The Stranger in Our Midst  Keynote Sermon The Rev. Paul W. Egertson, Ph.D., Bishop, Southern California West Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Matthew 25:31-46

Last Sunday and Monday evenings, one of the major television networks played Kevin Costner's movie version of Wyatt Earp. To help the viewer understand this man's adult behavior of intense loyalty to family and hostile distrust of everyone else, we were shown scenes from his childhood. His father passionately taught the children: Nothing counts so much as blood. All the rest are strangers. Most of us seem to know that without being intentionally taught it. There are few things we naturally fear more than the unfamiliar. It is a fear so universal we have a name for it: Xenophobia -- the fear of the foreign. Its comes from the same Greek word from which we get the word strange. It refers to everything outside the boundaries of the circles within which we are familiar.

The Strangers

Think of the way we view strangers in our midst. Are we not defensive about them and do we not work to protect ourselves from them? The warnings we give one another range all the way from Stella Bensen’s advise, Call no man foe, but never love a stranger; through our parent’s persistent counsel, never speak to strangers; to the policy of our police forces which urge us to report the presence of strangers. It may be a linguistic coincidence that stranger rhymes with danger, but our natural fear of the foreign and our social conditioning against those we don’t know, both tie them tightly together.

With such warnings in our ears, our primary line of defense is exclusion. By keeping ourselves separate we feel more secure. So we remove ourselves as far as possible from those who are different  from us in ways either great or small. The poor are separated from those with enough; the sick from the healthy; the old from the young; ethnic minorities from the ethnic majority; prisoners from the free; and the weak from the strong. On and on the descriptions of our separations could go. But the point is the same: if others are different from me they are bad or wrong or unworthy, so they must be excluded from participation in my life and society.

But surely, some would say, that description is no longer true in our society. We live in a generation that affirms diversity, that values human differences, that celebrates multicultural experiences. Inclusion rather than exclusion is the buzzword today, at least among those who are politically and religiously enlightened. While it is true that in places like Yugoslavia there still may be remnants of the exclusive spirit that marked the way past generations dealt with strangers, we are for the most part beyond it. Things are getting better all the time. Just this past week the State of Alabama began the process of repealing its Constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage. Since South Carolina removed its similar ban last February, there will soon be no State in these United States that legally forbids people of different races to love one another. There really are no strangers among us anymore. We are becoming just one big happy family.

Are we? Or, does there still remain one class of people who continue to experience exclusion right there in the middle of our newborn inclusiveness? Robert Dawidoff, Professor of History at Claremont Graduate University, thinks there is. He calls this group of people the Last Outcasts. The Washington Post thinks so, too. A recent Post article headline identifies One Area where Americans Still Draw a Line on Acceptability.  Based on a national survey conducted jointly by the Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, the article asserts that Americans have radically adjusted their moral sensibility in the last 30 years, reserving judgment on people and lifestyles they once readily condemned. A majority now finds divorce, sex before marriage, interracial relationship and single motherhood acceptable. But one group whose behavior remains firmly outside the bounds of acceptability for a majority of Americans is homosexuals.

In a recent opinion sampling, Alan Wolfe of Boston University found that middle class Americans no longer believe that Jews, Muslims or atheists are inherently less worthy than Christians. But he notes one exception to what he calls America’s persistent and ubiquitous nonjudgmentalism. He says, most Americans I spoke to were not prepared to accept homosexuality.

Do we need studies and surveys to tell us that? Any homosexual person you meet, who has not been totally successful in hiding the reality of his or her sexual orientation, can tell you experiences of exclusion that heterosexual people frankly find hard to believe. Here is the way that experience is described by an anonymous high school student in Massachusetts, as reported in the Winter 1999 issue of Open Hands.

