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Tom Coop Matthew 25:31-40 September 4, 2016

Mother Teresa: The Untold Story So …. dies and goes to heaven. God greets her at the Pearly Gates and says, “Are you hungry, Mother Teresa?” “I could eat,” she replies. So God opens up a can of tuna fish and reaches for a loaf of rye bread. While she is eating this humble meal, Mother Teresa looks down into hell and sees its inhabitants devouring steak and pheasant, pastries and wine. Curious, but trusting, Mother Teresa keeps quiet. The next day God again invites Mother Teresa to join him for a meal. Once more it is tuna and rye bread. Again Mother Teresa looks down on the people in hell. They are enjoying caviar, champagne, lamb, truffles, and chocolates. Still, she says nothing. The following mealtime arrives and God again opens a can of tuna fish. Finally, Mother Teresa can contain herself no longer. Meekly, she says, “God, I am so grateful to be with you in heaven and so happy to be rewarded for my obedient life of service. “But here in heaven all I get is tuna and rye bread, whereas in the other place they are eating like kings and queens. I don’t understand.” God lets out a big sigh and says, “Let’s be honest, Mother, for just two people does it pay to cook?” 2

I guess if it was just God and one more, that one more should be Mother Teresa!

In the late summer of 1910, a baby girl was born in eastern , a volatile place that was then Yugoslavia, now the Republic of Macedonia. Her parents named her Agnes. Her father was a politician and died when she was only eight years old. Rumors were that he died from being poisoned by a political rival. This left the family in fairly difficult financial circumstances. But their faith sustained them. With her mother and brother and sister, Agnes attended church every day, and she sang in the church choir. Her widowed mother volunteered in the neighborhood, caring for an invalid alcoholic woman and later taking six orphaned children into her own home. It was a model of servanthood that young Agnes would never forget. By the time she was 12, Agnes sensed God calling her to ministry, but she wanted to be sure, so she talked to her local priest who told her how to know: “It’s through your joy,” he said. “If you feel really happy by the idea that God might call you to serve him, then this is the evidence that you have a call. “The deep inner joy that you feel is the compass that indicates your direction in life.” 3

Think about that. Isn’t that true? It has been for me in my life!

Well, Agnes knew she felt that joy, so when she came of age, in 1928 at the age of 18, she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto at Loreto Abbey in Ireland, with a view to becoming a missionary. The sisters gave her a new name: “Sister Teresa.” Once in Ireland, she was never again to see her mother or her sister. That same year, she set off with other Sisters of Loreto to India where she would serve as a school teacher for the next 18 years of her life. Sister Teresa was a popular nun, cheerful and energetic. Then in September of 1946, when she was 36 years old, on a train ride to an annual retreat up in the Himalayan mountains, she had an encounter with Christ. As she later wrote: “It was in that train, I heard Christ’s call to give up all and follow Him into the slums – to serve Him in the poorest of the poor…. “I knew it was His will and that I had to follow Him.” She spent the next two years working within the Catholic hierarchy to get permission to follow this calling. Now, if you had watched the movie you would also know that her Mother Superior was never on board with her leaving the convent and ministering to the poor in the slums of Calcutta. But, finally, in 1948, the pope granted her permission to temporarily leave the convent to pursue her new “call.” 4

So, at 38 years of age, she left the security of the Loreto community and exchanged her black and white nun’s habit for garb of the street – a white and blue sari, decorated with a blue border. And thus she began a ministry in the streets of Calcutta that would last almost fifty years. In 1950, with some of her former pupils, she received permission from the Vatican to start a new order. The new order she formed was called the . All of the members were required to take the three basic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, as well as an additional vow of pledging service to the poor, whom Mother Teresa spoke of as the embodiment of Christ. The nuns were not cloistered, and there was no vow of silence. They lived simply, shared work equally … (Mother Teresa helped with the daily washing until she was too feeble to do so) … and served the dying and destitute with food, medical supplies, and companionship—whatever they needed most. Teresa wrote in her diary that her first year was fraught with difficulties. She had no income and had to resort to begging for food and supplies. Teresa experienced doubt, loneliness and the temptation to return to the comfort of convent life during these early months. She wrote in her diary: 5

“Our Lord wants me to be a free nun covered with the poverty of the cross. Today, I learned a good lesson. The poverty of the poor must be so hard for them. “While looking for a home I walked and walked till my arms and legs ached. “I thought how much they must ache in body and soul, looking for a home, food and health. “Then, the comfort of Loreto came to tempt me. ‘You have only to say the word and all that will be yours again,’ the Tempter kept on saying ... “Of free choice, my God, and out of love for you, I desire to remain and do whatever be your Holy will in my regard. “I did not let a single tear come.” The Missionaries of Charity began as a small congregation with 13 members in Calcutta. By 1997, when she passed away, it had grown to more than 610 missions in 123 countries, with 4,000 sisters running orphanages, AIDS hospices and charity centers worldwide. Caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless, and victims of floods, epidemics, and famine.

In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, “for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace.” Part of her acceptance speech went like this: 6

“It is not enough for us to say: ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbor.’ “Saint John says that you are a liar if you say you love God and you don’t love your neighbor. (1 John 4:20) “How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? “And so this is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt.” She refused the conventional ceremonial banquet given to laureates, and asked that the $192,000 award be given to the poor in India, stating that earthly rewards were important only if they helped her help the world’s needy.

But working tirelessly for those less fortunate around the world took its toll on her. After suffering numerous heart attacks, pneumonia, and malaria, she died on September 5, 1997. In 2002 she was beatified by Pope John Paul II. Beatification means to be regarded as “blessed” by the . Her canonization is scheduled for September 4th, 2016. That’s today!

