September 20, 2020
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 20, Track 1

I speak to you in the name of the Living God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Stop complaining. If you grew up like I did, you probably also heard this refrain whenever you found yourself in a situation you really didn’t want to be in.

Meatloaf and peas? Again? Stop complaining, and eat your dinner.

Your little sister in your room. In your stuff. Wearing your clothes. Stop complaining.

But she didn’t even ask. Stop complaining, and share.

A stack of thank you notes to be written the week after your birthday to all your aunts and uncles and cousins—Irish Catholic family on both sides. My wrist ached just thinking about those notes. Stop complaining, and be grateful for your family.

I believe my parents may have even relished telling me to stop complaining after having heard the refrain so often themselves, no doubt, when they were children.

Meanwhile, it made me feel powerless, unheard, my own thoughts and feelings and opinions about everything from meatloaf to thank you notes (and believe you me, I had them) disregarded.

***

In January of this year, I began working at Rush University Medical Center as a chaplain. It was part of my training—Clinical Pastoral Education, CPE for short—for my (hopefully) eventual life as a priest. I’ve continued to cover on-call chaplain shifts, though my CPE unit ended in May. At the hospital, I regularly encounter patients who bear that same message that I so often heard as a child, “Stop complaining.” Only they direct it at themselves.

I have sat with some very sick people, hooked up to various drips and monitors, too weak to walk alone to the bathroom—or get out of bed at all. A woman depressed and anxious because her husband had gambled all their money away, and now she couldn’t afford a home health care aid for herself. Another woman whose heart literally kept stopping and then restarting as she waited, panicking, for the operation to install a pacemaker. A woman (it does always seem to be women) about to receive a stem-cell transplant to treat the cancer that had already taken both of her breasts. All of them, at some point during our encounter, uttered the same words. “But I shouldn’t complain.”

I understand that compulsion, the sense that a complaint renders you somehow ungrateful for what is right in your life, or could, particularly if you’re a woman, earn you a label that rhymes with witch. (A word that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a fierce Jewish woman who righteously complained on behalf of so many was often called, especially early in her career. May her memory be a blessing.)

But when I am in chaplain mode, I force myself to get curious. And so I ask these women, “Why not? Why not complain?”

They usually respond with a long and quiet pause.

Eventually, I follow up: “Given all that you’re going through right now, all that is weighing on you, what makes you think you shouldn’t complain? Why not say, ‘I don’t like this—and I wish something would change!’?

I want my patients to complain to me. Because I want them to feel heard. I want them to know that their thoughts and feelings and opinions are regarded—at least by me.

But I also have a theory: Complaining forces us to recognize that we’re not in charge. It can express a sense of powerlessness that we’re not often ready to acknowledge or come to terms with. And that’s a particularly hard thing when you’re in a hospital bed, already feeling pretty vulnerable.

***

The Israelites in today’s reading from Exodus, however, were not shy about complaining. This passage that we just read names their complaining seven different times. In fact, their entire journey out of Egypt and into the Promised Land is marked by lots of complaining. This is the third instance that seems to warrant their outcry.

So far, Moses has led them out of Egypt and straight to a dead end—the Red Sea—with the Egyptian soldiers hot on their heels. Then, they are parched and dehydrated. There’s no water anywhere, and when they finally come across it in Marah, it’s undrinkable. And now here they are in the wilderness, weak with hunger.

Can you blame them for complaining? They’ve uprooted their entire lives to follow Moses on, let’s be frank here, a pretty dangerous, even deadly, journey through the desert to a land they’ve only heard stories of. No one really even knows if this place, supposedly flowing with abundance, with rich milk and sweet honey, actually exists. And the roadblocks keep coming at them.

Side note: Don’t you love how Moses shifts the blame entirely to God, like: “Hey, don’t look at Aaron and me! Your complaints are at the Lord—you know, the one who made me lead you out of slavery in Egypt?”

When I imagine myself in this story, I count myself among the complaining Israelites, hands thrown up and shaking, “Maybe we were better off before this insane journey! At least back in Egypt we had water to drink and food to eat. At least then I could feed my family. At least then, I wasn’t panicking over decisions such as: Fight off the trained soldiers coming at me with weapons and horses in order to keep them from harming my child? Or, swim across a sea and hope we don’t drown?”

But it never comes to that for the Israelites, does it? No one seems to die of hunger or thirst or drowning.

No. In this epic, dangerous, mostly ill-advised-by-all-standards-of-reason journey, God keeps showing up.

God shows up: In the parting of a sea to reveal safe passage.

God shows up: As a pillars of smoke and fire, never leaving their place in front of the people.

God shows up: As a piece of wood thrown into the bitter water of Marah, making it not just potable, but sweet.

God shows up: In the strange bread that falls from heaven and lands as morning dew.

“Draw near to the Lord,” Moses tells the Israelites, “for he has heard your complaining.”

***

“Do you ever complain to God?” I ask my patients at Rush. “Do you think God wants to hear your complaints?”

Like the response to my question, “Why not complain?”, this one is also usually met with thoughtful silence. I can almost see the lights slowly coming up as if on a dimmer switch with the realization that God might actually hear their complaints.

“To complain to God is firmly within our religious tradition,” I remind my Jewish and Christian patients. “There’s an entire book of the Bible called Lamentations, after all. I might even call putting your frustrations, your worries, your anxieties, your indignant protests against all that ails you physically right now into the hands of God, a prayer.”

Sometimes, I think we get so wrapped up in being Good Christians (capital G, capital C) particularly those of us from a more Western, zipped-up-tight-hands-folded-neatly variety, that we forget this part of our tradition. It’s as if we fear that were we to shake our fists heavenward and cry out to God, “I hate what is happening right now!” that we could be struck down immediately. As if to be a Good Christian means accepting your lot silently, no complaints.

I have to tell you though, that some of my best praying has been of the unzipped, hands flailing. I have spent some time alone in the car asking God out loud and in a not-so-quiet voice, “Why would you call me on this not-at-all-reasonable journey toward ordained ministry? Why would you put me through this? I am not happy about how this is going!”

Ironically, it’s in my expression and acknowledgement of my sense of powerlessness that I begin to feel empowered. Complaining to God is a way for me to say to God, “I trust you.” I call this some of my best praying because it’s been in my outcry, where I’ve felt the divine draw nearest.

Friends, let’s be honest: We have much to complain about right now. I don’t even need to name all the things—and I do mean, ALL THE THINGS—that burden us collectively, and some more so than others.

And so many of us feel powerless as we watch the world literally burn before our eyes, see the numbers of the sick and dying climbing day after day with no end in sight, watch bank accounts dwindle knowing relief still isn’t coming, experience a strange isolation in our staying 6 feet apart. (And that’s just SOME of the things.)

But I bid you, pray with me. Pray with each other, and lift up your complaints as an act of trust in our God. Lift them the God who hears you, to the God who knows you, to the God who is with you in all that you endure. Complain to the God who never stops showing up.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.