ACCIDENTAL INTERSECTIONS

A sermon prepared by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, April 6, 2008 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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“How could anyone ever tell you
You were anything less than beautiful?
How could anyone ever tell you
You were less than whole
How could anyone fail to notice
That your loving is a miracle
How deeply you’re connected?”
—Chant used in worship

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Note: This sermon was used as an introduction to our congregation’s Second Annual All Church Read.  The book our Fellowship Team selected was “Here If You Need Me” by Unitarian Universalist minister Kate Braestrup.  The goal of this sermon was to introduce the book and to encourage the congregation to read it over the next few weeks and participate in a dessert discussion later in the month.

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 “If you are really wise—and it’s surprising and wondrous how many people have this wisdom in them—you will know enough to look around for love.  It will be there . . . holding out its arms to you.  If you are wise, whoever you are, you will let go, fall against that love, and be held.”  So writes Rev. Kate Braestrup, in her lovely little book Here If You Need Me.

Sometimes, those arms held out to us will belong to a stranger.  Sometimes, that love comes disguised in the face of a stranger. Sometimes, a stranger is the one who will say: “I’m here if you need me.”

Our world is full of many more strangers than friends.  Our lives intersect with more strangers than with people who are known to us.  I think of just this past Thursday.  I spent a short time in the morning in the church office with Rosemary, then facilitated a Christian Scriptures class with 12 deep-thinking members of the congregation, and then I sat down for a quick lunch meeting with a few members of the Reading Clergy Association.  So far, I knew everyone I intersected with.  But then, I got on the Logan Express shuttle bus to the airport with 40 other people I’d never met: all strangers.  I walked into Terminal B at the airport and suddenly there were several hundred strangers around me.  Strangers checked my ID, checked my boarding pass (twice), searched through my knap sack, and lectured me that I shouldn’t have left my ipod in my computer case. Another 100 strangers sat on my US AIR flight to Pittsburgh. Strangers poured me my glass of water during the flight and handed me my miniscule bag of pretzels.  Hundreds more strangers joined me at baggage claim at the Pittsburgh airport.  Two strangers handled the paper work for my rental car and handed me the keys.  An hour later, at the skilled nursing center where my Mom is currently living, almost every patient I walked past in the hallway was a stranger.  In just one day: a handful of people who I know, and hundreds more who are strangers.

But sometimes a stranger can make the difference.

Kate Braestrup was at home the morning her State Police Trooper husband was killed suddenly and tragically in a car accident.  In those early minutes after the accident, two strangers’ life intersected with hers.  Years later, this mother of four young children remembers:

Perhaps forty minutes after I had heard the news of Drew’s death, I was sitting in the living room with my friend Monica when the doorbell rang . . . Monica sprang to answer it.  A young man stood on the front steps, clad in a spiffy dark suit, his hair neatly combed, exuding a scent of soap and virtue.  Holding out a pamphlet, he beamed at Monica.  “Have you heard the good news?”  For a long second, Monica glared at him, not sure whether to punch him or laugh hysterically.  She compromised by slamming the door.  A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again.  This time, I answered it.  It was my neighbor, an elderly woman I had exchanged no more than a dozen words with in the ten years I’d lived in Thomaston.  She had potholders on her hands, which held a pan of brownies still hot from the oven, and tears were rolling down her cheeks.  “I just heard,” she said . . . My neighbor, [a stranger I had exchanged no more than a dozen words with in the ten years I had lived next door] was standing on the front stoop with her brownies and her tears: she was the Good News.

When I asked Beth Brauer, our chair of Fellowship Committee, why she and her Fellowship team selected “Here If You Need Me” as our all-church-read, she gave several reasons.  It is a good book.  It is a short book.  It is about a Unitarian Universalist Minister—and what could be more interesting than a Unitarian Universalist minister?  It is chock full of moving and true stories—and who doesn’t like moving and true stories.  It is about resilience and the rebuilding of lives.  Who doesn’t need to be reminded about that?  But the thing that Beth said that stuck with me the most is this (and this is a bad paraphrase): “It is a book about those completely ordinary moments when lives, by accident or chance, intersect.  When someone we don’t know is there for just a moment in our life, and their presence makes a difference.”  We’ve all had those moments when someone unknown ever so briefly touches our lives for the better.”

When I was growing up, my Mom called them angels in disguise, the unknown miracle makers.