“Nobody tells Latino kids in the high school that nobody cares if they’re Hispanic so long as they keep it to themselves. Jewish kids aren’t told that they’re sinners and they could change into Christians if they wanted to. People don’t tell black kids they should put up with racism because they’ve come so far from when they were slaves. They don’t have to defend why there is a black history month, or why people want black studies included in the curriculum. People don’t say, That’s so Korean! when they mean something is stupid or weird. People don’t tell disabled kids that the community isn’t ready to defend their equal rights and inclusion yet. You never hear anyone argue that breast cancer is God’s way of killing off women, or that it’s a good thing. If a teacher hears anyone use a slang insult for a Chinese kid, they jump on it. When foreign exchange students ask teachers about dating in school, they aren’t sent to see a guidance counselor.

“But every day in the high school, I hear its okay if I’m gay so long as I stay in the closet, and that I‘m an abomination against God, that I can change if I want to, and that people like me shouldn’t be taught about in school. I’m told that I should be satisfied because our school is far better than it used to be, and that I shouldn’t push for my equal rights and inclusion because the community isn’t ready yet. I hear, That’s so Gay!, all the time, and I hear that AIDS is my punishment for being who I am, and I hear the world faggot all the time. It’s hard not walk around angry all the time.”

If Americans are serious about building an inclusive society (and the last time I looked that was the American Dream), we are going to need a lot of people to lead the rest across this last frontier of fear in response to people who are different. If Christians are serious about building an inclusive Church (and putting those two words side by side is redundant in the Bible I read), we have a special challenge to face. For the fact to be confessed is that Christians have been largely responsible for the inability of people in this country to accept these last outcasts. As the Post/Kaiser/Harvard survey showed, Most Americans who find homosexuality unacceptable say they object on religious grounds.

Do we need surveys to tell us that? Last week, Nancy Hanson sent me a copy of her recent book, From Pain to Joy -- Inspiring Words for Hope and Healing. She’s a Midwestern Norwegian who was transplanted to Hawaii and is now planning to enter Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley to prepare for a second career in the ordained ministry. As a new comer to the Bay Area, she spent last Easter Sunday in the Castro District of San Francisco, the heart of the gay/lesbian community there, giving away free copies of her book to anyone willing to receive it. While there, she saw a tee shirt displaying the slogan: Jesus hates me, this I know, for the Christians tell me so.

For many Christians, dealing with these strangers in our midst in this condemning and excluding way feels so normal and natural, it does not seem at all strange to do so. But it would be strange if someone appeared among us who held a totally different attitude in response to strangers. Let us move now from the strangers in our midst to the Stranger in our midst.

The Stranger

When Jesus comes among us in the gospel this morning he seems familiar enough.  We’ve known his name since childhood and expect to encounter him here in worship. It may be that very familiarity which keeps us from realizing how very strange he really is. But as soon as he starts talking in Matthew 25, the words he speaks sound strange to this generation of modern minds. He speaks of the ultimate judgment of God. That’s strange enough, because we think of Jesus as the one who reveals a God of mercy and love. None of that hell fire talk from him. But here he speaks as though humans are somehow accountable to God for what they do and that their destiny somehow hangs on it.

What could be stranger than that?  To think that we are accountable for our decisions and actions at all is becoming an increasingly strange idea in our time. Children don’t feel accountable to teachers; citizens don’t feel accountable to government; employees don’t feel accountable to employers. So why would anyone think they are accountable to God? Or, could it be that our failure to recognize a divine accountability is the source of our failure to feel responsible to others? But this Stranger in our midst faces us with the claim that God, however loving, is going to make a judgment about us. That is a reversal of our current mindset. It is like the story of the man who knew nothing about art taking a tour of the French Museum of Art. After looking around for awhile, he said to curator: I don’t think much of your pictures. To which the curator replied, Sir, it is not the pictures that are on trial here.

If the mere idea of judgment is strange to us, the objects of that judgment are stranger still. We would expect strangers to be judged. If people are poor, there’s a reason. If people are sick, there’s a reason. Those are forms of judgment the righteous know come upon sinners. So, that sinners would be judged is a familiar idea. But here, Jesus is not talking to those folks. He’s talking to his disciples. He’s talking to us. That is very strange, because we thought we were the ones to do the judging, not the ones to be judged. But the strange thing about Jesus is that whenever he has the chance to condemn a sinner, like the woman taken in adultery, he does not do it. And whenever he has the chance to reward the righteous for their earned worth, he doesn’t do that either. For example, two men go up to the Temple to pray, a publican and a Pharisee. The publican confesses his many sins and is justified, while the Pharisee prances his impressive achievements before God and is judged.

