We once had a delightful Roman Catholic Nun address our Lutheran Pastoral Conference in Southern California. To establish rapport with us, Sister Jose told us why her family became Roman Catholic. She said her father had not been raised in the church, but was converted as an adult by reading the Bible. Then he went in search of other Christians, only to be bewildered by an array of churches from which to choose. How could he know which one was the right one? It seemed obvious that Jesus would be present in the true church. So he read the New Testament in an effort to discern where Jesus was most likely to be found. Since Jesus was always with the outcasts and sinners, he concluded that the church with the most sinners would be the right one. And that’s why he joined the Catholic Church.
The Stranger in the Strangers
It is strange enough to be told that helpfulness to strangers is the basis for divine evaluation. But there are stranger ideas still. We think God will judge us by what we do for God more than what we do for people. Won’t we be judged by how much we love God; how much we pray to God; how much we give to God; how much we serve God? Well, in a way, yes. But the strange thing is that the way we love God is quite different from what we normally think. Specifically religious activities have their place and value. But the trouble with using them as a means of evaluation is this: we are liable to turn those very religious activities into a justification for avoiding the strangers in our midst.
Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan shows this. The people who walked by the man who fell among the thieves were the priests and Levites, those primarily responsible for religious services from which they would be disqualified by touching a dead body. When people came to church with their generous offerings for God, Jesus asked them if they had a conflict going on with their neighbor. If so, he told them to lay their checks down at the door, go be reconciled with their neighbor and then come back to offer their gift to God. Jesus will have no truck with this idea that serving God is more important than serving people. Instead, Jesus insists on the radically strange idea that the only way you can serve God is by serving people.
Who was that man who fell among the thieves on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho? Who was that hungry woman to whom you refused a meal? Who was that prisoner you had no time to visit? Who was that stranger you turned your eyes away from as you passed? Who was that transgendered person you would not welcome into your congregation? The strange truth is, that was Jesus! He is the Stranger in the strangers. So he says, in withholding your help from the least of these strangers you withhold it from me. And the opposite is also true. In giving your help to one of these strangers, you give it to me. Well, just whom does Jesus think he is to tell us these things? He is the one we avoided and the one we helped. And, strangest thought of all, to stand before the judgment seat of God for a verdict on our lives means standing before the very strangers we either ignored or served.
What are we then to do? Our first impulse may be to rush out and start accepting gay/lesbian people in order to build a resume of service to strangers that will assure us a place among the sheep instead of the goats at the last judgment. But that will not work. For the final strangeness in this story is that neither those who helped nor those who failed to help were in any way aware of what they had done. To help others in order to gain a reward for yourself will not work, because the goodness that distinguishes sheep from goats is an intrinsic difference in the nature of their being. Sheep act like sheep because they are sheep. Goats, who try to act like sheep, so they will be counted as sheep, are still goats and will find their destiny with the goats. People do helpful things because they are helpful people.
What we need is not a new set of actions, but a new nature. What we need is not a change in behavior, but a change in being. To naturally serve the Stranger in our midst, who is resident in the strangers in our midst, happens only as we come to know ourselves more honestly and Christ more personally. Thomas Wolfe, in Look Homeward, Angel, asks the question we all must ask if we are to begin knowing ourselves.
Which of us has known his brother?
Which of us has looked in his father’s heart?
Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
It is only as we come to recognize ourselves as strangers, who need the welcoming of divine grace, that Christ will be allowed to take up residence within us and transform us into his own likeness. Nothing short of that is what Christ comes among us to do. But the strange thing is, he may come in the guise of the very stranger you would exclude.
Reflecting on her experience with the homosexual community in the Castro on Easter Sunday, Nancy Hanson tells of the condemnation she had herself experienced at the hands of a well meaning friend. Because she was getting divorced, her friend told her that she was being deceived by Satan, going against God’s Word and being very selfish. That had given her a taste of the dregs those gay and lesbian people had to swallow at the hands of Christians wielding their Bibles like machetes. But after spending the day with the gay community she said, A spirit of love from the good souls I met kept me going all day. Then she made a strange comparison between her “Bible believing” friend and the strangers in San Francisco. Referring to her friend, she wrote, “In less than one hour, I felt hurt and invalidated by her words. After eleven hours with the folks on Castro Street, I felt energized, happy, loved, accepted and surely tolerated. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the people on Castro Street showed me so." Jesus is the Stranger in the strangers. Let me tell you of one gay man in whom Christ was so present.
