Spring Gathering of Presbyterian Women of Chicago, Saturday, April 23, 2016

No Longer Strangers and Aliens

Nanette Sawyer
Minister for Congregational Life

Ephesians 2:14–19
Luke 4:18–30

This sermon was preached at the Spring Gathering of Presbyterian Women of Chicago held at Fourth Presbyterian Church on Saturday, April 23, 2016. The gathering theme was “Becoming the Beloved Community,” inspired by the General Assembly document entitled “Facing Racism: In Search of the Beloved Community.”

Why do the people want to throw Jesus off a cliff? Imagine the energy of that angry crowd, how frightening it must have been. Were they pressing in on him? Where they grabbing at his clothing, pushing him?

And why were they this upset? Was it because they were against justice? Did they oppose feeding widows and healing skin diseases?

Were they against recovery of sight by those who were blind, or against the liberation of the oppressed? Did they think it was a bad idea to release prisoners from prison? Why were these prisoners in prison in the first place?

When the people in Nazareth first heard Jesus talking about these things they seemed very excited. They were raving about him. They thought his words were gracious words. They were impressed that this was Joseph’s son.

But then things started to go sour in their relationship. What was it that turned things around? Jesus seems to guess that they are about to get uncomfortable. He predicts that they are going to ask him to do here in Nazareth what he had done over in Capernaum.

They want the healings. They want the liberation. They want food security when there is a drought and a food shortage. They want the good news that the poor were getting over in Capernaum—whatever that was.

They wanted a year of the Lord’s favor for themselves. “Do here in your hometown what we’ve heard you did in Capernaum,” Jesus predicts they will say. After all, these things are what a prophet does, right?

The people see themselves in a certain way. They think they are the ones to benefit from Jesus’ power. But Jesus tells them something else. He tells them, with stories about other prophets, it’s not all about you.

What the prophet Elijah did was not feed the many widows in Israel. None of them were fed by him. Instead he only fed a widow in the city of Zarephath in the region of Sidon. Over there.

And what the prophet Elisha did was not heal the many persons with skin disease in Israel. But instead he healed the Syrian man, Naaman.

These prophets were bringing their gifts to others, to strangers, to foreigners.

Why is this son of Joseph not helping Joseph’s people? Why is he feeding people in Capernaum and telling us about the healing of Syrians? What about us?

The Nazarenes are being a little bit isolationist here, focusing only on themselves, and a little bit preservationist, trying to preserve and protect their own community only.

A prophet is not welcome in a prophet’s hometown because a prophet upsets the status quo. A prophet says, hey, it’s not all about you; it’s time to exhibit compassion and practice justice. You know, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. That kind of thing.

It’s time to worry about people who are not like you, because you know what? They actually are like you.

We heard of a similar struggle in our reading from the book of Ephesians when the Jewish followers of Jesus and the Gentile followers of Jesus are fighting with each other and excluding each other and saying that they and they alone are the ones who are following Jesus in the proper way. Does that sound familiar?

There is division. There’s a sense of separation, of isolationism and preservationism as each tries to preserve their way as the one true way. They were trying to maintain the practices and understanding they’d had up until now. What would it take for them to be changed? What would it take to really follow Jesus and not throw him off the cliff?

I’ve been reading a book about reconciliation as I was thinking about our desire and our work to become the Beloved Community. It’s called Roadmap to Reconciliation: Moving Communities into Unity, Wholeness, and Justice and is by Brenda Salter McNeil.

In her book she talks about this human tendency we have to try to preserve things the way they have been and this tendency we have to tend to cluster together with people who seem like us. It provides stability. We know how to live like we’ve always lived. We know how to talk with the people we’ve always talked with.

This kind of isolation is what God interrupted in the Tower of Babel story. The people were trying to stick to themselves and have one city and just one language. But God was having nothing of it. Go out and mingle, he said. Have different languages and fill the earth with beautiful diversity—like I told you in the beginning, at the time of creation.

As long as we stay isolated we’re not even able to get onto the roadmap to reconciliation. We just keep circling and preserving what we have always known. Or trying to.

Until something happens that disrupts our understanding. It happened to Saul on the road to Damascus. There it was God intervening and showing him just how blind he was about the followers of Jesus. He was physically blind for days until a Jesus follower laid hands on him and healed him.

After that he knew a different reality about Jesus followers. He couldn’t persecute them in the same way he used to. He had to start knowing them for who they were—healers and social transformers working for equality and living in communities of respect, sharing their resources so that none were in need.

Saul could not just see them as who he thought they were—rabble rousers and thugs who deserved to be in jail. He had a conversion, a turning point. Everything changed for him. Brenda Salter McNeil calls it a catalytic event.

It catalyzes change. It upsets our reality. We realize that the way we understood the world isn’t really how the world is. This creates a lot of anxiety, and if we don’t have a deeper sense of safety, then maybe that anxiety causes us to hunker down and try even harder to preserve our old reality.

We might not even be able to see what is really happening, because it contradicts how we think things should be. We run everything through our filters, and we interpret and we anticipate certain outcomes, and we pre-judge people, and we deny their stories, because we are trying to protect the status quo.

Like the people in Nazareth, who got mad because Jesus was helping the people in Capernaum, but not them—at least, not the way they wanted to be helped.