If the objects of judgment are strange, the basis for judgment is even stranger. If there were a final court before which we will stand, we would expect a verdict based on how well we have avoided doing bad things. We know what bad things are: they are things that hurt people. In our view, we will stand up under the divine judgment if we live up to the ethic of our day: I can do anything that feels good, so long as I don’t hurt any one in the process.

But the Stranger in our midst turns that dogma inside out. Divine judgment is not based on the avoidance of hurting others; it is based on our involvement in helping others.
I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me to drink.
I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me.
I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was in prison and you visited me.
We don’t need Jesus to tell us not to hurt each other. That we could figure out for ourselves. But God judges by a higher ethic than we humans would set for ourselves. What Jesus introduces into the equation of accountability is this second mile of responsibility for the health and welfare of others.

The idea is not new with Jesus. It goes back at least to Moses who taught Israel not to harvest their whole field, but to leave some grain standing for the strangers and sojourners passing through their land. The principle goes back to when Cain killed Able and God asked Cain, Where is your brother? Cain replied with the question so typical of our day: Am I my brother’s keeper? To which God’s answer is, Dah! More than that, it is not just your brother, but your neighbor who you are to love as you love yourself. More than that, your neighbor includes not just those in your circle, but those outside of it: the stranger, the foreigner, even your enemy. Or, so said Jesus. But then, what did he know?  Just whom does he think he is to lay such unnatural demands upon us? He is the Stranger in our midst indeed, telling us of our responsibility for the strangers in our midst. And he is more.

Perhaps the strangest thing we notice about Jesus is the correspondence between what he said and what he did. He not only taught us to include those we would naturally exclude, but he actually did it himself. Look at the places where you find Jesus in the New Testament. You find him in the Temple only twice: once when he was twelve and once when he drove out those who were desecrating it. The Temple was not his favorite place. You find him occasionally in conversation with the Scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and other leaders in the religious community, with their concern for righteousness. But more often than not these conversations were encounters of conflict over their narrowness or his graciousness.

You know where Jesus could usually be found: among the strangers most religious people considered unfit for their presence and deserving of exclusion from their company. He was constantly among those classes of people he taught us to care about: the tax collectors, like Matthew and Zacchaeus; the sinners, like the thieves on the cross; the women, like Martha and Mary; the children, like those he took up into his arms and blessed, over the protest of his disciples; the Gentiles, like the Syrophoenician woman who was willing to eat the crumbs that fell from Israel’s table; the poor, like the widow who gave her last mite; and the lame, the halt, the blind and the lepers, like the ten he healed and received thanks from only one. What’s a nice Jewish boy doing hanging around with people like these? He is the Stranger in our midst because he is in solidarity with the strangers in our midst.

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. Its 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.

Or is it? Is the acceptance of everyone into the full fellowship and service of the church a done deal? Or are there still classes of people our religious training teaches us to exclude, unless they become different from who they are? That was the second question Peter and those first Christians had to face. After gulping hard, the church could swallow the baptism of Gentiles so long as they became Jews as well as Christians. In other words, you couldn’t be Christian and remain Gentile. You were welcome to be Christian, but if you were Gentile you had to change. Or at least try! It was that second question they fought out at the first Council of the Church in Jerusalem. The decision was that you could be both Christian and gentile at the same time. Get it? Got it! Good!

I’ve taken time to spell this out because this message was at the center of the legacy that Joel left us. I know that for three reasons. First, as already indicated, I know it from the text he chose for us to read. But second, I know it from an incident that happened during the night before he died. His hospice nurse, Carmen, sat up with him during the night while he slept. That night, he suddenly spoke aloud, saying, We are all God’s children, aren’t we? Then after a period of silence, Joel said, Can I hear a Yes or Amen to that? It was vintage Joel, in both content and form. That was his message to us.

