussed with her remaining children how their brother was always concerned with the welfare of others and how he had always looked for ways to help people who really needed it.  They decided as a group that the young man’s organs and tissue should be donated to people waiting for transplants and other lifesaving procedures.  The transplant teams had begun their work just before I showed up to sit with the family.

The woman talked for a long time about her son, about how wonderful he was, about how helpful he had always been, even as a small child.  She was so thankful for him, and so delighted that he had been a part of her life.  She knew he was destined to be very special, even if he always seemed a little vulnerable physically.  She talked to him on the phone everyday, she said, and when she’d asked him yesterday how he was doing, all he said was, “I’m great.  I have a little shortness of breath.  It’s nothing to worry about, just a little shortness of breath.”

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  We all have what we might call “a shortness of breath.”  We all have a short time to breath here on earth.  We all have a finite number of breaths to take.  None of us gets out of here alive.  We all are going to die.

I know you don’t come here expecting to be depressed on a beautiful Sunday morning.   But you do come here, I assume, expecting to hear the truth.  And there it is.  It’s not the end, of course;  in fact, in some ways, it’s really just the beginning.

 

This week I had occasion to speak with one of my colleagues in ministry.  I made this phone call in conjunction with a wedding that’s going to take place here at church over the summer.  The wedding couple has a special relationship to a man we’ll call Pastor Derrick who ministers to a tiny flock at a church in rural Arkansas.  No, there are no UU churches that I know of in rural Arkansas - this is an independent Christian congregation that calls itself a Full Gospel church.  It sounds a little more conservative than the churches I am usually in touch with, and in light of that, I had no idea what to expect from Pastor Derrick.  After we dispensed with the formalities of introducing ourselves to each other, he began to tell me a little about his life and about why he’s a minister.  Pastor Derrick told me he had been picked up out of the gutter by God.  He testified that he had been picked up and cleaned up and given new life by his Lord and Savior.

Now this may not be your language of choice;  it’s not quite mine, either.  But I have had similar turnarounds in my life; perhaps you’ve experienced them in yours.  That’s not why I tell you this story about Pastor Derrick today.

The language is beside the point.  Whether you have been picked up, cleaned up, and given new life is almost beside the point.  The point I want to make is how thankful Pastor Derrick was that he was, not dead in the gutter, but alive.  He said several times that he would surely be dead if these changes had not happened to him, and he was so glad to be alive that he felt he just had to tell people the good news about life and how wonderful it is and how much there is to do for other people while we’re here together.

Certainly he lamented the tragedies that had befallen him.  He sounded like many of the Psalmists: I was at rock bottom, how many were my enemies, how long must I be in this pain, I had nowhere else to turn.  But Derrick didn’t stop at words of lament, not by any means.  He got to the other side of lament and was full of praise as well - he couldn’t contain his joy at finding himself alive again each and every morning, no matter what the day might bring.  He was so thankful, even though he knew how tenuous his hold on this life was.  He knew how short of breath he was, and he used that breath to sing praises to the rooftops anyway.  He said he was eternally grateful for his life and eternally grateful for the things that had happened to him in it.

 

We heard, as one of our readings this morning, the last public speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. who said “I've Been To The Mountaintop” the night before he was assassinated.  Dr. King said that night, and most of us would agree, that a long life is not a bad thing - “Longevity has its place,” he said.  But he went on, “I am not concerned about that now.  I’m not worried about anything.  I’m not fearing any man.”  He loved life as so many of us do.  He faced death more often than all of us here;  he met his death the day after that speech.

 

Many people think they want to live forever.  Many look forward to some form of eternal after-life.  Many think of death as an eternal nothingness.  In her poem When Death Comes, Mary Oliver says she considers eternity just one more possibility.  As Joseph Campbell said, eternity is not forever.  It is a “time out of time,” a time when there simply is no time, an interval when we are so immersed in the present tense, living so fully right now that we do not perceive the passing of time.  We are as we say “out of it,” out of time, we are eternal.

 

With all that as background, I want to talk for a moment about my father and his illness.  Many of you know that my father has been ill.  He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer back in October and was hospitalized for three months or more getting strong enough for surgery, having surgery, and recovering from surgery.  The doctors all said the same thing - this is a serious illness, you should sign up for hospice, this tumor will kill you within six months.

My dad has fought back.  He has fought the doctors, he has fought his family, he has fought the health care system, he has fought the news of the tumor, he has fought the tumor itself.

He is a fighter, for better or for worse.  And he is stronger and healthier today because of it, more so than anyone could have predicted.

One of the manifestations of his illness is that he can only walk a few steps (in a walker) before he has to stop and work hard to catch his breath.  Many days this is where his focus lies, in seeking the cause of this shortness of breath.  “I just don’t know why I can’t breathe,” he’ll say.  “And I can’t find anyone who can tell me.  Seems like some doctor somewhere could tell me why I have this shortness of breath.”  Early on in his illness, I would repeat what I’d heard more than one doctor explain.  “Do you think it might be that big ol’ tumor nestled up against your diaphragm that’s making it hard for you to breathe?”  Sometimes I was trying to be helpful.  Sometimes I was exasperated.  It’s hard for the over-educated son of a man who’s always been reasonable and rational to hear the same question over and over again when the answer seems so reasonable and rational.  But I’ve come to see that the question I’m hearing may not be the question he’s asking.

Surely my dad knows the mechanics of breathing.  After all, this is the guy who helped me put together a science fair project many years ago when I was in the fifth grade explaining the mechanics of the diaphragm and how the lungs were filled with air by the action of this flexible muscle that increased the volume within our chests forcing air to enter our lungs and then decreased the volume to expel the carbon dioxide that would kill us if it remained in our bodies.  I know it was simplistic, that elementary presentation of the mechanics of breathing.  But so was my understanding of the real question he was now asking.

 

“Why do we have a shortness of breath?”  Or existentially translated, “Why must we die?”  I’m not much of a philosopher, and I really don’t have an answer for those kinds of ‘why’ questions.  I think those are the kind of questions we simply live with rather than spend a lot of time trying to answer.

So I don’t have an answer for the question, “Why must we die?”  But I do know the next question, and it is this:  What will we do about it?  What will we do about it?

The answer I have to that one is:  I will live.  I will live everyday like it was a gift.  I will do my best as long as I have breath to do so.  It is ours to lament the tragedies and pains of our lives and it is ours to offer praise even in the face of them.  And if we’re really blessed, we will experience some eternal moments when we are so alive to life that we do not notice the passing of time, some eternal moments when we are fully awake to now and only now. 

 

My dad may or may not have the capacity for that kind of living;  not everyone does.  The lady who lost her son on a cold winter night had that capacity.  She loved her son, she lost him and cried hard, she rejoiced in his presence here with her for a short time.  Pastor Derrick had that capacity - he had been lifted from the pit of despair by a force beyond any previous experience.  He lamented his losses and he gave thanks and praise for the gift of life that he was able to share with others.  Martin Luther King had that capacity, even when he seemed to be staring into a crystal ball that night before he died.  “I may not get to the Promised Land with you, but I’m not worried about that right now.  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.  And I’m happy.  I’m happy.  I’m happy.  Because I have not ended up simply visiting this world.”

 

May we foster within ourselves the capacity to live in the face of difficult existential questions and in the face of great adversity.

May we foster within ourselves the capacity to live well in the face of certain death.

And may we foster within ourselves the capacity to reach out to others a hand of sisterhood and brotherhood that says, “It’s okay.  You are not alone.  I’m short of breath, too.” 

 

So may it be.