July 16, 2023 - The Rev. Bill Blaine-Wallace

Tenants Harbor, Maine | Proper 9A

Gospel wisdom from Sandra Pankhurst: “When at first you don’t succeed, redefine the meaning of success.”

Sandra Pankhurst was founder and director of Strategic Trauma Cleaning Services in Frankston, Australia. The company cleans up crime scenes and suicide sites. They assist the mentally and physically disabled with home maintenance. They clear out hoarder homes and the likes. Ms. Pankhurst, who died in 2021, described her business as cleaning up messes no one else wants do deal with. 

Ms. Pankhurst was not your typical successful business owner. The Guardian newspaper described her as “a person who has led many lives within a life: adopted as a child, then severely abused by her adoptive parents; emerging from a failed marriage and coming out as a transgender woman in the 1980s; working as a drag queen and sex worker; and eventually starting her own cleaning business in the 1990s.”

Last week, Victoria and I watched the 2022 documentary about Ms. Pankhurst and her cleaning service. The title of the documentary is Clean.

The rotten tomato score shows a wide discrepancy. The tomatometer score, based on critical reviews, gave it 100%. The audience score: 36%.

The discrepancy makes sense. I have seen PG-13 depictions of violent murder scenes, stains of decomposed bodies, homes of hoarders and general squalor. All of which are revealed in R-rated reality in the documentary. Hard to watch. And for Victoria and me, well worth it. 

Ms. Pankhurst died of severe COPD, after decades of struggling to breathe. She was a smoker. And her disease was due in part from exposure to extremely harsh cleaning agents during the first years of work, when she did not wear a mask. 

Ms. Pankhurst lived a Christ-like life. Radical compassion and care for the untouchables, the disenfranchised, the inconsolable, the so-called criminal element, the erased, and ridiculed.

Moreover, she recruited colleagues whose own lives parallel those they serve. Folks who are struggling to get their lives back together. 

The Specialized Trauma Cleaning Services mirrors what one of my heroes, Will Campbell, understood the church to be: “One cat in a ditch and one no count son-of-a-gun trying to pull her out.” 

Church, at its best, celebrates what I call the sacrament of shared sorrow and suffering. From such a sacrament emerges a solidarity that incites a relational joy. Sizzling joy inspires fiery passion for justice. 

The Specialized Trauma Cleaning Services zealously embraces grunt work. Another way of saying it: STCS, as their logo reads, re-defines the definition of success. 

The Parable of the Sower, at first glance, is a morality play. The story stirs in us a desire to scratch our heads. What kind of soil am I? What does good soil look and act like. How can I enrich my soil? 

The more I wrestle with these questions, the further down I go into the be-and-do-better rabbit hole.  

I often follow paths that lead nowhere. I make commitments that are uprooted. I am distracted by thin cares and appealing possibilities for more and better. 

And I keep striving to plant my life in good soil. 

What, exactly, is good soil? 

The Parable of the Sower also is found in the gospels of Mark and Luke, each with its particular nuance. Matthew says good soil understands. Mark says good soil accepts. Luke says those who have good and noble hearts. I guess that’s the go to 10-10-10 fertilizer. Still, weeds grow, plants wilt, dry out and drown, and sometimes fail. Like our lives.

And that leads me back to the parable’s title: The Parable of the Sower. The parable is less about the quality of our faith and actions and more about God’s fiercely devoted heart. 

When it comes to seeding love, God is generous, if not reckless, indiscriminate, if not wasteful, determined, as in possessed. God, in this parable, does not get the less is more thing. The heart of God is profligate. 

Good for God. Great for us. We all need love over-seeded in our lives now and again. And at times we really, really need love over-seeded again and again. And for that, thank you Strategic Trauma Cleaning Services. Thank any and all who show up when we are knee deep in you know what.                                                                                                                                                                                         

Here’s what I imagine Ms. Pankhurst saying to me when I am obsessing about the quality of my dirt: “Get over yourself! It’s not all about you! Get with your neighbor. Pick up a mop, and don’t forget to put on your mask.”

We belong to the post-resurrection Church. Jesus, for us, is less a person and more a way of life. Jesus was back then. Christ is right now. Christ as presence. Christ as action. Christ in and as us.

Christ as us. Those who have finer polish and more means than the majority of the world. Our social location calls for a Christ-like caution. 

In the Specialized Trauma Cleaning Service, the distinction between server and served is transfigured into us, just us. Little noblesse oblige in the body of Christ. 

Generosity of the more privileged toward the less privileged has little to do with the Jesus Movement. Just us, all of us, making our way together through life-the-way-it-really-is. Down and out. Up and out. And those in between. 

A few days ago, at breakfast, while reflecting on having watched Clean the night before, Victoria said, “The fundamental questions are, for all of us, it seems: “Am I enough? Do I have enough?” 

When we ask these questions in a materially saturated culture, the answer is usually no, whether we are on a fixed income or have a big bank account spilling over into investments. 

Always scratching in the dirt to be more and have more. A less anxious me. The latest driver to correct my slice. Or, more concisely and succinctly put, words of Damon, protagonist in Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel: Demon Copperhead: “The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in and day out.” 

When we ask Victoria’s questions about enough, from the standpoint of a less domesticated Jesus Movement, the answers are more nuanced. 

From such a social location, our faith might whisper: “Maybe I am enough. Possibly we are enough.” 

Gospel identity is simple: We relate, therefore I am. 

Amen.