But, Mother Teresa isn’t just a Catholic saint, she is a saint for all people! 7

She is to have said, “It matters to the individual what church he belongs to. “If that individual thinks and believes that this is the only way to God for her or him, this is the way God comes into their life. “If they do not know any other way and if they have no doubt so that they do not need to search, then this is their way to salvation.” “I’ve always said we should help a Hindu become a better Hindu, a Muslim become a better Muslim, a Catholic become a better Catholic.” And so those brought to any of their homes received medical attention and were afforded the opportunity to die with dignity, according to the rituals of their faith. Muslims were read the Quran, Hindus received water from the Ganges, and Catholics received the Last Rites. Mother Teresa said that the biggest disease today is not leprosy, nor tuberculosis, not Aids, nor cancer. Rather, the biggest disease in the world today is the “feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everyone.” “A beautiful death,” she said, “is for people who lived like animals to die like angels—loved and wanted.”

But, there is more to Mother Teresa than most people realize. A book was published in 2007 called, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. 8

It is mostly a collection of her writings to priests, letters she requested they destroy after her death. Instead, they released them in the hope of showing the innermost thoughts of a woman whom the world looked on with reverence. The letters reveal that beginning almost from the day she established her ministry in the slums, Mother Teresa’s spiritual life dried up. The voice and rich communion she felt with God earlier in her life ended, and she was left with a void and darkness that stayed with her for the next almost 50 years. All of this was a secret side of Mother Teresa. On the outside, she continued to lead her nuns, minister to the poorest of India’s untouchables, open centers of mercy. Inwardly, she also embraced Jesus’ experience of abandonment on the cross, when he cried out in agony, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mother Teresa lived her public life loving, smiling and healing, bringing light to others’ darkness. She lived her interior life abandoned, loving, seeking, doubting in the darkness.

Ten years after her spiritual life dried up, Pope Pius XII died. Mother Teresa prayed to the deceased pope for “proof that God is pleased with the Society” of nuns she led. 9

In that instant, the darkness and suffering of the previous 10 years lifted. She had a five-week respite when she felt God’s presence. But then it disappeared again and never returned. Not surprisingly, Mother Teresa felt like a hypocrite. Here she was the world’s foremost symbol of piety and prayer, and there were times she couldn’t pray.

The apparent depth of her spiritual suffering was terrible, but it should come as no surprise that she doubted. I mean, she was human. Yes, it should come as no surprise that she doubted. For doubt is part of the journey of faith. Despite popular perception, doubt and faith go hand in hand. Doubt is faith’s friend. Doubt is not the opposite of faith, certainty is. Certainty, it is said, is the sin of bigots, terrorists, and Pharisees.

It was St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic of the 16th century that gave a name to this common experience. He called it “The dark night of the soul” The time when someone feels completely abandoned by God. Such experience is often described as being like a desert. Something seems to be sapping the energy of our faith and we feel dried up. But it is normal to have that kind of experience. 10

You see, whether we believe in God or not, doesn’t actually affect whether God exists or not, though. God’s love for us, God’s mysterious, unfathomable love, does not depend on us feeling loved all the time. Holiness is more about how you live and who you are, than about what you believe. Mother Teresa reminds us that the focus should be on living to serve other people. Her holiness is revealed in her extraordinary life of service. Her spiritual maturity is shown in the depth of her doubting.

Archbishop Ferdinand Perier of Calcutta said much the same thing. He urged Mother Teresa to look around her at the people in the slums being served, at the nuns giving their lives to God’s work. “You have exterior facts enough to see that God blesses your work,” he wrote. “Therefore God is satisfied. Guided by faith, by prayer and by reason with a right intention, you have enough. Feelings are not required and often may be misleading.” Now, isn’t that interesting? Feelings are not required and often may be misleading. I think we can get intimidated into thinking that everyone but us is feeling some kind of union with God, some kind of intimate prayer life. 11

I know I felt that way in seminary. Everyone else seemed to have an extraordinary devotional and prayer life, and there I was, wondering what was for lunch. The priests to whom Mother Teresa confessed saw things in her life and in her work that she could not. They saw the fruits of her following Christ. They saw the fruits of her following his command to love the poor and the untouchables of India. Mother Teresa’s feelings were of abandonment and rejection and forsakenness. Yet, she didn’t let those feelings direct her life. She continued to follow the commands she read in our Scripture passage in Matthew and the command she heard on that train back in 1946. And she followed them until the day she died in 1997. And because of Mother Teresa, I can put some of my own doubts and dryness in a new perspective. If Mother Teresa could live in profound spiritual darkness yet minister with inspiring grace and love, certainly I can live with my own modest spiritual dryness and doubts, and be willing to do what needs to be done for the sake of The Kingdom. We all experience the storms of our emotions – feeling frustrated or lost or tired or abandoned. Yet we are more than our feelings, and we can live beyond emotion’s tyranny.

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All but a few of us have felt abandoned by God. All but a few of us even have had doubts about God’s existence. It is not unlikely that most of you all here this morning may be experiencing yourselves, to some degree or another, emotionally abandoned and intellectually doubtful. Mother Teresa is our patron saint – for all of us who experience the darkness of mind or emotion. Though she did not feel Christ’s love, Teresa rose every morning at 4:30 to say, “Your happiness is all I want.” If she could do so much with so little spiritual consolation, what might we do with just a little more willingness and humility?

As one of the best-known 20th century humanitarians, Mother Teresa was a symbol of Christ’s light to a hurting world. “Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier,” she said. “Be the living expression of God’s kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, and kindness in your smile.” I couldn’t have said it better! Amen!