Bob Massie

6 Pentecost Proper 10 Year B 7-12-09

©Holly Lyman Antolini

Lections: Amos 7:7-15; Song of Pilgrimage; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29

Blessed are you, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as you chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before you in love. AMEN.

Like the great sweep of arches, tower, stone and light that defines the capaciousness of this great worship space around us here at St. James’s, the opening benediction of the Letter to the Ephesians creates a capacious vision of hope for the community committed to following Christ.  All in one great rolling, run-on Greek sentence in the original, the Ephesians author sets out the full scope of God’s blessing upon us.  God’s blessing, Ephesians tells us, runs to every corner of the universe, and spans the entire length of history, from “the foundation of the world” on into the future, to the very “fullness of time” itself, when at last “the mystery of God’s will” will be fulfilled, as “all things are gathered up in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.”  In this spacious vision, all the diversity of God’s creation will be re-unified in Christ, restored to each other, belonging with and to each other once again, not in uniformity but without division and competition and animosity and violence and fear.  God, affirms Ephesians’ author, “accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will,” and our inheritance as Christ’s brothers and sisters, who have “set our hope on Christ,” is to live in the steadfast hope of this great reconciliation.  We, in our baptisms, have been marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit in a cross upon our foreheads, as the pledge of that inheritance, that inhabiting of redemption even now, while we still wait for the final consummation of all things that this passage promises.

This particular Sunday, we at St. James’s are experiencing more than the mere mark of promise upon our foreheads as a testimony of the Holy Spirit.  We have ju
st witnessed a most concrete enactment of that promise, a kind of advance return on investment, right here, right now.  For some seven years now, this congregation has been praying our fellow congregation member the Rev. Bob Massie through a long, long and at times acutely difficult waiting, not just waiting for the reconciliation of all things, as we all are, but waiting on the organ donor list.  Bob was born a hemophiliac whose “blood factory” did not produce the Factor VIII we all need in order for our blood to clot properly and prevent us from hemorrhaging every time we bruise or cut ourselves.

As if to compensate for this terrible life-long “thorn in the flesh,” Bob also seems to have been born with a concomitant double helping of determination blended with organizational genius.  Perhaps enduring many episodes of bleeding and pain and protracted – you might even say, recalcitrant – healing as a youth and throughout his 50+ years of life tuned Bob’s inner ear and soul to the needs of the vulnerable. Despite his physical difficulties, he has dedicated himself to prophetic ministry, speaking truth to power and calling leaders to account not only in the battle against apartheid in South Africa but also for environmental and economic injustices right here in the U.S. of A.  He seems to have heard God’s voice much as Amos the pruner of sycamores heard it back in the 8^th Century B.C.E., compelling him to be a PLUMB LINE OF JUSTICE, and to point out the “leaning walls” of self-serving policies and their destructive implications wherever he saw them, even when to do so made those responsible intensely uncomfortable.

In that sense, Bob has also shared the lineage and calling of John the Baptist, who, in today’s story in Mark’s Gospel, lands himself in prison for speaking forthrightly to the Roman puppet Herod about his inappropriate relationship with his husband’s wife.  The setting of the story among royal courtiers and its grisly outcome could tempt us to think ourselves far removed from Herod’s “dysfunctional family par excellence.”  We do not send our young daughters to dance for drunken parties!  We would not serve up anyone’s head on a platter!  But let us not miss the quotidian ordinariness of Herod’s type of sin.  How many times in our lives have we known perfectly well what was the “right thing to do” but let the opportunity simply slide by us, fearing that to speak up would risk our appearing weak or impotent, or worse, would expose us to retribution? How many times have shut down the criticizer in order to avoid hearing the criticism?  How many times have we sacrificed the long-term good for a short-term “easy way out?”  Herod, as Mark depicts him in this story, KNEW his own wrongdoing.  How else would he have so quickly perceived that Jesus’ works of power could be John, risen from the dead?  We may not be minor despots wreaking murder; our failures of nerve may be mostly verbal or worse, silent, but most of us are all too familiar with Herod’s face-saving violence.  Not Bob Massie.  Whatever his faults may be, remaining silent in the face of injustice has not been one of them.

