Day: September 10, 2023

First Congregational Church UCC, Auburn MA, September 10, 2023

Luke 10:25-29 — ²⁵ An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” ²⁶ He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” ²⁷ He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” ²⁸ And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”  ²⁹ But wanting to vindicate himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, our God, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

It seems to me that all of the Bible, all of theology is something of a commentary on this little story of an interaction between Jesus and the man who was playing “gotcha”… you know, that game where the other person tries to trap you into saying something foolish or embarrassing?

I don’t know what it says, if anything, about me that I’m beginning our work together with a short story and a trick question…. but we’ll see.

I’m going to begin by telling you a little about myself, and why this is, for me, the core of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And probably I’ll repeat a little that is in the bio in the bulletin, but from a different point of view.

I spent the first eight years of my life in New Jersey, south Jersey.  My mother was raised a Hicksite Quaker in the Philadelphia region, my father was a Congregationalist from Woodstock, right south of us in Connecticut.  We followed the Quaker path in New Jersey.  

Now don’t feel bad if you don’t know what a Hicksite Quaker is… Philadelphia Quakers had a big fight in the early 1800s about how much you could accommodate to the world and they ended up splitting into two branches – the followers of Elias Hicks became known as Hicksites, and the other camp were called the Orthodox.  

Or as we would have put it in my First-day school classes, the Orthodox folks had closed minds and didn’t want to hear about any new ideas.  We each had contempt for the other party; for instance I could attend any church I wanted, except the Orthodox Friends Meeting right around the corner from our house.

In other words, even though I was raised a Quaker, with traditional Quaker understandings about worship, involvement in the world, pacifism, and so on, I was also raised to believe there was one right way to be a Christian, and I was following it.

We moved to Florida when I was in the ninth grade. and that was, for the most part, the end of church for us.  The closest Quaker meeting was too far for us to travel on a regular basis; moreover it was small, had no children, and was largely composed of folks who were wintering in the area.  

In my high school years, I began to examine my faith more seriously.  One of the tenets of the Quakerism I had absorbed was that people were capable of perfection, and that I should be continually working to be more and more Christ-like every day.  You can actually find this in the Letter to the Hebrews, chapter 6, verses 1-3:  Therefore let us go on toward perfection. . . and it’s a key part of Methodist practice as well.  There are ways to explain this – these days Methodists say it describes a process, not a destination, but when I was 16, I was quite literal, and I thought perfection was impossible, if not for other people, then certainly for me.

 I didn’t stop being a Quaker then; I didn’t stop being a Quaker when I joined the Marine Corps, though by then I had decided that if military service was a sin, it was ethically indefensible for me to expect those who served to protect me, while I enjoyed the fruits of their endeavors.  I was married in the Quaker way, in my mother’s home Meeting.

But, some years later, when my marriage failed, and I could not see a future, I walked into the local UCC church in Rutland, Vermont, and there I heard that it was always possible to start again, that failure did not have to define my life.  I joined this church that said there was always more to come, that knew how to welcome the stranger.  I filled my life with friends and there I learned how to be welcoming myself.

It was there in Vermont that I began to really study what it meant to welcome neighbors, to think seriously about what “neighbor” really meant.  Getting active in the UCC meant I met a lot of people from different places. 

Was that Japanese pastor who came to preach my neighbor? Or was he a representative of the evils of the other side in the Pacific campaigns of World War II?  We had members who would not come to church to hear him because he was Japanese.  Was he a neighbor?  Were we being neighbors when we (some of us) would not meet him?

It’s a question which continues to make me think as these years later.  My last church helped expand my understanding of that neighbor, as we not only welcomed the folks you’d expect, but the couple in the corner who couldn’t (literally, could not) stop whispering to each other through the service… and a number of other folks, gay, straight, trans, white, Black, professors, folks who could not read, people who couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, were just different from one another in so many ways.

Through all this I can’t help noticing that when the expert in the law comes back at Jesus, when his first trick question didn’t work, he asks another trick question in order to vindicate himself.  In other words, whenever we start asking that question, just who is it that belongs, who must we welcome, we have to suspect there’s an edge of self-protection, maybe even self-justification, hiding back behind what we’re saying.  Maybe we’re hiding hatred, or anger, or fear.  Maybe we’re just embarrassed because we’ve just acted in a way that says to someone, you’re really not welcome, you’re not ever going to be one of us… and we know it’s wrong, but we couldn’t help ourselves.

And now I’ll bring you back to my first truth discovery.  Jesus loves us anyway.  Jesus loves us anyway.  We’re afraid of the other?  Sure, and we want to work on that fear, but it’s hard.  Remember, Jesus loves us anyway.  All the time, no matter what, we are God’s loved people, and all God asks of us is to love the world around us.  God knows how hard that is, and God understands when we fall short of the mark.

English Bishop N. T. Wright once wrote:  The church is not a society of perfect people doing great work.  It’s a society of forgiven sinners repaying their unpayable debt of love by working for Jesus’ realm in every way they can, knowing themselves to be unworthy of the task.

Every time you hold the door open for someone with a bag full of stuff, you’re showing love to a neighbor, whether or not you know them.  When you smile at the cashier, you’re showing love to a neighbor.  When you say something pleasant to a stranger, when you allow a car in ahead of you when the lane closes on the Pike (and isn’t that hard to do with a smile?)… it those simple ways as well as the more complex, we show love.  

It’s love which turns strangers to neighbors, and that’s what God has called us to do.

Amen.

© 2023, Virginia H. Child