I also know this for a third reason. Joel carried the burden of this news in his heart because he knew so many needed to hear it. Gay and lesbian people like himself, who feel excluded by the church because of its own religious traditions, need to know that another part of that tradition includes the recognition that God’s voice is sometimes heard in contradiction to the church’s voice. The church also needs to hear this, so that it might respond to what it regularly asks God to do for the church: where it is in error, correct it.

Joel’s concern for this message was clear in a devotional he wrote in 1988 on the Parable of the Prodigal Child. When the church relates that story to the gay/lesbian population, it usually understands it to mean that homosexuals are those who have left their heterosexual homes for a life in the far country of deviance. The church, like the waiting father, is eager for them to come home and will welcome them if they come to their senses and return to heterosexuality.

Joel read the story in quite a different way. For him, the church has left its gospel home of inclusiveness and wondered into the far country of exclusiveness. But that does not mean we should give up on this church. He sees gay/lesbian Christians as the loving ones, waiting to welcome a wandering church home when it comes to its senses. He wrote to encourage us to do so, by saying: How shall waiting lesbians and gays view their relationship with the church? There has been a break, a resounding “no” from much of the prodigal church to any form of partnership or familial bond. But is it No. period  or “No-dash? No. period means that the relationship is over. It is dead, period. Go back inside the house and stop worrying about the ungrateful kid. No- dash, on the other hand, means the relationship is incomplete. There is more to be said after the dash, no matter how long the intervening silence. No- dash means believing, hoping and trusting that the prodigal will come home. It means waiting for the church to “come to its senses.”

That was a courageous thing for a young man to say who, at the hands of the church, had just been denied ordination into the ministry to which he was called by God and for which he had academically prepared himself. But even though the church hadn’t got it yet, he still encouraged us to wait in love. I quote: Love puts a dash behind every No. period and waits. For gay Christians, God’s love is the power of punctuation, the power to turn No. period into No- dash and to wait expectantly for words of reconciliation. The parable . . . says “Hope, believe, wait, love. There is more to be said. This show is not over yet. Just you wait.

We can hear in these words, even in the midst of personal hurt, the sense of mission Joel lived out in his life and continues to share with us, after his death, here today. The God of grace we know in the gospel had captured his heart and his mind in a way even personal hurt could not take away. It flowed out of the vision he had of a God who includes all as children in the household of faith.

In his Certification for Ordination Exam Joel wrote this: The kingdom is the destiny of the whole cosmos, the big party God is planning and to which everyone is invited. It is the fulfillment of all those great scripture passages: the lion lying down with the lamb; death being swallowed up; the lame leaping; no more war anymore. Even if it kills God (and it did, the cross), even if it kill us (and it does, baptism), somehow God is going to get everybody to that big banquet feast (resurrection, the kingdom, new life). I want to continue to be a messenger and means of God’s invitation, to share the good news of God’s “Yes,” to live a courageous and comforting life of faith, to incarnate Christ and the kingdom, for my neighbor, to die and rise daily. This is my “mission”.

Some years before his death, Joel quoted those words in a letter to a friend. Two weeks before his death, the friend quoted them back to Joel in a good-bye letter, saying, I thank you for these inspiring words. May you find satisfaction now in having accomplished that mission in a significant way . . . May your leave-taking now itself be a part of the mission. In this message Joel left us, his leave-taking was a part of his mission. In this strange gay man dying from AIDS, we encountered the Stranger in our Midst. Through him Jesus speaks to us again: Hope, believe, wait, love. There is more to be said. This show is not over yet. Just you wait.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing that you have made and forgive the sins of all those who are penitent. Create and make in the Church a new and contrite heart, that lamenting its discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered members and clergy, it may receive from the God of all mercy, perfect forgiveness and peace; through Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Rev. Paul W. Egertson, Ph.D., Bishop, Southern California West Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. ©1999 Via Media Services. Permission is required to reproduce by any means more than one copy for personal use. Phone or FAX (805) 493-4565 or e-mail requests to VMServices@aol.com

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