As Bob has pursued this remarkable prophetic dedication to the work of justice, his body has seemed almost determined to block his progress.  One of those obstructions took the form of hepatitis, and began to destroy his liver, so that seven years ago, he became eligible to receive a new one.  Several times he was called to the hospital to prepare for surgery as a liver was identified for him.  Once he was even on the operating table.  But then the liver was determined not to be the right genetic “fit,” or in the right condition, to go forward.  And he and his wife Anne and his kids, Katie, John and Sam, returned, once again, to the long discipline of waiting, wondering, consulting, evaluating, exploring options as new techniques for dealing with his liver problems emerged, and through it all, fearing, praying and hoping.  And we too, along with them, have been waiting, wondering, praying and hoping too.   And marveling as, again and again, liver or virtually no liver, he took up his prophetic plumb line and called us to stand with him against injustice.

Last week, Bob and Anne suddenly got a call from the transplant center in Atlanta GA that there was a new possibility on the horizon, and that they should come immediately and make themselves ready.  A young woman had moved much higher than Bob on the organ donor list, and was eligible – indeed, desperately in need of – the next appropriate liver donation.  Her own liver, though perfectly normal in all other respects, refused to make a certain enzyme necessary to health and, in an extremely rare condition, the rest of her body was also failing to make the enzyme.  Bob’s body, on the other hand, manufactures this enzyme without incident outside his liver.  The doctors in Atlanta realized that if the young woman received a new liver from the donor list, her own liver, so healthy in all other respects, could do all the work Bob needed it to do even without the enzyme-producing function.  More extraordinary than that, the young woman’s liver produced Factor VIII.  So if, in what is called “a domino transplant,” Bob could receive her liver as she received her new one, he would, for the first time in his life, be hemophilia-free.

The day before yesterday, in a three-and-a-half-hour surgery (half the time it takes to do a liver transplant normally), and with the loss of only a few ounces of blood so that he didn’t even need a transfusion, Bob Massie received his new liver, as did his young liver-donor in the neighboring operating theatre.  As of yesterday morning, both patients, their bodies adjusting to the receipt of their new organs, were recovering extremely well.  Anne reports that their four white-coated surgeons – Bob identified them as his “strange angels” – were practically dancing down the hallways at the extraordinary combination of skill and grace that has brought about this double healing.

As a final fillip of grace in this extraordinary episode, who should be attending the Massies as their “chaplain on the ground” in Georgia, but my colleague from my days as a vicar in Maine, the Rev. Allan Sandlin, formerly rector of St. Francis-by-the-Sea in Blue Hill Maine and pastor there to Bob Massie’s mother Suzanne.  Though Allan had left Blue Hill and spent almost the last decade as rector of the Episcopal Church in Frankfurt Germany, he had recently taken a cure in Decatur, GA, right near Atlanta. But even more remarkable
, Allan himself had a liver transplant a few years back, after waiting more than a decade for the right liver at the right time.  When the time came for Bob’s surgery, there was Allan, right nearby, shepherding, praying and anointing Bob and Anne through this extraordinary, transformative time, knowing more intimately than anyone else could know all the hopes and fears involved.

What a powerful testimony of grace this is for ALL of us who have been praying for Bob all these years.  What a long journey of sustained hope has brought us here!  There is still lots to pray for; the assimilation of a new organ into the body after transplant, as you no doubt have heard, is a delicate process, fraught with dangers as the natural processes of the body try to reject the foreign organ, no matter how good the match.  Our journey of hope is by no means over.  It will be weeks before we can be sure that Bob is moving “out of the woods,” and he will need careful attention and care for the rest of his life.  But now he has a long “rest of his life” to live, a life, most extraordinarily and miraculously of all, free of hemophilia, and life in which to devote his full energy – and enlist OURS, too! – to the prophetic work God has given him to do.

Ched Myers quotes Markus Barth describing the Letter to the Ephesians as offering “theology as doxology:” the study of God as the work of praise.

Myers writes, “Human history has long mocked the hope for the genuine reconciliation of everything.  Yet the fact that it is a mystery revealed [in Jesus Christ] invites and challenges us to be part of this new ‘administration’ entrusted to Messiah… to live in solidarity with God’s will as ‘citizens’ of this [new] social order [of hope and reconciliation] [Proclamation 6 Series B Pentecost 1, Fortress 1996].

The miracle of Bob Massie’s new liver and new identity as a man free of hemophilia is yet another invitation to all of us to live our lives “radically determined not by the uncertainties & anxieties of the world around us, but by our experience of God’s goodness to us… [to] frame our conduct therefore not by the competitive and anxious mores of the world but by the love & peace that God’s goodness has made possible for us.” [L. William Countryman, New Proclamation Year B 2003]  AMEN.

The Rev. Holly Lyman Antolini St. James’ Episcopal Church, Cambridge Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts
“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”  Paul Farmer