Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

The Kindness of Strangers
The Fourth Sunday of Advent Year A, 2007
Deacon Richard Buhrer

“The sun has never shone on so total a ruin!” Blanche Dubois proclaims about herself to her sister, Stella Kowalski, as she arrives allegedly for a visit (she is really destitute and homeless). “They told me to take a streetcar named ‘Desire,’ and then transfer to one named ‘Cemeteries,’ and to ride six blocks and then to get off at ‘Elysian Fields.’” But far from finding herself in the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology, she is in a seedy neighborhood in New Orleans. Blanche pretends to have been making her living as a teacher at a girls’ school in the South, but in reality she has been surviving as a prostitute. “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” This is her leitmotif in Tennessee Williams’ famous play.[1]

First of all, how Gay can you get, quoting Blanche Dubois in a sermon? And, you may well be asking, “What does Blanche Dubois have to do with the Fourth Sunday of Advent?” But in praying over today’s readings, it struck me that Our Lady, who is present in Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth as a silent but looming presence, was, in fact, dependent on the kindness of strangers.

She was probably a very young girl by our standards, probably thirteen or fourteen, and was awaiting the consummation of an arranged marriage with the just man, Joseph, who like his namesake, the patriarch Joseph, was a dreamer of prophetic dreams. After the marriage contract had been signed but before she had moved into Joseph’s home, she began to “show;” she was probably not all that well nourished and her belly would have started showing fairly early in her pregnancy. Joseph knew the baby was not his.

We are so used to hearing the Christmas stories that we view them through rose-colored glasses and often miss the stark human content of the story. We make the stories pretty, when they were most definitely not pretty for the people who had to live them.

Mary’s very life was in danger. Middle Eastern women in our times are murdered by their families for far less than this. This is what the Book of Deuteronomy has to say about her situation:

If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.[2]

So, Joseph, “being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.”[3] That would have left the Mother of God alive, but alone, in bitter poverty and deep disgrace; she would have had to make a choice between starving to death with her unborn child and earning her bread as a prostitute.

At this moment in the story, Joseph dreams a prophetic dream: “just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’”[4]

Like Blanch Dubois, although Our Lady had not been warn so desperately thin by a long and painful life, she was, indeed, dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Many of you are wondering what I have to say about the surgery and long illness from which I have so recently emerged.

I had been having chest pain for close to a year. I had been writing it off as caused by a sour stomach (here you see the hazards of self-diagnosis); when I told my physician about this, it made him nervous and he wanted me to see my cardiologist. So things progressed to the point of needing cardiac catheterization. My procedure may have been one of the shortest on record: The cardiologist took pictures of my coronary arteries and discovered a large and ugly lesion in the left main coronary artery. This vessel is the conduit for blood to 2/3 of the heart muscle. Health care types know a lesion in this artery as “the widow-maker.” So in less than five minutes, Dr. Lewis stopped the procedure, came up to the head of my stretcher and told me that I would need to have open-heart surgery. I went to my room to recover from the procedure and when I was alone, laid in the bed and wept.

I often tell people that I am somewhat allergic to surgeons. From several professional experiences, I had formed a deep, explicit and fond wish that I could die without ever going under the knife myself.

The cardiologist had his nurse persecute me until I made an appointment with the surgeon (it really only took me a couple of days, he had showed me the pictures and I was frightened by what I saw). I was able to get an appointment fairly quickly. I saw the surgeon on July 2, and we scheduled the surgery for July 24. I felt like I was walking around for these three weeks with a ticking time bomb in my chest. But the time went by quickly, almost too quickly.

Rudolph Otto, a famous scholar, the founder of a branch of study called the History of Religion, which looks at the religions of the world to try to identify the common themes in religious experience, talked about the experience of the “holy” as “mysterium tremendum et fascinans,” fearful and fascinating mystery. The Latin word “tremendum” comes into English as “tremendous” but the connotation is really cheap compared to the Latin, which carries the weight of appalling, horrific, awe-full. Well, the idea that my heart would stop beating and be held in the hands, in the very hands, of the surgeon was “tremendum et fascinans” to me. In prayer, I had the consolation that, whatever human being would have his hands on my heart, it was the Lord Jesus who would be holding it.

So I went through with the surgery. How I ever did so as calmly and peacefully as I did, remains a mystery to me. Now I am left with this long red gash on my chest. It continues to remind me of my fragile, vulnerable humanity.

After the surgery, there was a long, such a long, period of recovery; Throughout this time, compelled by my weakness and neediness, I have had to allow other people to love me in a way that I have never experienced in my long life. I emerged from a difficult childhood with the conviction that however bright and competent I was, I was not very lovable. My ploy, then, has been to try to trick other people into loving me by serving their needs for nurture, comfort, support, whatever they might need. For good or ill, the strategy has never worked very well; it has never overcome this pernicious conviction I have carried around for most of my life. But I have emerged out of this great struggle, restored to health and life and I am experiencing joy and vigor unlike anything I have ever known. There is a new sense of myself, almost a new personality that is largely the result of this painfully long experience of being loved by other people without any hope of ever repaying or earning it. Many of you who have done this work in my life are in this room today and I have learned from you who I am and what I am really worth.

So I, like Blanche Dubois and the Mother of God, have been dependent (literally) on the kindness of others, many of them strangers to me, but unlike poor pitiable Blanche Dubois, who was teetering on the threshold of madness and pushed over the brink by rape, and like the Mother of God, this experience has been a pure grace and a blessing that has transformed my life.

So for us, what does this mean? It first means that we must school ourselves to be willing to accept kindness from others. A Buddhist contemplation to help one grow in compassion begins (surprisingly to me) with a consideration about growing in compassion for ones self.

Then, like the ancient people of Israel, we are called to care for strangers: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”[5] There is a Benedictine proverb that goes “Hospes venit, Christus venit,” “When a guest comes, Christ comes.”

Blanche Dubois says, in “A Streetcar Named Desire:” “But some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable! It is the one unforgivable thing, in my opinion, and the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty.” If we can say this with Blanche, we can also say what she says elsewhere in the play: “Oh look, we have created enchantment.”[6]