What's changed?

Although most of us think of MASH the TV series when we think of a field hospital, the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH, concept was first deployed by the U.S. Army during World War II. They were initially called Auxiliary Surgical Groups and were an attempt to move surgical care closer to wounded soldiers than the fixed-in-place hospital further from the battlefield or those permanent hospitals accessible by air and located on more established bases.  We still see this today.  The Hospital at Ramstein Air Base is often in the news as it remains the largest US installation in Germany (perhaps in Europe!) and its facilities are both established and excellent.  Wounded military personnel who have received emergency medical treatment at the forward hospitals are evacuated from the fighting zone were and are often sent to Ramstein -- at least those who are expected to survive.

Field hospitals -- MASH units -- are wonderful places of healing and horror.  The job of those in triage is to separates the wounded into categories -- those who must receive the most urgent care, those who can wait, and those who will not survive.   As I recall from MASH the TV series, it is a terrible burden and creates a heart wrenching environment with great success and painful failures.  It is the place where death is all too common and where success may still mean disability for the patient who survives.  It smells like death -- even among the survivors -- and the sights are terrible to behold.  But it works.

The field hospitals and MASH units are by nature temporary places.  Like the TV series, there are down times when nothing happens and there are moments in which too much is happening.  It is the nature of the place.  The patients there are all temporary -- the dying are comforted in their last moments and the survivors are patched up as best can be and then sent elsewhere down the line.   Some don’t make it.  Those who do carry their wounds with them long after healing has finished.

Such is the nature of the Church.  We are not the fine permanent hospitals who finish the healing before sending the folks home to their leisure as much as we are the MASH units and field hospitals planted right in the midst of the battlefield.  The folks who walk through our doors come right from the fight.  We tend to their wounds with the healing balm of God's Word and Sacraments.  As soon as they are able, they are passed along and back into the fight.  Some will not make it.  They will be lost to the battles of faith and life, distracted by the cares and joys of the moment, having surrendered the eternal for the present.  We do the best we can.  The miracle is not in us but in the means of grace.  We meet most folks in their worst moments of life (and some, in their best).  They are the lost seeking their way, the guilty seeking forgiveness, the erring not even aware of their wrongs, the living in love with all the wrong things, and the dying without hope.  All we have to give them is Christ.  And Christ is enough.

Original sin is the common wound of us all and actual sin tears at this wound until its pain threatens life itself.  It is painful and it is desperate because sin is death without the healing grace of Christ to restore the broken.  It is no wonder that our people are not calm and reasonable and easy to deal with.  Those who know their wounds are fixated upon them and beg for another picture stronger than the mortal pain they know.  Those who do not know their wounds will find themselves shocked by the diagnosis and the prognosis.  But they also will be surprised by the promise of an answer to sin in the bloody death of another and answer to death in the grave of Him who died for us all and rose to plant us in hope.  

Your pastor carries your wounds in him -- not because He is the Savior but because He serves the Savior with the Savior's love and mercy.  It is easy for the pastor to despair for all the wounded and wounds he meets and it is easy for his family to wrestle with that same kind of despair -- sharing their husband and father with a huge and different family in addition to theirs.  But it works.  It has worked.  We do not need to reinvent the Church but to be faithful.  We do not need to make pretty what cannot or to put a good face upon death.  We need to be faithful in the Word and Sacraments of our gracious God. The Church needs to do the same thing.  We cannot turn away the wounded or broken because serving them is messy or costly but neither can we get down into the muck of their sin and become like them -- to do so would be to surrender our hope and to render ourselves worthless to the task of saving some.  Neither can we afford to be idealistic in presuming that we are the healers or that everyone can be saved.  Grace and mercy are offered to all and some will inevitably reject them as those once rejected Christ.  It is the painful tension of our calling.  But God is at work in our midst -- saving and rescuing through the Gospel proclaimed and by the power of the Spirit turning deathless ends into endless futures.  

In the midst of all this mess, pain, and death, God reveals beauty.  The music of angels sung from our own lips, the vision of the eternal feast right here in the present Eucharist, the hope spoken right here in the face of death, and the arts which deliver with noble purpose to ear, eye, taste, and smell the glimpse of heaven.  The vision is not beauty to replace reality but beauty right here in the terrible reality of a world gone astray, virtue surrendered to vice, selfishness replacing sacrifice, and self-interest to govern everything about life.  My friends, every church is a field hospital or MASH unit, planted by God in the midst of the battlefield, equipped with the healing balm of the Gospel, and able to save many.  Let us not rejoice in what we cannot do but what we are able to do with God's own resources.  And let us pass them on and patch them up so that they may enter the fray again and fight the good fight of faith until they wear the victor's crown of glory.   Good Lent, my friends!