Text — Luke 14:1, 7-11

One of the important ministries of the church is to our members in nursing homes.

Before I go any farther in the direction I’m going to go today, I want to say that all the nursing homes I visit in Middletown are places full of love and compassion.

Running a nursing home is a difficult thing to do.  Medicare reimbursements from the state are low.  People who work in nursing homes aren’t paid huge salaries, as I pointed out last week.  But the vast majority of those people care genuinely and even very deeply about the people they help.  They do heroic things for the comfort and dignity of the residents they care for.

There’s a lot of love in a nursing home.  There’s a lot of mercy there.  Which is good, because most of us have had, or will have, someone in our family who needs nursing home care, and many of us will be there ourselves.

The reason there’s a lot of love and mercy in a nursing home is that there’s a lot of pain there too. People are in nursing homes because they’ve had a crisis in their health, physical health or mental health.  Some are there for a relatively short period, to recover from surgery perhaps.  Others, probably most, are in the last chapter of their lives and its not a very glorious or exalted chapter.  They’ve lost some or a lot of their ability to take care of their own physical needs.  They’re weak.  They may be incontinent.  The smells in nursing homes are not always pleasant.

For these reasons, I used to find visiting nursing homes to be very exhausting emotionally.  I wondered about this because visiting there generally doesn’t require much in a certain way.  You don’t need any specialized knowledge. 

Mostly, it involves being there, just showing up.  Just getting your body in there is ninety percent of the effort.  And then, all you have to do is listen.  You can always ask someone to tell you their life story — even if you’ve heard it before. 

I think one reason why getting ourselves to the nursing home is difficult, and why being there can be draining, is this:  There’s a lot in a nursing home that we don’t want to identify with.  We want to keep a safe emotional distance.  We don’t want to think about ourselves being there, weak and dependent. 

It’s a threatening environment.  It’s humbling.  And keeping all of that at a safe distance takes a lot of energy.  It’s hard not to identify with what’s going on there.  It’s hard not to think, “This is where I may be headed.  So you want to keep your distance, but that takes a lot of emotional work.

When I read the gospel lesson for this week, about choosing a seat at a banquet, I knew immediately that the time had come to re-tell an experience I had about ten years ago.

My first telling of this came about 3 weeks after it happened.  Now it’s ten years later and this is still an experience that feeds me and helps my perspective.  Most of you probably weren’t here on that particular Sunday in 1995, so here goes.

One day I went to see a church member in a nursing home.  I went into the room and there was a rather strong smell of urine in there, which is not usual.  I didn’t think too much of it.  I pulled up a chair, and sat down. 

The conversation started, and after a few minutes the chair I was sitting in started to feel cool.  This was odd, because usually nursing home rooms are very warm, even hot.  Then, a few minutes later, I realized that I was sitting a pool of urine.

So, without making a big fuss I stood up.  The seat of my pants and my underwear were soaked and sticking to my skin.  I tried to discretely pull them away. 

I’m quite sure the person I was visiting didn’t know what had happened, though she probably sensed that something was wrong with the chair.  I know she wasn’t the one who’d been sitting in the chair.

So, what was I going to do now? 

I figured I might as well just go on with the visit as if nothing had happened.  We talked about the usual things you talk about in a nursing home if the person is up to it:  How she was feeling?  We talked about members of her family.  Who had visited her recently?  People who spend a long time in a nursing home sometimes don’t get visited very often, so visits are big deal.

At one point, a personal care worker came into the room and I pointed out the problem with the chair and she cleaned it off. 

So the visit when on, as usual, and I began to realize something very odd.  Standing there with my pants soaked in urine, wasn’t as bad as you might think it would be.  It wasn’t horrible.  It wasn’t as unpleasant as you’d expect.

In fact, this whole visit didn’t feel as difficult or as exhausting as many other visits had.  It was certainly an interesting, adventure, at the very least.

As I left the nursing home that day, I had a certain smile on my face.  I was able to see the humor in this situation. 

I got to my car and there I was faced with the situation of how I was going to get home without getting the car seat wet.

I thought of just stripping down right there in the parking lot, but then it occurred to me that getting stopped by the police driving naked below the waist might not be the best thing for my professional reputation in Middletown.

So I took one of floor mats from back seat, put it on the driver’s seat, and drove home, and began to ponder this whole experience, and began to feel actually grateful that this whole thing had happened.

As I drove, I started to ponder this.  It occurred to me that when I walked into that nursing home that day, I did so in a kind of “exalted” state.  I was only visiting.  I was healthy, independent, able to take care of my own personal needs.  I could take refuge in the comforting thought that I was a long way from having to think about needing anything like personal nursing care myself.

But I was brought down, and brought into contact with something I had not made such contact with before, at least not in such an intimate way —which is why this visit wasn’t as tiring as others had been.  There was no question here of “keeping a distance.”  I was there.  I was “in it.”

Some years after that, when I visited my own mother when she was dying in a nursing home, this experience helped me be there.  If I ever go into a nursing home myself as a patient, I know this experience will help me with that too.

Jesus said, Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who are humbled are exalted already, by virtue of being teachers and pioneers for the rest of us, by going into territory where we will all eventually have to go.