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Sermon - May 17th, 2009
Insiders/Outsiders
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture:Acts 10:44-48
Most of you know I grew up in a small town in Eastern Oregon. I was born there at Pioneer Memorial Hospital exactly one month before the two babies who were switched at birth, if you have been following that story in the news. ( And no, I did not know either of them.) My Dad was born there too, although I believe he was a home birth. We were natives. Insiders. My Mom was born in Nebraska. She moved to Heppner after college. She was not a native, an outsider. I think maybe now she is finally gaining the insider status at 88 years of age, and returning to Heppner for her retirement… maybe.
When I moved to Myrtle Point, Oregon to take my first appointment, right out of seminary at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA, I was an outsider. It didn’t matter that I had grown up in a small town in Eastern Oregon. I was coming from the Bay Area in California. I was not a native of Myrtle Point. I had a husband who was planning to be the stay-at-home parent. Oh, there were lots of things about me that were strange and foreign and suspect.
We humans are very sensitive to this feeling of either belonging or not belonging. We all yearn to belong somewhere. We do not like feeling like an outsider. We long for a place in a family, among our friends, a group, a community where we don’t have to explain ourselves, we can just be ourselves and know that we are accepted. It is a good feeling—safe, secure, comfortable, loved.
So we form groups. Well, the nature of groups is exclusion, sometimes by definition, sometimes by membership, sometimes by status, gender, race, age. There are all kinds of ways that we may feel that a certain group is not for us. And then there is religion. Religion has the whole can of worms where the human nature of belonging or not belonging is played out. We only need to go to the Bible to see examples, from the beginning, of exclusion, building walls for protection and inclusion, breaking down walls to expand the community.
It’s a messy thing, this belonging thing. The Bible tells us to be pure and holy and do certain things to stay that way, including not inter-marrying with the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The Bible talks about not allowing certain people into the assembly of the Lord, like Ammonites and Moabites, even to the 10th generation. Then, there is the story of Ruth, one of those excluded Moabites, who married Boaz, Naomi’s kinsman, and gave birth to the grandfather of King David. King David, Israel’s most beloved king came from a mixed ancestry.
In the Bible, is the story of Nehemiah, who led the people to re-build the wall around Jerusalem. Nehemiah instituted reforms to cleanse his people from everything foreign, once again instructing the chosen people to not inter-marry and not accept food and water from foreigners. On the other hand, the prophets insisted that their people to take care of the sojourner, because the Jews once were sojourners in a foreign land.
You see. there is no clear line drawn about who’s in and who’s out. When a line is drawn; it is not long until it is moved. A wall is built and then it is torn down. A people are excluded and then God’s uses one of the excluded as a means of grace and salvation. It is in the Bible.
The Scripture read today is after the death and resurrection of Jesus. It was when the church was a kind of free-for-all. No rules, no doctrine, no Book of Disciple, no constitution, no creeds. There were the disciples, the followers, and there were the stories. We know now, that there wasn’t unity in every idea from the very beginning of the church. We often romanticize that there was. But in reality there were 12 disciples and people had their favorites and people had their own ideas. Just like today.
However, clearly something new was happening and Jesus was clearly the reason for this new thing happening. Also, Jesus was clearly about reaching out, breaking down walls, expanding the walls, and challenging everything that spelled exclusion. His teaching and example was so inclusive it was shocking. He re-defined family and religion and community. He intentionally spoke to women in public, ate with tax collectors, touched the untouchable, and broke some of those purity and holiness laws. He told stories about how religion got in the way of caring for people. And he didn’t seem to care if the person he was with was a gentile or a Jew, clean or unclean, foreign or not. I think his message of inclusion and expansion was so shocking that right away, people started instituting boundaries. But in today’s Scripture, people are still being shocked.
It is the time after Pentecost which we will celebrate in two weeks. Pentecost is the coming of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the church, and you are invited to wear something red or orange or yellow that day, as we United Methodist try to overcome our “Pentecostaphobia” for a day, and get a little excited, and move a little. Well, on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes to all of the Jews who have gathered together. Remember Jesus and the disciples were Jewish. Gentiles were still the outsiders. The Christian Church had not separated from the synagogue yet. That would take another hundred years or so.
Sometime after the Day of Pentecost, Peter received this very disturbing vision that he was to go and preach to the Gentiles. This may have been okay for Jesus to do once in awhile, but Peter didn’t want to ruin his ritual purity by mixing with those unclean, impure Gentiles. But the voice in the vision said, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” So when Peter was called to Cornelius’ house, a God-fearing Roman centurion, he goes, even though he is violating the purity laws.
Peter arrived at the house, along with a few of his Jewish friends. Cornelius had his family and friends assembled. Peter began to preach and before he says “Amen” the Holy Spirit came upon those Gentiles and they began to speak in tongues.
It appeared to be another Pentecost experience like in the second chapter of Acts. Except this time, something was wrong. Didn’t God know that there was an order and a process to this kind of thing. First, a Gentile must become a Jew, be circumcised, follow all those special dietary laws, study the Scriptures, and then be baptized as a Christian. Then, if they are lucky, maybe they can be filled with the Holy Spirit. I mean, it’s not like the Spirit can descend upon just anybody! This is just not right. You can’t give those Gentiles a PhD before they have a high school diploma! They need to do what everyone else has had to do, before they can belong! What are you thinking of, God???
Ann Lamott attends a little Presbyterian church in Marin, California. Everything was “sweet at church,” Ann writes, “and then the pastor had to go and ruin it all by giving a sermon on loving our enemies.
“It was like being in the Twilight Zone.” Ann wrote. Her pastor was clearly speaking only to her, saying. “Christians have a very had reputation in the world, and we have earned it, with our hate and self-righteousness. We speak in reverent terms of grace, justice, equality, mercy, and then we despise people who are created in God’s image, who are [God’s] children, too.” It drives Ann Lamott crazy that God seems to have no taste and no standards. It was driving those disciples who were with Peter crazy, too.
The Holy Spirit landed on those Gentiles, those outsiders, those pagans, those…. Well, you fill in the blank because we all have people we would rather not see in our group, in our community, in our church. Or, at the very least they need to clean themselves up and learn how to act properly, and then we will consider letting them in. After all we have our standards!
We United Methodists have own sad history of exclusion. The African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded when Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, to black Christians sat and kneeled in the wrong place in a Methodist Church in Philadelphia.
In the 1930’s the Methodist Church organized into five geographic areas called jurisdictions. One of them is called the Central Jurisdiction which is not geographical. It includes all the Black conferences, regardless of where they were located.
William McClain, a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C. said, “The Central Jurisdiction was a compromise. It was a way that the church avoided integration. It was a compromise to bring the southern Methodist Church and the northern Methodist Church together and to merge them in 1939. The truth was that black people were abused, insulted, and disappointed that the church was not willing to be one church.”
It wasn’t until 9 years ago, in the year 2000 when we finally publically and ritualistically repented of our racism and began dismantling the Central Jurisdiction. At Annual Conference this year in Salem in June we will be voting on several constitutional amendments that will move us toward the structure of a worldwide church, a more inclusive church, rather than one that segregates out our African American brothers and sisters. We also will be voting on an amendment that takes out a list of who the church is open to and simply replaces it with the language of being a church who is open to all,s period, no list. It is called the “all means all” amendment.
In Acts, Peter recognized God’s actions, even in this unexpected, unacceptable place. He was able to overcome his upbringing, his experience, his training, and his fear just long enough to see God’s face in those supposedly unclean faces. He saw God out front leading the way and he decided to get in line. He took that first step of baptizing Gentiles. The Holy Spirit came upon them and Peter baptized them.
Was it easy for Peter? Not at all. We know that. When the other disciples found out what he had done, they were more than a little concerned. They were appalled. “And you ATE with them?” What was the world coming too. What kind of riff-raff was Peter letting in? Yet, Peter didn’t give up. He continued on, arguing the case before the whole “mother” church. And…his voice eventually carried the day, but not without a lot of grumbling and complaining and whining and fighting. Peter’s testimony opened the mind and the door of the church to the Gentiles for the first time. He stood up for the Gentiles against the objections of the believers. He stood boldly. It seems so obvious to us now, because we are those Gentiles.
Every generation has its so-called unclean, impure people whom the Holy Spirit is landing upon. God is always opening the doors of religion, of the church, of Christianity. Today, we are the disciples who are watching Peter baptize people whom we would rather NOT see sitting in the pews with us.
This is not an easy message for us, if we are truly honest with ourselves, the message of “all means all,” the message of inclusiveness, the message that I just might experience God’s grace from a person I don’t even like. How can that be? But thank God it is that way, because I need those people I am not comfortable around in my life. Because in some strange way, when I am more accepting of others, I am more accepting of myself and when I’m more accepting of myself, I’m more accepting of others. Have you noticed that?
Of course, I have parts of me that I wish would just go away, or at least never show up. I know I’m not perfect; but, sometimes I just wish I was smarter and faster and more articulate and… well, God forbid that anyone know about all my limitations and my faults. But you know what? God knows all of them. And all means all. All of me. God loves me and each one of you even when we feel the most unworthy, even when we do dumb things, even when we are a neurotic mess, or when we totally miss the boat. God loves us all, this whole unpredictable, crazy, amazing lot of us and there’s nothing we can do to change that…….the only thing we can to is respond by loving ourselves and each other.
Amen.