Where the Gospel Is

One of the questions I sometimes ask when wrestling with a sermon is: Where is the good news? The good news, as in the gospel. The word comes to us from Old Saxon via Old Norse - the Germanic languages - beginning as "good spell," or good story or good message. It's a translation of the Latin bona adnuntiatio, which itself is a translation of the Greek eu- + -angelion, bringing the good news.


At first, in Old English, it was pronounced goad-spell. By the 13th century, it had shifted to god-spell by association with God as if the history of Jesus was the "god-story." The Oxford English Dictionary terms the mistake "very natural." 

Sometimes, I ask Where is the good news when I'm not wrestling with a sermon. At all.

I was not overly alarmed, though I was dismayed, to learn that my mom, who dwells in assisted living, had gone to the bathroom at 4 a.m. and failed to transfer back to her wheelchair successfully. She had had a fall. That was on a Sunday morning. By Monday evening, she had had two more falls, and she was borne to the emergency department of the local teaching hospital. My dad was the messenger; my older sister supplied us with updates, sharing the news of her conversations with our dad. All these messengers, all this news ... where is the good news?

It is everywhere, as it turns out, when we are able to see it.

The bladder infection, while not good news, explains why my mother had had three falls in some 40 hours. The broken fibula, a lower-leg bone, from the second fall, was in her "dead" leg, a leg that poliomyelitis withered in 1949. The broken bone is not good news - but of her two legs, this was the less bad option.

There is more good news. Where my parents live, the university medical center is the local hospital. The medical care is world class. This is the United States, where health care is costly, but my parents are retired state employees with pensions, Medicare, and the long-ago foresight to have invested in long-term-care insurance.

More good news. My mother had received physical therapy to help with her ability to stand from her wheelchair and transfer to a seat. When she returns from the hospital, she will receive another round of physical therapy - and her muscles will have retained some of the first round of therapy. It can be expected that she will be stronger and more able to transfer herself when needed.

Still more good news: Mom has been refusing to wear a necklace with a help button on it, the kind that would alert staff to the need for instant assistance. Once she is back in her room, staff and physicians and social worker will quite likely be able to insist that wearing the necklace is now required. My mother, accepting of rules and ever the good student, might begin to wear the necklace.

Of course my dad is worn out with loving concern, with the inability to carry for a loved one all the pain and fear and stress, and with the myriad small daily tasks that accompany having a spouse in the hospital, with the grueling exhaustion of eight-hour waits followed by more waiting, with the "quotidian mysteries," as Kathleen Norris terms it, of laundry and groceries. Where is the good news in that?

Our close and communicative family cannot take the burden from Dad's shoulders. We cannot completely carry out the advice of Galatians 6:2, "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ" (NRSV). But it turns out, etymologically, that to bear is where we get the language of child-bearing. That child-bearing is, of course, ideally a communal shared experience. Only one person actually carries the child. So, in a real sense, we can help to bear the burdens. So does bearing a child become the holy work of community. So does bearing one another's burdens.

A whole community, a network of strong wise women, of girls who are being shown, of men who love and walk alongside, of the religious community (religion sharing a root with ligament). I am reminded powerfully of Anne Lamott's reflections in Traveling Mercies about how when, unmarried, she chose to carry and bear her child, it was the small scrappy church community into which she had reluctantly been drawn (by the music, she says) who took loving possession of the baby, who pressed sandwich bags of dimes into her pockets, who playfully argued over whose turn it was to hold the baby on Sunday mornings. Sometimes she went to church, with the baby, because everyone else was wanting to love them.

I draw great strength, and pray that my worn-out dad does too, from the way the family network activated, automatically, upon receiving the bad news of a fall ... then a second ... then a third.

There have been times in my life that I have felt overwhelmed and numb, as though half my head had no feeling in it. One occasion about a decade ago came when, in divinity school, I returned from a weekend of my firstborn in confirmation class at a mountain retreat, during which I stayed at the home of a friend and wrote a paper for a seminar on the Gospel of Matthew. Cell-phone an email service was scrappy and I was not doing much looking, at any rate.

I returned home with the boy on a Sunday evening, checked my email, and learned that my mom and dad had been on a weekend jaunt, during which my mom had contracted Bell's palsy, a facial hemiplegia (paralysis of one side of the face). I also learned by email that my cousin serving in Afghanistan had lost both legs below the knee to an improvised explosive device.

First thing once I got on campus the next morning, I sent a group email to the divinity school class and faculty, asking for prayer. Then I went to the seminar class and turned in the paper. A couple of hours later, when I checked my email, there were almost 40 messages of prayer, love, and support. More poured in. I was held up.

Over and over again, when I am emotionally paralyzed, when I don't even have the wherewithal to fall back into the hammock, the love and support of community, of family however I define it, rises up to me where I am. When the news is horrible, I have only to croak, "Help," and it is there. This network, these ligaments, this community, is my necklace with the button on it.

I press it, and help arrives, the help that I have been barely able to summon. Even when I am too worn, too weary, too numb, too paralyzed, too everything.

This is God. This is the relationships. See, look, behold how God is relationship. Here, in the weariness, here in the dark, here in the groceries and laundry and hospital parking, and what-ifs, here is God. Behold the good news.