Jesus wasn’t just Joseph’s son who should have been helping them, Joseph’s people. He was also Mary’s boy, and she had sung from the beginning about how he would lift up the lowly and bring down the high. He would create an even playing field and upset the status quo.

A prophet is not welcome in their home town when they start pushing the envelope and asking too many questions and trying to change things. A prophet points out problems, and that is uncomfortable.

When the resulting anxiety hits, and the discomfort, we can withdraw and try even harder to preserve. But we don’t have to. We can find other ways to address our anxiety. We can look for our security in the foundation of our faith, for example, in the steadfast love of God. In the peace of Christ.

We can work for our security by creating a community of trust, in which we exercise the spiritual practice of seeing God in each other, even when we are confused and the world feels chaotic.

A catalytic event, a turning point, a conversion moment—it feels chaotic and overwhelming. But we have to go through it to change.

Salter McNeil describes it this way: “Transformation requires disruption and a degree of chaos to increase the sense of urgency that change must happen. However, there must also be enough psychological safety that the chaos does not completely overwhelm our ability to reflect and reorganize ourselves. A catalytic event will either push us forward toward transformation or tighten our tether to preservation.”

To change, really change, we have to be able to reflect on the new information we are getting about the world, and we have to begin to reorganize ourselves. We rethink who we are and rethink who others are. We begin to identify with the new reality. It means that your story begins to become part of my bigger story.

I start to realize that we are we. This goes back to the classic “none of us are free until all of us are free,” because on a spiritual level we are all connected. Our racial separation is created, as our speaker pointed out this morning, our separation is created not by God but by individuals making choices and taking actions and putting systems in place that the rest of us go along with.

When your story becomes my story, we are all changed. Dr. Salter McNeil tells a story to illustrate this, a story that she heard from her friend Austin Channing Brown. Austin was part of an interracial trip with the Evangelical Covenant Church that visits historic sites of importance in the civil rights movement and places of oppression and inequality for people of color. Its purpose is to promote healing from hundreds of years of racial injustice in the United States.

One of the stops on this trip was at a museum that has photographs documenting the brutal and horrifying lynchings of black men, women, and children. I have seen these pictures in a book called Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (by James Allen and John Lewis).

We can have a book like this and a museum exhibit like this because white people took pictures of the torture they perpetrated with no shame. This is a sign of the moral damage that racism does to white people. It leads them to an inhumanity: they are morally broken and disconnected from their own humanity.

White people had picnics at lynchings, and there are newspaper articles documenting this. It is truly shocking. We don’t want to believe it, it’s so horrible. But the photographs and the newspaper articles tell a story that can’t be denied.

After the people on the church trip saw the exhibit, they were in shock. They were speechless and horrified. After awhile some of the white people started trying to distance themselves from what had been done. They didn’t want to feel responsible, after all they didn’t do that, and it was so long ago. Then a black student stood up and, speaking from her hurt, announced calmly that she believed all white people are evil. This led to yet more anger and raised voices.

“Finally,” Salter McNeill writes, “a white female student stood up to speak, and everyone seemed to hold their breath. But instead of another version of ‘please don’t make me responsible for this,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what to do with what I just saw. I can’t fix your pain, and I can’t take it away, but I can see it. And I will work the rest of my life to fight for you and for your children so they won’t experience it.’ She started to weep, and her mascara streaked down her cheeks, leaving dark trails. The bus was silent, and then my friend Austin said aloud, ‘She’s crying black tears.’”

She was crying tears that were black with mascara running down her face, but she had also internalized the story, she had identified with the suffering in what they had all seen together, and her tears were the tears of a different people who had become her people.

It reminds me of Ruth saying to Naomi, “Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people.”

When we know another person’s story, or when we know a people’s story, we are given the opportunity to change our story, to change our very identity. “I” become “we.”

In the words we heard from Ephesians today, “So now you are no longer strangers and aliens. Rather, you are fellow citizens with God’s people, and you belong to God’s household.”

This is finding our security in our God and in our faith. It’s not just about personal transformation; it’s also about community transformation.

Hearing each others’ stories and understanding them, not distancing ourselves from them, not denying that they are true, letting those stories change our stories, that’s fundamental work that we can do in becoming the beloved community.

That’s work that the white and black students on the bus had to do; it’s work that Saul had to do after his catalytic moment; and it’s what the people of Nazareth had an opportunity to do when Jesus brought them a prophetic word and a call to a new way of life.

What would we have to do to make our hometown Jesus’ hometown? How can we welcome Jesus and his life-changing, society-changing ways, even when those ways upset everything we have known in the past?

Can we let him stay and not try to throw him off the cliff? Can we follow him when he slips through the angry crowd and continues to go about his ministry, healing people, challenging people, loving people, and forgiving people?

Can we follow him? Can we take that risk? If we do, I think we will find that God is with us—that our identity is rooted in steadfast love that can carry us through the challenges that confront us.

Please join me in prayer:

Holy God, our souls are not at rest until we rest in you. Receive our hearts. Bless and open our minds and our understanding. Help us to know, deep in our bones, that we are your beloveds; that this is our identity; that this is who we are. Beloved. Help us to see it in each other, that this one is beloved, and that one is beloved, that she is your beloved, and he is your beloved, and they are each and all your beloveds. Help us to live as the Beloved community that we are.
Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church