Peggy Tabor Millin, in her book, Mary’s Way, comments: “I was on a train on a rainy day . . . For some reason I became intent on watching the raindrops on the window.  Two separate drops, pushed by the wind, merged into one for a moment and then divided again—each carrying with it a part of the other.  Simply by that momentary touching, neither was what it had been before.  And as each one went on to touch other raindrops, it shared not only itself, but what it had gleaned from the other . . . . I realized . . . that we never touch people so lightly that we do not leave a trace.  Our state of being matters to those around us . . . we need to become conscious of what we unintentionally share so we can learn to share with intention.”

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes:

Know this.  No one has within themselves
All the pieces to their puzzle . . .

Everyone carries with them at least one and probably
Many pieces to someone else’s puzzle.
Sometimes they know it.
Sometimes they don’t.

And when you present your piece
Which is worthless to you,
To another, whether you know it or not,
Whether they know it or not,
You are a messenger from the Most High.

If what Rabbi Kushner says is true, how could anyone ever tell you that you were anything less than beautiful?  How could anyone ever tell you that you were less than whole?  How could anyone fail to notice that your loving is a miracle, how deeply you’re connected?

Rev. Kate Braestrup serves as a chaplain to the Maine Warden Service, and her ministry is part of the story she tells in her book.  Kate is a stranger to many of the people she cares for: she is a stranger to the family members and friends of those who have been lost or killed in the woods or wilderness of Maine.  She writes:

I showed up, not so long ago, in a small northern Maine community.  An elderly woman, an Alzheimer’s patient—let’s call her Corrine—had wandered off, and the ‘place last seen’ was near the woods. 

The wardens established a command post at the fire station, and by the time I got there, it was swarming with men and women in green uniforms . . . [and] a small army of volunteers was assembling at the firehouse, eager to assist the wardens in their search.

The volunteer search and rescue dog teams, those middle-aged hobbyists with their fine, trained dogs, had arrived in force.  Then there were the less obviously skilled: A half dozen elderly backwoods guys in torn flannel shirts, a gaggle of college students with unfortunate piercings, some overweight Elks, and a Shriner or two.  The members of a local equestrian club appeared with their horses.  Also present were the owner of a stained-glass studio and her domestic partner; and a state senator with his teenage daughter in tow.

The high school varsity soccer team abandoned its late-summer practice to come out to search, along with a bunch of U.S. Marines who had been cooling their heels in Bangor, awaiting transshipment to Iraq.  And, arriving in a van with wire-mesh reinforced windows and under the direct supervision of a guard, was a group of men in neon yellow shirts, inmates from the Down East Correctional Facility, a prison primarily though not exclusively reserved for sex offenders. 

Corrine’s son, Jim, able-bodied and fiftyish, announced that searching the woods for his mom would be less stressful than just sitting around waiting.  So Jim was put on a team as well.

Those members of the community too old or too obviously out-of-shape to search set up shop in the firehouse kitchen and commenced cooking.

The wardens gave each search team a map and an area to search.  Each team had a Xeroxed photograph of Corrine, a white haired lady smiling vaguely at the camera . . .

It was hard going.  The terrain was rough.  The weather turned ugly.  Rain fell, and still they searched.  Everyone wanted to find the woman in the picture . . . those who had never met her wanted to find her.  Through the very effort of searching for her, they had begun to love her a little, to love Corrine, the mother of Jim.

Untidy searchers return . . . to the firehouse for their lunch.  They are tired, cold, and very hungry . . . Jim comes back to the firehouse with a heavy heart.  He has scratches on his cheek, twigs in his hair, pine needles down is pants, and his mother is still nowhere to be found.  Yet he takes in the scene before him, mops the rain from his face, and smiles.

“Look at this,” he says.  “Look at this!  This is incredible.”

The firehouse is filled with people.  The old coots in flannel shirts, the middle-age dog handlers, and the college students with piercings are sharing American chop suey with the state senator and his daughter.  The U.S. Marines are comparing blisters with the soccer players, the sheriff’s deputies are breaking bread with the convicts, game wardens share jello with equestrians, the stained-glass artist offers the retired state trooper an oatmeal cookie. 

In a little while, they will go back out and search some more.  They will try to find a body, living or dead.  For now, they are here together, joined in community, bent on the common purpose of love.

"Everyone in the world is here,” the lost woman’s son exclaims.  "It’s a miracle!”

“If you are really wise, you will know enough to look around for love.  It will be there . . . holding out its arms to you.  If you are wise, whoever you are, you will let go, fall against that love, and be held.”

Sometimes, those strangers’ arms will be ours.  Sometimes, love will come disguised in our face.  Sometimes, we will be the stranger who must say: “I’m here if you need me.”

May it be so.  Blessed Be.  Amen.

©Copyright 2008 Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved.