Learning Compassion

Mark 7:24-37     

So Jesus is on his way to Tyre, but he is coming from Galilee where he has been trolled, you might say, by Pharisees. They have been following him around, apparently looking for opportunities to criticize him. Of course, they found one: uncouth table habits. Apparently, they didn’t wash their hands before eating. No doubt, they ate with their hands, so it is a little bit gross. But it was not so much hygiene that the Pharisees are worried about, it’s protocol. Their chief complaint is that Jesus and his disciples don’t follow the tradition of the elders, a ritual hand washing.

I don’t know if Jesus had a beef with this particular tradition. But what bugs him is their hypocrisy. The way they abandon the commandment of God and hold on to human tradition. God did not say, “wash your hands.” That was your mother.

So, while washing your hands is a nice thing, Jesus feels that it is being used as a stand-in for the more important, more challenging things that God actually does command. It’s easy to wash your hands; it’s a lot harder, say, to love your enemies, forgive those who harm you, heal broken spirits, welcome the sinner. If all it took to be a Christian was to wash your hands, sermons would be a lot shorter.

I suspect that Jesus neglected to wash his hands on-purpose, just so he could have this conversation.

He takes the opportunity to tell the Pharisees, and everyone else listening in, nothing outside of you can defile you. It doesn’t matter how you eat or what you eat. It is what comes out of you that defiles you. Particularly, what comes from your heart.

So, just like that, he declares all foods kosher. No problem. Eat whatever you want. God doesn’t care what goes in your mouth; it is what is in your heart that really matters.

Then he takes off, leaving them with this new idea to chew on. And he goes to the region of Tyre. Tyre is in Syria. This is a non-Jewish area, so the people Jesus will encounter here are gentiles.

Right away, a gentile woman approaches him. She is Syrophoenician, meaning she is Greek culturally, of Syrian ethnicity. She is not at all Jewish.

And she approaches him because her daughter is suffering. She has an unclean spirit, a demon. This child is possessed by evil.

Now, we don’t usually talk about being possessed by spirits, or demons, or evil. But even though we don’t use these terms, we ought to be able to understand these problems. When you hear that she was possessed by an unclean spirit you may suppose she is suffering from a severe mental or physical illness. It doesn’t really matter what it is. A sickness that has no known cure or treatment, that causes nothing but unrelenting suffering, can certainly seem evil.

And the suffering is equally intense for Jews and gentiles alike.

But this is a gentile woman. In a gentile land. Jesus is out of his area code. Why he went there, I don’t know. Mark offers no explanation. But he does, and word about him and the amazing things he does has spread this far. And this mother doesn’t let tradition or custom stop her from approaching him because her daughter’s life is at stake. She bowed before him – stopping him in his tracks – and she begged him to heal her daughter.

She has cast off her dignity, she has put her body on the line, taking the chance that she will be brutally thrown aside. And she begs him for mercy.

And the Jesus we know and love – what do we think he would do? He would look at her with kindness. He would go down on one knee to get at eye level with her and tell her she matters, her daughter matters. And he would follow her back to her house, lay hands on this girl and bring peace to her body and soul. This is the Jesus we know and worship and love.

But that is not what he did.

He looked at her and said, “I’m not gonna throw the children’s food to the dogs.”

There is so much packed in that response. It says I am here for the children of Israel, God’s chosen ones. I am not here for you. It says they are special and you are the opposite of special. It says you are lower than a human being – you are a dog, and I don’t mean a pet chihuahua.  I mean a dirty dog.

And we just can’t believe he said it. We can’t believe he would be so cruel.

Everything about this exchange says that he just wants her to go away. You would expect her to skulk off quietly, begging forgiveness for the trouble.

Yet, she surprises us – about as much as Jesus surprised us with his words – when she says –

Yes, but even the dogs get to eat the children’s crumbs.

This woman knows what she needs. She musters up the courage to push for it. She bets that even though she won’t be first in line, she might be second. She takes a chance that there is more than enough mercy for even the dogs that sit under the table waiting for crumbs to fall.

She is amazing in her boldness, her persistence in asking for what she needs. And Jesus is amazing in his response.

When we say about Jesus that he was human in every way, we should believe that he was human in this way too – that he might make a mistake. And when we say that he was without sin, we might mean that he was willing and able to correct his mistakes. That alone is quite enough, and it is much more than you could say about many of us much of the time. Jesus, holding at the same time both human and divine natures, was on a learning curve.

Having just schooled the Pharisees about God’s law versus human tradition on the matter of food, he now gets schooled by a Syrophoenician woman about God’s law versus human tradition on the matter of people. Yes, Jesus was sent to the children of Israel, but God’s grace doesn’t end there. And confronted with this truth, Jesus says Yes.

After leaving Tyre, he journeys in the region of the Decapolis, another gentile area, and he is presented with a man who is deaf and unable to speak. Again, a gentile. This time, he says nothing about dogs, nothing about who is worth his time, but he simply takes this man in hand and heals him.

Later on, in the next chapter, Jesus is teaching great crowds of people, still in the gentile regions. And he turns to his disciples and says to them, I have compassion for them. All of them.

Compassion is something that we have to learn. Even Jesus learned it, and quite possibly he learned it from a Syrophoenician woman who wasn’t wiser than he was – she just needed her daughter to be made well.

We learn by experience, through our encounters with others, if we allow ourselves to learn, just as Jesus did.

We learn that our shared humanity makes us one family, even if our languages and customs and religious practices are different.

We learn that loving others in the manner God loves us involves giving much more than demanding. And in giving, we become the model of Christlike love. In giving, the way Jesus gave, we show the world the love God has for them.

Compassion is the good news. Compassion is the mission. And here is the message for you and me:

Be like the Syrophoenician woman and stand up courageously for what is good and right. Stand up for yourself and stand up for others who need you to.

Be like Jesus who changes course when he sees that his initial response was wrong. Believe me, if Jesus is not too proud to correct himself, neither should you and I be.

Be compassionate, as Jesus is compassionate. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Asking yourself how you would want to be treated in that same situation. Pushing aside preconceptions about “these kind of people” for the sake of better understanding the flesh and blood person before you.

Learn compassion. Now is a good day to begin.

Sermon: No Longer Strangers, Part 6: Suiting Up

Joshua 24:1-2, 14-18  

Ephesians 6:10-20

Anyone know what Charlie Sheen is up to these days? Some years ago, you might recall, he had a spectacularly public breakdown. Although, not if you asked him. If you asked Charlie he would have said, “Winning!” because that became his mantra.

When asked about his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, he said, “Not bipolar. It’s bi-winning! Winning here, winning there…” His conversations were colored with staccato bursts of “winning!” It appeared to be a kind of game – a mind game, where the object is saying it enough times in the hope that will make it true, talking oneself into believing it despite the clear reality. Winning!

He started something, didn’t he?

Winning is big. Winning is huge. #winning. Winning at life. Winning so much we get bored with winning. So. Much. Winning.

It might get boring, but it has to be about winning, because this is a zero-sum game – if you’re not winning you’re losing. And who wants to be a loser?

No one wants to be a loser. I don’t. I like winning. I like winners.

Most people do. Winning at games, winning at politics, winning at business, winning at friendship – winning at friendship? Yes, when life is a zero-sum game, there are winners and losers in everything.

The people of Israel were just like everybody. They liked winning. On this fine day when they stood before the threshold of the Promised Land. After 40 years in the wilderness, homeless, property-less, they were finally on the verge of winning.

And their leader, Joshua stood up before them and reminded them of all the trials they had faced, of all that they had overcome, and of the great opportunity that lay before them now, so close they could almost taste the milk and honey. And he offered them these words: Choose this day whom you will serve. Whether it be the gods your ancestors served back in the land they came from, or the gods these other people serve in the region we are in now. Choose. As for me and my household, Joshua declared, we will serve the Lord.

And the people all cried out in answer, Yes, yes, we too will serve the Lord. He has done great things, he has brought us through the wilderness, he has protected us and he has brought us to this place where we are winners. We are winning. We will serve the God of winning.

Perhaps they didn’t say it quite that way. But I imagine they felt like the Bad News Bears when they turn their losing streak around, the Hoosiers when they win the championship game, Rudy when the coach finally puts him into the game and he makes the winning play for Notre Dame, Rocky Balboa when he beats Apollo Creed. Winning.

They liked the feeling of winning as much as we like the feeling of winning. And they said yes, we will serve the Lord who has brought us so far. We will remember his deeds, his faithfulness to us. We will.

But then they didn’t – not always. The promise they made was at times forgotten. Because life got complicated, offering too many options – in this new land they took there were the remnants of other gods and forms of worship, interesting things they had not seen before, perhaps. Opportunities to hedge their bets. You know, if the Lord doesn’t seem to be helping you quite as much as you want, you can try this other god over here – what can it hurt?

Have you ever said that – what can it hurt?

And these temptations, these other gods, come in all forms, we’re not just talking about stone figures. There are endless forms of idols that offer us opportunities to be winners. They seem harmless; they usually appear as something good. These “spiritual forces of evil,” as the letter to Ephesians phrases it, look like winning. And winning feels so good, it just makes you feel like you ought to keep on winning and winning and winning – at any cost.

The struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, the letter says, but against the cosmic powers of this present darkness. It is no wonder we get confused.

But we reach for the armor to fight the battle, to keep on winning. Breastplate, the shield, the helmet to protect us from losing, to keep us fighting another day. Suit up! Game on!

The problem is we forget what battle we are fighting. We forget what winning is and what losing is. We forget what kind of armor we really need.

It’s the risk of living in this world – as the letter says, “this present darkness” – that we can become habituated to just about anything. We can become so well adjusted to the darkness it seems like light. and when confronted with dishonesty and theft, say things like, “anybody would have done the same.”

And because anybody would have done it, we will excuse it, overlook it. We might even draw the conclusion that we, too, need to do it – cheat and lie and steal, because it looks like the kind of armor we will need to survive. To thrive. To win.

Then when we stand up before Joshua, full of enthusiasm, and say, “Far be it that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods … we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God” how truthful is our proclamation?

I remember a church I did some preaching at years ago. The church was about 40 years old, and had been about the same size for those 40 years. Then suddenly they started to get an influx of people. A couple would come visit, express an interest in joining the church. Another couple would come. In a period of a few months they received about 25 new members. They were all coming from the same place. The Methodist church in town had a new pastor and things were not going well. People were leaving the church and going across town to the Presbyterian Church. And the Presbyterian congregation was overjoyed. Winning!

This is what happens when it becomes a zero-sum game. Sheep-stealing feels like winning.

I met a new-church pastor last week, and he told me that when someone comes to them from another church, feeling wounded by that other church, they send them back. They encourage them to reconcile; so far as they are able, to make peace; to not spread ill-will by their actions, but to seek the good of all. Because we are interconnected; our loss is their loss and our gain is their gain. This is not zero-sum. It’s either win-win or lose-lose.

The truth, which we might forget, is that we are the church wherever we go and whoever we are with. To take satisfaction in our neighbor’s loss, even if everybody else is doing it, is to become alienated from the way of Christ. The words of our Confession of 1967 affirm that the church is both gathered and dispersed to do the will of God. And as the church is dispersed, “the quality of their relations with other persons is the measure of the church’s fidelity.”

Winning. This is winning. Not just what we do in here and with one another, but the quality of our relations with others wherever we go.

So we must suit up with the armor of God. Not to be confused with steel and iron outfits that allow us to make war on each other. I am always a little bit bothered by this imagery of armor. Ever since the time I went to a birthday party where the child was given a “whole armor of God” playsuit. So this child could have play dates with his Christian friends and they could put on their whole armor of God suits and beat up on each other. The message seems to get lost in the application.

The truth is this: there is no way to win when we lose the ability to distinguish the dark from the light. There is no human-made armor that can protect us from the weapons that will pierce our hearts and destroy our souls. There will always be a better weapon to match and beat our armor and shields and helmets.

True winning is putting on the armor of God, clothing ourselves in truth and righteousness, faith and peace; taking these with us out into the world; seeking reconciliation with all God’s children. In this way we draw ourselves closer to God.

So, suit up. March on in the light of God.

Photo credit: By john - armorUploaded by Urbourbo, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14951910

No Longer Strangers, Part 5: Overflowing Life

Ephesians 5:15-20

Time is something we think about often enough. We have a popular saying: Life is too short.

Too short for what?

Life is too short to be sad, to hold grudges, to not celebrate. Life is too short to worry. Life is too short to be on a diet, to live on low-fat everything, to forgo cake and champagne or any of the good stuff! Life is too short to stay in a bad job, a bad relationship, or to live a lie. Life is too short for a long story, life is too short to talk slowly, life is too short to waste a minute of it.

In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Clearly, there is a wide range of ideas about what life ought to be used for. No doubt there is a wide range of ideas about what wise living should look like. What do the scriptures say wise living should look like?

