Sermon by Dr. George Bryant Wirth
September 23, 2007
CHRIST AT THE CENTER:
THE FAITH OF MOTHER TERESA
Scripture:
Psalm 22:1-5, Matthew 11:1-6, James 1:1-8
INTRODUCTION
When Mother Teresa visited
You see, like many of you, I have
always looked up to her – Mother Teresa of
So, again like many of you, I
was surprised and somewhat shaken when I read the cover story in Time Magazine
three weeks ago, entitled: “The Secret Life of Mother Teresa: Newly Published
Letters Reveal a Beloved Icon’s 50-Year Crisis of Faith.” (Time Magazine,
September 3, 2007)
This was not a story about
yet another high profile Christian caught up in a sexual scandal or found out
for embezzling funds – no, this was far more serious. This was and is a story about a well-known
and highly respected spiritual woman who supposedly lost her faith but kept it
secret.
And that is why I decided to
change the sermon title for today.
Instead of preaching about “The Tower of Babel” (which wasn’t coming
along all that well anyway), this sermon is about “The Faith of Mother
Teresa.” Once again, as we have
acknowledged from this pulpit before, “Life is what happens when you’ve made
other plans.”
I
The recently published book
that has brought all of this out into the open, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My
Light,” was compiled and edited by Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, who knew Mother
Teresa for twenty years as her friend and spiritual counselor, and who is now
the priest in charge of the process of her becoming a saint in the Catholic
Church.
As you might have guessed,
many people are upset that Mother Teresa’s personal and private letters, which
she requested never to be made public, have now been exposed to a world-wide
audience. But Fr. Kolodiejchuk, in his
preface to this book, offers an explanation:
“Mother Teresa could not hide her work
among the poor, but what she did manage to keep hidden…were the most profound
aspects of her relationship with God.
She was determined to keep these secrets…far from mortal eyes…
(But) providentially, Mother Teresa’s
spiritual directors preserved some of her correspondence. Thus, when testimonies and documents were
gathered during the process of her beatification and canonization, the remarkable
story of her intimate relationship with Jesus, hidden from even her closest
collaborators, was discovered.
In contrast to her ‘ordinariness,’
Mother Teresa’s confidences reveal previously unknown depths of holiness and
may very well lead her to be ranked among the great mystics of the church.”
(From the Preface of “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” by Fr. Brian
Kolodiejchuch, M.C., PhD, Doubleday, 2007)
Whether or not we agree with
what the author has said and done, Mother Teresa’s letters are now available to
anyone who wants to read them. So let me
come right to the heart of the matter as I quote from this one, written to Fr.
Joseph Neuner in April of 1961. And
remember, this is long after the young twelve year old Albanian girl named
Agnes Bojaxhiu sensed her call to become a missionary in 1928, and took her
vows as a nun in 1931, and became Mother Teresa who started The Missionaries of
Charity in 1948 in Calcutta where she and her sisters have ministered to the
poorest of the poor.
Many years later, this is
what she wrote to Fr. Neuner:
“-Since 1949 or 50, this terrible
sense of loss – this untold darkness – this loneliness, this continual longing
for God – which gives me that pain deep down in my heart – darkness is such
that I really do not see – neither with my mind nor with my reason – the place
of God in my soul is blank… - I just long and long for God… - Sometimes I hear my own heart cry out ‘My
God’ and nothing else comes – the torture and pain I can’t explain.” (Pages 1-2 from the Introduction)
The
following year, 1962, she wrote again to Father Neuner:
“If I ever become a saint – I will
surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will
continually be absent from heaven – to light the light of those in darkness on
earth.” (ibid, Page 1)
This was, according to the author,
“a kind of mission statement” for Mother Teresa’s life. At the age of 12 she heard Jesus say “Come be
my light,” and from that day on, she strove to be a light of God’s love in the
lives of those who were struggling in the darkness. For Mother Teresa, however, “the paradoxical
and totally unexpected cost of her mission was that she herself would live in
that ‘terrible darkness’ for many years to come.” (ibid, Page 1)
In fact, just before
traveling to Oslo, Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in December of 1979,
where she, in all of her simplicity and humility, stood before that
distinguished audience and spoke into the television cameras broadcasting her
words to millions around the world, declaring that “It is not enough for us to
say ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,’ since dying on the cross,
Christ had ‘made Himself the hungry one – the naked one – the homeless one,”
thereby calling us to reach out to others in His holy name…Just twelve weeks
before saying all of that and more in Oslo, Mother Teresa sent these words to
another spiritual director, Rev. Michael Van der Peet:
“Jesus has a very special love for
you. (But) as for me – the silence and
the emptiness is so great – that I look and do not see, - listen, and do not
hear.” (From Time Magazine Article,
September 3, 2007 by David Van Biema, Page 36).
So, my friends, how can we
make any kind of sense out of this? And
what are we to do with it, with this secret now revealed about Mother Teresa,
who cared for, loved and helped to heal all those suffering, dying people, and
yet whose own heart seemed broken by the absence of the Holy One who had once
spoken to her, but then remained silent for almost 50 years?
II
One thing is certain – there
are no easy answers here, no glib religious clichés that can take away Mother
Teresa’ struggle and pain, much less our own, as we look for light in the
darkness, love in the midst of loneliness, hope in the valley of despair, and
faith during those hard times when we cannot feel that God’s presence is there.
It happened to Helen Hayes,
that grand old lady of the screen and stage whom I have told you about
before. Her daughter was stricken with
polio and died far too young, and that actress felt the curtain of grief come
down as she shut herself off from friends and from God.
In her book, “I Believe,”
this is how she told the story:
“I cut God out of my life and didn’t
have the nerve to ask Him back in again.
Nevertheless, I went to my church in
And suddenly, I realized that I was
one of them. In my need, I saw their
need too, and felt an interdependence with them. I experienced a flood of compassion for
people, and have never since felt separated from the love of God.” (From “This I Believe,” by Helen Hayes, Simon
and Schuster)
The reason why I have told
that story a number of times is that many of us can identify with Helen Hayes
as she faced suffering in her life, and also because the story about being in a
New York City church makes me think of you sitting here in this sanctuary,
Sunday after Sunday, bringing to this sacred place your private sorrow and
personal pain, lifting it all up to God in prayer. Helen Hayes was healed, relieved of her grief
and able once more to experience the presence of the Lord. So it has been for many of us. But Mother Teresa’s letters reveal that she
did not feel the presence of Jesus, even though she went on working and helping
to heal others in His name.
It happened to C.S. Lewis as
well, who after the death of his beloved wife Joy in 1960, was plunged into a
kind of living hell on earth. Lewis
wrote a book about that agonizing time in his life entitled “A Grief Observed,”
and so forthright was he about his sense of God’s abandonment, that the book
was originally published under the pseudonym of N.W. Clerk (See Forward by
Madeleine L’Engle, Page 5).
Here’s why – just listen to
the depth of C.S. Lewis’ cry for help:
“…Where is God? This is one of the most disquieting
symptoms. When you are happy, so happy
that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel
His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to
Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with
open arms.
But go to Him when your need is
desperate, when all other help is vain, and who do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of
bolting…on the inside. After that,
silence…there are no lights in the windows.
It might be an empty house. Was
it ever inhabited? It seems so once…What
can this mean? Why is He so present a
commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of
trouble?” (From “A Grief Observed,” by
C.S. Lewis, Harper San Francisco, 1961, Pages 17-18).
Toward the end of this book,
Lewis begins to emerge from the valley of the shadow and writes “I have
gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted.”
And he went on to write more
about his restoration of faith until C.S. Lewis died in November of 1963, the
same day as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
But for Mother Teresa, there
did not seem to be that same kind of restoration of a sense of God’s presence
in her life. At the time of her death at
the age of 87 on the 5th of September, ten years ago, Mother Teresa
had endured what felt like God’s absence for a long, long time.
