The Pitt - Pop Culture Sermon #1

What profit is there in my blood, if I go down to the Pit? (Psalm 30:10a)

Please be seated!

Back in seminary, at the conclusion of my summertime hospital chaplaincy internship, my mentor- who served with me in the emergency room of the downtown level 1 trauma center hospital- said that if I learned nothing else that summer, he hoped that I had learned to pay attention. It's kinda tricky to teach chaplaincy, but among his methods, he would have me walk up and down the halls of the emergency department slowly- slowly!- and pay attention, look-listen-notice-wonder, in the rooms, at the nurses stations, down the hallways, out in the waiting room. He hoped I had learned to really, slowly pay attention that summer. He said that even if I never set foot in another hospital, ER chaplaincy would serve me for my entire career in the church, because it was his belief that the world outside the walls of the hospital was one big ER waiting room, and in the six years since that internship, he has seemed quite right about that.

Have you ever seen the TV show ER?

It ran from from 1994 to 2009 and I always knew about it, but had never given it much thought until I watched another emergency department focused hospital drama starring Noah Wyle as an ER doctor. The show is called The Pitt and it's, the best. The BEST. The Pitt aired this year on HBO Max and it is a realistic hour by hour account of a single shift in a hospital emergency department. The first season is 15 episodes, each episode is one hour and covers one hour of a shift from 7am to 10pm, that spills over into the evening for reasons that you will find out when you watch it.

The Pitt tells a kind, sensitive, paced, and complicated story of the lives of doctors, nurses, residents, EMTs, patients, and medical students who are on the very first day of their ER rotation. It's not sensationalized. It doesn't fall into soap opera tropes. There is no background music that dramatizes moments into being bigger or more emotional than they are. It is just the stories of complicated people, on a complicated day, in their complicated lives.

Over fifteen hours, The Pitt tells the stories of people without health insurance, people who are underhoused, and underemployed, people with complicated family systems and tense family dynamics; the show broaches the epidemic of male loneliness, maternal health care, substance use disorder, gun violence, end of life decisions and care, post traumatic stress disorder; it shows how all of these issues, as complex as they are, are further distorted and inflected through the realities of racism and sexism and hospital budget cuts and political propaganda and how these things all cut evenly across the lives of both the patients and the doctors. The Pitt is complicated show full of complicated scenarios for a world that feels as complicated as it ever has.

And it really does feel as much as ever, that the whole world has become, is becoming, has always been just a big ER waiting room.

Which is not to say that everybody has a penetrating chest wound in need of a thoracotomy and intubation orrrr an unvaccinated case of adolescent measles with secondary meningitis, but the issues of the world feel so prolific, so major, so broad, and so varied, that I can't really think of a single person that isn't dealing with something big and weird and complicated. So much so that it feels like we ought to stop asking each other "you doing okay?" and start asking one another "so how long have you been waiting?" and "what are you in for?" Turn to your neighbor and say "what are you in for?"

The problems of the world just feel so tough, don't they. If I could wave my magic wand or flash a bottomless checkbook, I would fix it all right now- my problems, your problems, the things we all face together and the things we face alone. And I wonder what it would be like if we decided that, among the most important things we do at church, we learned here how to pay attention, really pay attention, to one another, to our shared lives, to God's work-- or God's invitation to work-- among us.

I'm not your ER hospital chaplaincy mentor nor am I Noah Wyle as Dr. Rabinovich, and you all, med students beginning your ER rotation, but if I was, I might say, go sit at the bar seating on the front window of Hyperion for an hour- without a book, without your headphones, without your phone, and just watch, and come back and tell me what you see. Or go find a bench on the main drag of Ball Circle on the Mary Wash campus, or you might take a shift volunteering at The Table or at Community Dinner or come to the booth next year at the Pride Festival, and just pay attention, look and listen and notice and wonder. And tell me what you see.

One of the things I find so endearing about The Pitt, is perhaps the same thing I find endearing about, like, Star Trek The Next Generation is a display of leadership and care that feels really quite novel these days, and so much of it feels like a willingness to slow down, pay attention, and believe what you see.

On The Pitt,

it's how they recognize a vaso-occlusive sickle cell crisis,

it's how they notice a colleague having a panic attack in the children's ward,

it's how they realize a trans patient is being misgendered on their chart,

it's how they spot Whittaker sneaking off after his shift,

it's how they find the rats that have escaped into the ward.

The problems of the world feel so many and so varied and I can only wonder what it felt like for Jesus to go from town to town, especially as his reputation evolved, and to be met by so much need by so many people who were even just grabbing at the hem of his robe for help. Hunger, illness, death, loneliness, fear, uncertainty, anger, and all dumped in his lap to be fixed. No wonder he commissioned his apostles to be his help, some PAs for our Great Physician. First he sends the 12 and then one chapter later he sends out 72 more disciples. And there is something so curious about his instructions, instructions that I don't think many of us would be too eager to follow to a T, which is to go ahead to the cities where Jesus himself intended to go, take nothing, stay in the houses where you are welcomed, accept what you are given, and minister to who is there. And then come back and tell me what you see.

There's no job description, no program calendar, no social media presence, just showing up to the town, looking around for the hurt, the hungry, the sick, the brokenhearted, and figuring out what to do about it.

We are those 72 that Jesus sent to this town, and even quite a few more than 72, thank God for it. So again, I wonder, when you look out in this city, in our community, when you look around in this room, what do you see? I mean it, really look around in this room... ... ... What do you see? What do you hear? What do you notice? What care is Jesus calling you give? What pain has God equipped you to address?

There is so much pain in the world, there is so much wrong, there is so much evil gone absolutely haywire. And I want to give you |this much| permission to turn your tv off. To shut your laptop, to set down your phone, to close Facebook, and to give your attention to what it immediately in front of you. As my nephew says, looking at screens for that long "literally fries your brain out and if you do it all day you literally become a zombie." And zombies, even if they keep watching and clicking and scrolling, aren't usually paying very good attention. I'm not saying |stop caring| and I'm not saying |become uninformed|, I am saying that if your eyes sting and your brain feels empty and you feel a little detached from your feelings, why don't you turn your phone off, and take a walk up and down the hallway of this big ER and come back and tell us what you see.

Do I think you should watch The Pitt - yes.

Does it have some real intense stuff that might make you feel bad? - yes.

Does the world have some real intense stuff in it that might make you feel bad? - yes.

Do I think you should watch the world around us? - also yes. But slowly. Slowly.

Amen.