September 10, 2006
The readings today call us to consider how we treat those who are not a part of our clan, those who seem different......outsiders.
We all need our people. We learn early in our lives about the safety of family and kin. We all need a place where we are comfortable, and so we are all wary at times of people we don’t recognize.
In 1972 I worked in a little garage in Millington Tennessee. I had hair down to my shoulders, and most days I was usually pretty grubby from working under cars. Sometimes I would be sent down the street to the dollar store to pick up something for the shop, tape or paper towels, coffee maybe. There was this guy at the dollar store who seemed to be sure I was some kind of bad news. When I cam in he would give me a look that said, “I’ve got my eye on you” and then he would kind of stroll up and down the aisle across from me as if he expected me to steal something, or somehow maybe rub off on his merchandise. I sometimes walked up and down the aisle a few more times than I needed to just to give him a little exercise. He was one of these very clean cut righteous looking kind of guys. He certainly wasn’t part of my clan and I wasn’t part of his. I had him pegged for Southern Baptist.
The next year, my girlfriend and I went to the folk festival in Mountain View Arkansas, and on the way home my old VW decided it wasn’t going to go any faster than twenty miles an hour. It was late on a Sunday afternoon and we had a hundred miles or more to go. I had already been stopped a couple of times on trips through Arkansas by sheriffs who didn’t like my looks and thought it might be a good idea to check me out. I wasn’t any too happy about being stuck there after dark. We found a little service station outside of Bald Knob where the owner was just closing up. He stopped to hear our story and said he’d take a look at the car. It took him two hours, and he had to make a part, but he got us going. He never mentioned religion, but at one point he told us that if we couldn’t fix the car, we could spend the night at his house. He said his wife wouldn’t mind a couple of extras for dinner. This guy too was very clean cut and straight looking and his kindness suggested to me that he must be a church--goer. In that part of the country, I figured that meant that he too must be some kind of Baptist.
The waters of baptism--the waters through which we all passed to get here--have marked us as people called to grow in our ability to love God and our neighbors. Loving God and neighbor is our life work. That’s it. Loving God and neighbor. The stories of our lives--the people we meet, the choices we make, dreams that occupy our thoughts--these will tell us how our life work is going. If our work is to become new kinds of people who can love more, then maybe we need to stop from time to time to reflect on how the journey of growth is going. Who has changed us? What are we hoping for? What are we keeping at bay and why? What in our world is nagging at us, asking us to pay some attention and get involved?
Sometimes, the path of our lives can be altered permanently by the needs of someone whose situation we just haven’t noticed before. We hear a cry for help, stop long enough to engage the voice that is calling and in so doing, risk being changed.....risk seeing the world around us and our place in it in a new light. That seems to be what happened to Jesus in the story we heard today.
He heard a cry for help, started to pass on by but then stopped just to exchange a few words and he was changed.
Even Jesus learned something new about his ministry in the world from someone in need, someone who wasn’t one of the chosen people. Jesus, who came to share our lives, shares even the growing, the opening to which all humanity is called, and he learned his lesson from a stranger.
I am convinced that some of the lessons we need to learn in our lives we have to learn from people outside our tradition.
I’ve talked to a lot of folks who have made the journey to Mississippi or Louisiana to pick through rubble and help strangers get their lives working again. Those people who go out not really knowing what they are getting into, only that they need to respond, come back changed. I talked to one guy who came back with newly acquired taste for grits.
We Christians live our lives in response to a question, one that James suggests for us this morning. Are we to focus on securing a place for ourselves in eternity or on being Jesus in the world. Are we to be growing into people fit for heaven or becoming people who care for those in need?
The simple answer of course is, yes.
Faith without works is dead, says James.
Faith and works go together. They are part of the same package, and we can approach the balance of those two from either direction.
If we, in prayer and reflection, or in our worship become aware of the presence of God’s spirit in us, we will probably find ourselves caring for those around us.
But down through the ages, when the Church has been bogged down in issues of dogma and belief, when it has needed some new vision of its center, its reformers have called the faithful to get to work in the world. So many of our saints are people who left the comfortable halls of religion to work at loving the poor, the dirty, the different. When prayer seems difficult or impossible, spiritual guides advise us to find a place to practice love.....to give what time and caring we can muster toward making someone’s life better. Prayer can lead us to care for strangers, but caring for strangers will almost always lead us back to prayer.
If we are becoming more caring, if we are losing our fear of not having enough, of getting our hands dirty, if we are learning to risk because we love, then we will recognize the gate of heaven when we draw near. We’ll recognize those gathered there, not because they look like the chosen people, but precisely because they don’t. We will have learned that the realm of God is filled with those whose hearts have grown in the practice of love. And, we’ll have learned that getting to know what’s in someone else’s heart involves taking the risk of opening our own...especially to those who are not part of the clan.
Amen. JMB