Pentecost 13 A
Isaiah 56: 1, 6-8
A House For All Nations
08/18/02
As part of my daily routine, I receive and read an e-mail newsletter called Heartlight. I was struck this past week by the heartfelt confession of a brother in Christ by the name of Lynn Anderson in the July 31st issue. He was recounting a tale from earlier years in his life, one that he wasn’t all that proud of now, but one he valued for the lessons it taught him and the change of attitude that it worked in his life.
It happened while he was living in British Columbia. He had a rather interesting circle of friends. Some were Indians from a nearby reservation. Most on the Indians were on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. A few of them even battled alcoholism. Among them was a man by the name of Joe Redfox, a friendly fellow, but one who was notorious for wild bouts of public intoxication. He was someone not well respected by people like the mayor of Kelowna, who was also one of Lynn’s friends. Which was ok, as long as Lynn could keep his two friendships to himself. Trouble was, Kelowna was a small enough town that eventually he couldn’t.
He was walking down the town’s main drag one day when he spied his friend Joe Redfox coming toward him in the next block. Their eyes met, recognition was made and Joe characteristically raised his hand in greeting. But just as Lynn was raising his own, the familiar voice of his friend the mayor called out from across the street.
It’s in shame that Lynn remembers what happened next. He halted his greeting before it reached shoulder height, dropped it quick as a flash, and turned to cross the street to shake his honor’s hand. Basking in the glow of attention from the mayor He wrote off the dignity and significance of another whom he had called "friend."
It’s embarrassing for Lynn to remember now, but imagine how dehumanizing to Joe. Imagine how it must have felt.
I don’t think it’s hard for us to imagine because we’ve been there – befriended only to be dumped when our acquaintance’s circumstances changed or when their good fortune returns or when someone they conclude to be more “acceptable” arrives.
That the fear on the part of foreigners and God’s concern for them in His Word today. Israel’s circumstances were about to change. God was promising release. Their time of bondage would end. He’ll restore them, but He doesn’t want the foreigners who have joined themselves to His people, who have turned away from their false gods and embraced Him as their savior and king to think that they’ll now be forgotten, written off as after thoughts. Nor were these concerns misplaced.
Again and again God warned his people not to compromise the practice of their faith by associating with foreigners or creating alliances with other nationalities. They were to remain God’s chosen, rather “unique” people.
Nevertheless, they were God’s chosen “unique” people in order to be a “light to the Gentiles.” Just a few chapters before this Isaiah had spelled out His plan. From the 49th chapter 6 he says: "It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth." From the 14th chapter we also hear: 1The Lord will have compassion on Jacob; once again he will choose Israel and will settle them in their own land. Aliens will join them and unite with the house of Jacob. They were God’s people, separated; but with a purpose – to prepare a way by which God’s savior would be brought to the world.
Unfortunately, they often missed this. They would miss it again in the days to come. Think of the Samaritan woman at the well. The idea that Jesus, a Jew, would be talking to her – why she’s beside herself. She can’t imagine such a thing happening because, Gentiles, especially Samaritans, were despised in those days. That’s what makes the story of the Good Samaritan such a powerful one. The fact that one of the Pharisees Jesus was talking to had to admit that the Samaritan who took pity on the man beaten by the road was more of a neighbor than his fellow Jew was hard to admit, though the circumstances Jesus drew in that story left no other choice.
And I suppose some might point to the Gospel lesson today and say, “Heh, isn’t Jesus doing the same. Look at what he says to the Canaanite woman. ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.’” But look again. Jesus acts the way he does in the Gospel today, not to belittle her, but to encourage her to greater faith; a faith which he commends to her in the end.
The point of all this is that God’s people missed this part of God’s word of promise. They grew to ignore their God-given mission to be lights to the world, missionaries of God’s grace. Instead they grew to think of themselves as the sole object of God’s love and refused to associate with foreigners at all.
It’s almost ironic then to hear Paul talking about circumstances that appear to be very much reversed in the epistle today. Jews lording over Gentiles, Gentiles lording themselves over Jews – none of it was the will of God who “has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.” Yet sadly we’re still struggling with this today.
