Rev. Paul Tellstrom Proper 11 B

Scripture- 2 Samuel 7:1-14a Mark 6:30-34, 53

 

Irvine United Congregational Church                         July 23, 2006

 

word count: 1,631

 

There is a story about a small village in Poland, sometime during WWII, where there was a man who was well known for his care and compassion for others, and who was deeply loved because of it. He was not a wealthy man, nor was he a native of the village, nor did he attend the village church. In fact he was not baptized and showed no interest in it. But both before and during the war he was known for his good works within this village, the place that he had adopted in which to live and work. If a stranger needed a place to stay, this man would offer his home. If a family ran out of food, he was among the first to offer whatever he had. If someone was in trouble with the authorities, who by and large oppressed the citizens of that nation, or if the Germans or, later the Russians, were performing a sweep of the village to collect up the young men for either imprisonment or the army, he would help hide them. He was loved very much by the villagers on account of all these things and many more.

Finally the man died, but the story doesn't say how. The villagers prepared his body for burial and proceeded to the village church where they asked the priest to perform the burial service and to bury the man in the church cemetery.

The priest knew and loved the man also, and agreed that he would conduct the funeral service, on one condition. Despite what the villagers wanted, he could not bury the man inside the church cemetery because he was not baptized.

The priest said, "I cannot bury him in our cemetery, because it is hallowed ground. He must go where those who are not baptized are buried. Those are the rules of the church and I cannot change them."

The villagers argued that the man was as good and as surely loved by God as any of the baptized, and maybe even more because of all the good that he had done.

The priest agreed with them regarding the virtues of the man, but insisted that the rules of the faith were clear and could be not be broken. Finally, he came up with a compromise that he hoped would satisfy everyone. He said, "In recognition of your love for him, and his love for you and all of God's people in this village, I will bury him on church land, near to those who have gone before him. It will be near those whom he has loved, but it will have to be beyond the fence that surrounds the consecrated ground of our cemetery."

And so it was. On the appointed day a grave was prepared just outside the fence that surrounded the church cemetery, and the body of the man was processed by all the villagers to the site where the priest conducted the ceremony, and then the grave was filled in and a stone placed before the night fell.

During the night something very beautiful happened-something that became apparent when the priest went to the church next morning to conduct morning mass. The fence that surrounded the cemetery had been moved by some of the villagers, so that it now took in the grave in which the man had been buried.

 

I found this story recently, and it impresses me.! 

We hear the word, "inclusive" used a lot these days, and this story captures what it means to be inclusive-first, in dealing with the world the way the man did, he captured something that Jesus demonstrated, which was a natural inclusivity. And second, the way in which the village made the fence larger in order to contain one who was different, showed that they acted out a kind of corporate inclusivity that the church struggles even today to show.

As the villagers expanded the fence which enclosed hallowed ground to include the grave of the man whom they loved, so too do we try and do the same through the example of Christ, who expanded the boundaries of the sacred to include both those whom the rules of our religion would exclude and those that the ways of this world would exclude.

Robert Frost once wrote, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

We live in a world of walls. The walls of separation in t_e Middle East are tearing apart nations and causing daily death and destruction, and there is no nation that has been involved without some measure of blame for those walls.

            Dividing walls keep us apart in our very language, and we construct a world of

"us" and "them."

            Illegal immigrants are "those people" not "us" (those who employ people to do work we would not do), Marriage is for "us," not for "them."

"Ours" is the right faith, the wrong expressions belong to "them."

Christianity in America has come to mean a specific thing_ an alliance with an ideology, a sense of certitude, a narrow definition of salvation, let alone grace. Some of us have seen in our lifetimes, how a land that once was proud of being a place of freedom of religion, has brought the fence into a smaller circle where the "us" in the middle views those of us "thems" with a certainty that we cannot also be people of faith.

We say, "Those people come up here wanting our jobs," or, "that kind is just looking to use our system," or "those people want special rights, not equal rights," and the lists of us-and-them goes on.

Who are the "thems"? Perhaps they are on welfare. Or immigrants (legal or otherwise) Or people of a different race, speaking a different language. Or gay. Or transgendered. Or just plain poor.

            Perhaps they are Republicans, or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, or

Muslims or Jews, Catholics or Protestants, the religious right or "that church."

            We have done a wonderful job of building fences and walls to divide the "us"

from the "them."

The fences that we have erected take many forms. Some are related to our culture and to our way of life, and others have to do with what we believe to be true about God or about Jesus.

In our Gospel lesson, Jesus goes off with his disciples for a little down-time. But then come the crowds... the throngs of "them" intruding on the time Jesus has with his most like-minded friends. The story says that he had compassion-that he taught and that he healed. It turns out that he was always one of "them."

Race, sex, culture, biblical knowledge, religious heritage or ideology, have no part in any pecking-order to receive God's grace, for all are chosen and loved by God.

 

 

We need to look at the barriers we have set up, or that are part of the larger world in which we live. Barriers are not to exist between us. We need to consider how we contribute to those barriers, how we add fence posts to their construction. God help us to remove them and to build a new house in our world, one without walls.

Think of the racial, economic and social barriers that mark the terrain of our daily lives and determine with whom we see, touch and share our lives. These enclosures direct where we go and whose terrain we avoid. Think of the gender barriers between us, where part of what determines our income has to do with an accident of birth.

When people are shunted aside, there should be hospitality, some space of welcome in which they can be themselves. And, sometimes we find we are just too different, and we need to know how to refer those whose needs are greater than we can realistically offer help to--we cannot cure mental illness or personally give away housing, but we can support institutions that do, and assist peopl(( in finding their path.

Hospitality means people don't have to conform to our ways, but that they can be themselves in our presence. It doesn't try to change people but enables them freedom and space to change at their own pace in their own way, as God leads them individually and collectively, just as God does for us.

Our reading from II Samuel says that David wanted to build a house for God. But God replies instead that he would build a house for David, meaning that God's people would dwell together in a place where one of his descendants would build the temple. To look at Israel today it seems to be a place with an .endless supply of fences and walls, yet I believe there is a growing consensus that the whole world and all of the people in it are part of the unity of God, and that keeps us to the business of pushing the fences around our hearts and our spiritual homes further and further away in the hope that the circle can keep widening.

That first spiritual home is not just the one built by Solomon and rebuilt later by Erza and Nehemiah. Nor even is it just the last and by far the greatest house built by Herod, the one which was destroyed around 70 AD. Rather it is the spiritual home that we recognize as representing God's realm, eternal and open to all who wish to rest there.

Gays and Straights, welfare moms and Bill and Melinda Gates, liberals and conservatives, Catholics and Jews, are all called to be part of the house that God builds, and are all made part of that house by the Spirit of God.

A house without fences in a realm without end. That's inclusivity. Amen, and let it be so.

 

Sermon Resources

Rev. Richard Fairchilde, story-"A House W/out Walls" United Church of Canada