A Sample Stranger
Joel Workin was one of those three Lutheran seminarians over ten years ago who publicly identified themselves as gay and were ultimately refused ordination by our denomination. Joel was a kid from North Dakota and a good preacher already in Seminary. If our church had been up to the challenge of ordaining him, he would have become a great one. As I said some year’s later at his funeral, the sermon he preached at the installation of Jeff Johnson as Pastor of First United Lutheran Church in San Francisco, the day after Jeff’s irregular ordination, was the best I had heard in ten years. The weaving together of text and context on that occasion was stunning. So, when I was preparing Joel’s funeral sermon, I wondered how he would have dealt with it.
We got some idea of what he would have done from the gospel he selected for reading. It was not from one of the gospels, but from the book of Acts. It was the story of that odd couple, Peter and Cornelius, whose unlikely encounter with each other forms the heart and axis of the book of Acts. The gospel according to Acts focuses less on what the gospel is than on whom the gospel is for. The brief version of its message is this: The gospel is for ALL people, specifically including those classes of people our own religious tradition has taught us to exclude.
Luke, the gospel writer, also wrote Acts. He makes his main point in a story so crucial to his message that he tells it twice in a row so that those who miss it the first time might catch it the second time around. Its main outline is familiar to most of you. Peter is lying out, getting a tan on the roof of a house in Joppa, on the Mediterranean coast. Suddenly a sheet drops down from heaven containing all kinds of animals, including those Jews are forbidden to eat by the 11th chapter of the book of Leviticus. A voice tells Peter to reach in, take any one of these animals and roast it for lunch. Peter just knows this is a temptation to be unfaithful to God, so he draws on a lifetime of religious training and resists, saying I have never eaten anything unclean. To which the voice responded: Don’t you call unclean what I call clean.
Now Peter may have been a good fisherman but he was a slow learner on this matter. So are the readers of Acts, even to this day. That’s why the vision and its lesson are repeated three times for Peter and for us. It’s called learning by rote. You remember the drill: several receptions of ‘Don’t you call unclean what I call clean; Don’t you call unclean what I call clean; Don’t you call unclean what I call clean! Get it? Got it! Good!’ But Peter only got the literal half of it: In Christ, there are no longer prohibitions about what animals you can and can’t eat.
Then the doorbell rings and when Peter opens it he finds some Roman Soldiers standing there. They want him to come and share the gospel with their Captain. These are not Jews, but unclean Gentiles. Jews do not enter the houses of Gentiles or eat with them. Suddenly an explosion goes off in Peter’s brain and he gets the whole point big-time! God isn’t changing my mind only about what animals I can and can’t eat; God is changing my mind about what people I can and can’t eat with!
Get it? Got it. Good!
Now Peter may be a slow learner but he is not stupid. He is about to violate traditional ecclesiastical practices, so he takes six witnesses along with him. When he gets to the house of Cornelius, he acts in contradiction to his own religious conditioning, enters the house of a Gentile and begins sharing the gospel of Jesus. He has no more than started when the wind and the flame from his own Pentecostal experience is repeated. God baptizes Cornelius with the Holy Spirit. What can this mean? Only the unthinkable: God shows no partiality between peoples. All are accepted into the church, even those our own religion has taught us to reject. Exclusion has been transformed into inclusion. The question now is clear for Peter: If God has baptized Gentiles with the Holy Spirit, what is there to prohibit us from baptizing them with water and thereby admitting them into the church? Answer: Nothing! Get it? Got it! Good! So Cornelius and his whole household are baptized and the rest, as they say, is
history.
Paul W. Egertson, Ph.
Building An Inclusive Church Conference
Minneapolis, Minnesota -- April 17, 1999
An advocate whose eldest son is gay, he chose to participate in the ordination of a lesbian pastor in Minnesota i 2001, eight years before his denomination officially opened its doors to gay and lesbian clergy in committed relationships. In the storm of controversy that followed the ordination, Egertson resigned at the request of denominational leaders a month before his term would have expired. After the resignation, the synod assembly named his as Bishop Emeritus. People speak highly of his courage, advocacy and leadership as a pastor and teacher.
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