Take a good look at your church, not just this congregation; but the LCMS as a whole. It’s disturbing that still today, in 2002, that we’re a church body of people that are most of the same skin color, same Germanic culture, same dress. We’re divided from others on the basis that they’re “different”.
Or sometimes the problem is just that we communicate that they’re “not good enough” to fit in. Let me tell you another story from the Anderson family diary. Some time after Lynn returned to the states with his wife Carolyn they were describing a wedding that Lynn had been asked to perform. The "wedding chapel" was an old cabin on the side of a mountain in the sagebrush just beyond the timberline. The bride was twenty-seven years old, and the groom was forty-seven. They already had two children, and the bride was seven months pregnant. But they were getting married because, as brand-new Christians, they had come to believe that the Lord wanted them to quit living "common law." Of the handful of wedding guests, five or six were alcoholics, some were drug addicts, and one woman was a prostitute who had often sold herself for a case of beer. Another man was on parole – attempted murder. At the end of the ceremony, instead of kissing the groom, the bride shouted, "Where’s my rolling pin? I’ve got a license now!" A sordid bunch. Not respected by many. Yet you need to know, all except two had recently come to Christ. It was one of Lynn’s favorite weddings.
But in Indiana when he and his wife described those mountain nuptials, one man stood rather defiantly and asked, "Don’t you ever bring any good Canadian people to Christ?"
It’s the kind of question that’s been asked in many ways, sometimes here. “Why are you marrying that couple in church when they’ve been living together for years?” “Why is that fellow getting a Christian burial? He never crossed the threshold of the church until a week before He died.” “Why are we letting that child attend our school? We don’t need to be paying for the education of the likes of that?” “Why should I forgive someone like that? Look at what they’ve done.” They’re the kind of questions that say, “No foreigner’s welcome.” “If you’re not someone like us, then you’re not someone at all.” But the truth is none of us really are, at least not in God’s book.
Look at us by nature. R. Scott Richards has got it right when says on p. 38 of his book, “Myths the World Taught Me” that every one of us starts life as a little savage, completely selfish and self-centered. We want what we want when we want it. Deny us these once, and we seethe with rage which would be murderous were we not so helpless. We are, in fact, dirty; no morals, no knowledge, no skills; children born delinquent. And if permitted to continue every one of us would grow up a criminal - a thief, a swindler, or a rapist. That’s what we all are except that God, by his grace and mercy, intervenes in our life by the power of His word for help and salvation, for positive change. When we exclude others, when we cut them off, when we fail to let go of our hurts and forgive we’re actually in jeopardy of cutting ourselves off. We’re in jeopardy because therein we demonstrate that we’re lacking the truth of who we ourselves are and what God in Christ has done for us.
Thanks be to God that He’s here again today with His word that would remind us that truly we are all “foreign” before Him, who alone is righteous and holy, and thus we would remain if not for the grace of God which has made us righteous by faith in Christ and His cross and gathers us together in His love. On the cross Jesus bore away our “foreign-ness” before God, He himself being forsaken on His father in our place that all might be given the right to become God’s children. He took every one of our sins, even our exclusive attitudes towards others, and made us clean. He made us righteous in His sight, and this not only to save us for eternity, but to affect the same kind of righteous life in us as we deal with others.
It’s part of the joy of the Gospel. None of us are excluded – not for our past, not for our family history, not because we are physically weak, not because our names aren’t among the socially elite. God’s promise is that we’re all welcome, that we all belong, by virtue of our faith in the one who has welcomed us by His grace in the waters of baptism and bids us to his table to partake of his sacrificing love. Sinners all, made righteous in Christ’s blood; and in this gracious righteousness we look at others in new ways. We see them as we are, another sinner for whom Christ died, another one lost who needs God’s grace, a potential brother or sister in God’s house forever.
God’s plan is to gather still more besides us whom he already has gathered. And the joy of it is that he would use you, once foreign yourselves, now brought near; once lost but now found and fashioned into tools of the Spirit to gather even more – people of every walk in life, peoples of every nation in the world – He would use to gather them all to the joys of knowing Christ Jesus and the eternal blessings that spill forth from His Church, His House of prayer.
