Online Sermons
The 6th Sunday in Easter: May 17, Ron Andreatta
Welcome to our website. You are here: The Word --> Online SermonsGood Morning and welcome to the Rev. Catherine Quehl-Engel, so heartwarming to see you this chilly Sunday morning.
[Ed Note: Catherine, our friend and chaplain at Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, came to Celebrate our services this weekend].
In our reading from Acts10 today, the issue of Jewish identity arises. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Peter asks “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So he ordered them to be baptized. We know what happened, those original Jewish followers of Jesus did indeed obey this command and that is why we are here today. A short excerpt from Jürgen Moltmann’s book Jesus Christ for today’s world:
‘Messianism is Judaism’s most profoundly original idea’ claims Martin Buber, rightly. Messianism is the idea which Israel gave to the world. This is not just one Old Testament idea among others: The Old Testament as a whole is what von Rad called ‘the book of a continually growing expectation’, pointing beyond itself and beyond every historical fulfillment. According to the prophetic interpretation, an explosive power builds up in Israel’s history itself, and when ‘the explosion comes, it is not revolutionary; it is Messianic.’ Christianity’s mission has to be seen as the way in which Israel permeates the world of the Gentile nations with the Messianic hope for the coming God. Christianity loses nothing by recognizing that its hope springs from this enduring Jewish root. Judaism surrenders nothing by recognizing what Martin Buber felt to be the ‘mysterious’ spread of the name, commandments and kingdom of its God by way of Christianity.
This evokes the image of the vine. You may remember from last week our John 15 reading was the beautiful Gospel of ‘I am the Vine, you are the branches’. Rooted in God, Jesus Christ is the spreading vine. WE are to be fruitful branches on that vine, nourished by the one root. If you love the root, what issues from the root you will also love. Our reading from 1 John (5:1-6) restates this as:
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For the Love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the Truth.
Returning to today’s Gospel, hear what the Good News says to us today:
You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask Him in my name. I am giving you these commandments so that you may love one another.
Even when you aren’t sure you can, even when it’s hard. Jesus’ voice calls, DO IT ANYWAY!
This past week was the one year anniversary of the Postville raid. Throughout the history of human interaction, we have been faced with the problem of the stranger. For every “us” there has to be “them.” To describe ourselves, we have to differentiate ourselves—me and you, kin and non-kin, friends and enemies, neighbors and foreigners. Without dividing the world, we would have no identity. Since the beginning of humanity, belonging to a group has been a matter of survival and, over the ages, multiple identity boundaries have been drawn—gender, tribe, race, religions, nations, possessions, political parties. The stranger is different from us.
We are engaged with strangers in inverse proportion to the distance that separates us. With globalisation, however, the distance between “us” and “them” has been rapidly vanishing. Through the media, in our workplace and in our families, the stranger has come close. Now, the other is not only “out there.” They have moved into our physical, intellectual and emotional neighborhoods. The distance that used to separate us is being abolished and our perspectives are changing.
In this new relationship, we are confronted not only with a new view of those we used to consider “outsiders” but with a new view of ourselves. They see in us what we could not recognize in ourselves and, when we let them, they tell us what we cannot tell ourselves. They have arrived into our daily lives with their beauty, wisdom, and vulnerabilities, as well as their suffering, grievances and aspirations. Like an uninvited company consultant who can see what the company cannot see, the stranger reveals. And that’s the problem of the stranger. To survive we need to protect ourselves from the stranger; to survive we need the stranger to help us see.In the Scripture, this problem has been inversed and transformed into one of the most potent commandments for God’s people. While the Hebrew Bible commands, “you shall love your neighbor” only once, it commands no less than 36 times to “love the stranger.” For example, it demands, “When a stranger lives with you in your land, do not ill-treat him. The stranger who lives with you shall be treated like the native-born. Love him as yourself” (Leviticus 19:33). In the New Testament, Jesus insists the ultimate judgment of our acts will come from the way we treat the stranger (see Matthew 25:31-46). In the Muslim world, informed by the Quranic texts, one is expected to take a stranger into one’s home and treat him with honor and care no less than three days, even when one is considered an enemy. This may seem as nothing but a simple invitation to a virtue of neighborly love, but there is far more to this insistent call of God.
Abraham, the father of three monotheistic faiths, was ordained by the priest Melchizedek, an outsider to the covenantal family. Although a stranger, he was called “the priest of the Most High.” We have no idea where and how he became a priest before Abraham was called to follow God. Later, Abraham and Sarah were visited in their tent by three strangers to whom they offered hospitality, only to discover they were God’s angels. In what is generally known as the Christmas story, “wise men” from the East who look to the stars for answers—outsiders to the race and religion of Israel—after following an unusual star to Bethlehem, visited baby Jesus to confirm the identity of Jesus as Messiah. The entire history of people who follow God has been held together by the visits, wisdom and care of strangers, people who were not “us” but “them”—the other. Why the other? Why does God insist on speaking to his followers through strangers?
Because understanding our relationship and life with the Divine Other—the Holy One who will always confound us—is inextricably intertwined with our relationship and life with the human other—humanity that also confounds us. God comes in the form of and works through a stranger because the otherness of a stranger is akin to the otherness of God. The human other is a trace of the Divine Other in whose image the stranger has been made. The challenge God poses to us is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image. The less strangers we know the more truncated out vision of God will be.
The blessings and corrections of God come to us from the outside of the boundaries we have made for our groups, through those who can tell us the truths we cannot tell ourselves. If we could know these truths on our own, they would not be strangers. Strangers bring not only danger to us, but also advice, solutions, beauty, opening for us new vistas into understanding the humanity, the world and God. But the blessing of the stranger goes deeper. When encountering another, we also encounter ourselves in a new way. Each encounter challenges our isolated and ingrown ideas and helps us become our better selves. And this is where the grand invitation of God to humanity lies: without knowing and caring for the other, we cannot know neither God nor ourselves.
Religion has been one of the most potent identity-forming mechanisms. It has bound people together in common purpose, joy and action as well as contributed to the prejudice, exclusion and violence toward the outsider. Now when globalization has turned our societies into societies of strangers, every religion has a chance to transcend its own limitations. We live in a society where relativism—claim that no differences really matter—is too weak to stop the aberrations of religious or anti-religious fervor. Mere tolerance of the other will not do. As Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of England, points out, “Only an equal and opposite fervor can do that. Healing . . . must come, if anywhere, from the heart of the whirlwind itself.”
We are all part of a larger web of life in which “the other” is part of our own life. Those not in our image are, however, in the image of God. In the past, the whirlwind of religious passion came from our experiences of being visited, corrected, and blessed by God. Today, God has not withdrawn Himself. He is calling us to a profound experience of meeting Him in a stranger. For those open to the strangers, the whirlwind never stops.
Acknowledgment of use
This sermon incorporates a text that I found on the Internet, at the website FaithHouseManhattan.org. The author is Samir Selmanovic. The source is titled God Our Stranger (Jan 22, 2009) & can be viewed at: