Knowing Our Needs
Presented by Ken Kline Smeltzer

June 11, 2000, Modesto California Church of the Brethren

The conviction and testimony of western faith and the scripture is that God knows our needs and cares for us. That is our faith, that God knows our needs and cares for us. While God knows and cares in different ways, perhaps more compete and perfect than we can imagine, as the creation of God, we are called to know and care for each other, too. And that is just what Dennis endeavored to do, quite successfully. As a healer, friend, family man, and faith-filled person, Dennis sought to know our needs and care for us, all of us. 

As I searched the scriptures for expressions of God's knowing and caring ways, that Dennis also embodied, I settled on a trinity of texts, that uplift the different ways that God cares for us. 

The first is through those people like Jesus and other Physicians of the Spirit, who will sit and eat and suffer with those excluded from the mainstream community and help restore them to health and wholeness and belonging. Listen to Matthew 9:10-13. 

For many years the tax-collectors and sinners, the outcasts, of our communities were the mentally ill. In fact, they often are still, living outside the accepted norms of work and home and relationships. It was to these persons, these lepers, demoniacs, tax-collectors, and "sinners" that Jesus directed much of his caring and his efforts to include them in God's redefined community of caring. Indeed, this is the same work that Dennis carried on in community based mental health care, and in individual conversations and therapy, in his relationships and daily work. His family says "he was driven by a desire to help others and that doing so gave him great satisfaction. His work of caring, as he put it, "had inherent value!" 

Somehow Dennis heard Jesus say "Go and learn what God means by saying 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice!'" So Dennis went and he learned and kept on learning how to offer mercy and not to sacrifice others or himself in misguided efforts to buy God's approval or find satisfaction in things or wealth or fame. You know, it's fitting that one of his favorite sayings was, "There is no justice, only love." And that's what Jesus is saying here, "It's not about righteousness and justice, it's about mercy and love." 

I remember one of the jokes said about Dennis at his retirement roast. Someone said that he was like the man who came upon someone lying beaten and wounded in a ditch, and full of compassion said, "Someone ought to find the man who did this, he needs help!" 

In Matthew 6 we hear Jesus telling those gathered on the mountain, (Matt. 6:25-27, 31-34) Somehow this seems like something Dennis would have said or repeated. "Each day has enough trouble of its own, so let's just start where we are and go on from there."

Dennis was a rather calm and even-tempered man. He was a thoughtful man, concerned and committed to making lives better, but not one to worry much. I think he knew that God knows our needs, all of them, and is working to meet them, but that it might take some time.

Now I guess that might be a mantra for psychiatrists and psychologists and ministers and healers of all types, that "this will take some time to get better." But Dennis also did something in the meantime, using resources of his faith. He helped people "seek first the presence and spirit of life and right relationships with others" or in religious language "God's kingdom and righteousness." 

I'm told that when feelings were running strong in the family and discord was breaking out that Dennis would call everyone together and ask each member of the family to talk about what they wanted or how they felt. Knowing their needs they could then work together to meet as many as possible. 

And when things weren't going so well, Dennis would remind himself and others, "Well, in 30 years it probably won't make much difference." 

It's good to remember that God knows our needs and that worrying about a lot of things doesn't help much. God will see to our food and clothing and shelter - to our life - we just need to see to our relationships with God and one another! But even there, God will help us. In Romans 8:26, Paul writes that "the Spirit of God helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, to ask for, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express." 

I think Dennis knew the secret of silence. He was not a wordy man. He let his compassion come forth from his understanding eyes and gentle presence. 

Though Dennis was a man who knew many of our needs and did his best to help us address them, he also knew, as a physician, that he could not bring healing by himself. He knew that the Spirit, the life-Spirit or God-Spirit, must heal and empower our own spirits to bring newness of life in ways that words and therapy and medications and we ourselves cannot. 

It is a good thing to know. For knowing this we can relax a bit, stop striving, and wait for the One who knows our needs to come and minister unto us - for all that we need, God's hand will provide, with great faithfulness, mercy, and love, in ways beyond our words and worry. Amen.

Meditation shared by Ken Kline Smeltzer
Memorial Services for Dennis F. Rupel
Holy Cross United Methodist Church - Stockton, California
Modesto Church of the Brethren - Modesto, California
June 10 and 11, 2000