Time Magazine described it
this way:
“The absence seems to have started at
almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in
Which is why some people now
think and have said that Mother Teresa, “The Saint Of The Gutters,” the
founding visionary leader of The Missionaries of Charity in the city of
Calcutta…that Mother Teresa had lost her faith and kept it a secret throughout
her life.
CONCLUSION
Well, what do you think? Having read most of the letters in this book,
“Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” as we conclude our sermon, let me tell you
what I think.
Mother Teresa was not an
atheist. She believed in the reality of
God and dedicated her life to Him. So I
think that differentiates her from the person described in James, Chapter 1,
who doubted the very existence of God, “being double minded and unstable in
every way,” and therefore was not able to “receive anything from the
Lord.” In other words, if you don’t
accept that God lives, then you won’t expect God to give you anything.
Just the opposite was true
for Mother Teresa. She knew God was
there, and she constantly asked and prayed that He would help her care for the
poor, the sick, the suffering and the dying people with whom she shared
everything the Lord gave to her. But
sadly and painfully, she did that without being able to feel His presence for
most of her life’s journey.
Moreover, Mother Teresa loved
Jesus and trusted in His grace, even though she could not always hear His voice
or see His face. Like John the Baptist,
locked in the darkness of a prison cell, who sent his disciples to Jesus asking
“Are you the One who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”, Mother Teresa
longed to hear those same words Jesus sent back to John: “Go and tell him that
the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf
hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matthew
11:2-5).
And that is where Mother
Teresa found Jesus, as she touched those very same people in His name. Perhaps that might even be described as her
creed: “In as much as you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have
done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40).
And finally, I think Mother
Teresa’s faith can ultimately be described with the words which Jesus cried out
on the cross: “My God, my God, why have
You forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Those
words, originally written in the 22nd Psalm by King David, go on to
say:
My God, I cry day by day, but You do not answer…yet
You are holy…and in You, our ancestors trusted…to You they cried, and were saved…in
You they trusted, and were not put to shame (Psalm 22:1-5).
You see, Mother Teresa
realized that God had called her to be identified with the suffering of Jesus,
and with the pain and sorrow of the people whom He came into this world to
save. So the cross that Albanian nun was
willing to bear empowered her to live and love and labor in the midst of the
darkness and despair of
Soren Kierkegaard once said
that “Faith sees best in the darkness,” and that was the story of Mother
Teresa’s life. No one in our time has
done more for the poor. When she
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, the statistics of her ministry with The
Missionaries of Charity were staggering: 960,000 patients cared for in her
dispensaries, 47,000 lepers looked after in 54 clinics, 7,500 children educated
in her schools, 3,400 destitute and dying people ministered to in her 23
hospices, 1,600 orphans brought up in her 20 homes. (From an Associated Press news release,
December 1979). And all of those numbers,
of course, have increased exponentially around the world over the past 28
years.
But what has impressed me
more than statistics are some of the final words in this book, which actually
were among the last words anyone ever heard Mother Teresa say before she died
peacefully that night of September 5, 1997.
One of the sisters looked through the open door of her room and this is
what she witnessed:
“I saw Mother alone, facing…a picture
of the Holy Face…and she was saying ‘Jesus, I have never refused you anything.’ I thought she was talking to someone, so I
went in…and again heard the same words: ‘Jesus, I have never refused you
anything.’” (From “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” Page 331)
That was the promise Mother
Teresa made in 1928 when Jesus called her to “come be my light.” And that was the promise she kept all the
days of her life, until she died.
I don’t know how long it will
take for Mother Teresa to be officially made a saint. But can you imagine the great celebration
among all the saints in heaven when Mother Teresa arrived, as she and they
heard the Lord Jesus Himself say “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter at last into the joy of my
kingdom!” And that is where she will be
for all of eternity.
In the name of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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