We know from the context, the entirety of this letter, that the life God has intended for us is to seek reconciliation with God and with others. To know ourselves as God’s beloved and seek to imitate God’s love in our lives and relationships with the world. To let that love be reflected in all we do, making the most of the time we have.

The key to making the most of the time is to feel the urgency of it but avoid becoming anxious about it. A sense of urgency will motivate you to do what needs to be done, to take the risks that ought to be taken. We need that sense of urgency. But anxiety is another thing; anxiety will paralyze you, making you afraid to do anything at all.

I could easily become anxious when I think about the minutes ticking by, the sand sifting through the hourglass, knowing that as each day passes I have one day less ahead of me. And yet, when I allow this anxiety to overcome me, I am failing to do the very thing I intend to be doing, the thing I ought to be doing – seizing the moment, making the most of the time. I am failing to live in this precious moment that is given to me.

Make the most of the time, the letter says to us.

A textual tidbit I learned this past week about this phrase, making the most of the time – it is a Greek word, exagorazomenoi. Within it we see the Greek word for marketplace – agora. And it literally means to snap up all chances of a bargain at the marketplace. If you see a great deal on a bag of apples, take it – it will be worth it. And if you see a great deal on a blanket, take it. Take the opportunities that are presented to you when they are worthwhile, without stewing too much over whether there might be a better one somewhere or if this is the appropriate type of apple or blanket. Let go of whatever is getting in your way of taking the good opportunity that is before you.

That is an enlightening way of hearing the phrase, making the most of the time. Seizing the opportunity to do something good. And to be looking for those opportunities to do something good. This is life abundant and overflowing.

How can we as the church, the body of Christ, do that?

How can we pay attention to the incredible bargains that are offered to us and seize them?

Take church meetings, for example.

I think of church meetings, because I have spent a lot of time in church meetings and thinking about church meetings. And I know there is a lot of time wasted in meeting. I have sat in some meetings where we let hours go down the drain as we rehash things that have gone before, things that are really of no consequence today, or things we dislike but have no power to change. Sadly, neglecting what we might be doing now, how we might be making the most of the time.

I have been in meetings that are the equivalent of pushing the food around on our plates. An hour passes by and no active steps have been taken, no concrete decisions made. Nothing is changed.

And mostly, I have been in meetings where there are too few present. Most people don’t come to the meetings. Maybe because they don’t like meetings – they have been in too many of the kind of meetings I have just described. But maybe because they don’t know they are needed. They assume that they are neither needed nor wanted, because others are already doing it.

Of course, we must realize that this business of meeting, discussing, planning – the good, the bad, and the meh – this is all part of the business of being church. Could we do it better? No doubt. But we start where we are and go from there. What are the possibilities you can see?

Even as you read this there are incredible opportunities for us to be church all around us. In our city, there is the National Folk Festival coming up in a few weeks, an event that will draw thousands of people here. How can we be a part of helping this beautiful thing happen? How can we welcome the strangers in our midst? There will be a lot of them.

There is the event called Third Friday every month downtown where citizens of Salisbury come out to be a part of the community – how might we be a part of that?

And there is so much more. How might we be a part of the many efforts in our midst to make our community more beautiful, more joyful, more loving?

Exagorazomenoi! There are a ton of bargains out there – don’t think there are not. Let us go out and snap them up! Let us fill ourselves with the Spirit, with songs of praise and thankfulness for everything, and make the most of all we have been given. We have been given life – adoption into the family of God, a new identity as God’s beloved children. And we have been given a purpose – to nurture and strengthen the body of Christ.

To live this life overflowing – it is not something in the past that we look back on. It is not something in the future that we look toward. It is now and here, on offer to us.

Let us make the most of it.

photo credit: Jerusalem Old City Market. By  Ester Inbar, available from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:ST., Attribution,https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1637899

No Longer Strangers, Part 4: Making Peace

Ephesians 4:25-5:2     

On a Saturday afternoon recently, Kim and I were listening to Harry Chapin’s music while we were working around the house. When the song, Cat’s in the Cradle, came on we both stopped what we were doing and just listened.

It’s one of his most famous songs. It tells the story of a father who has a son. It starts out:

A child was born just the other day,

He came to the world in the usual way,

But there were planes to catch and bills to pay,

He learned to walk while I was away.

He was talking before I knew it, and as he grew he said, “I’m gonna be like you, dad. You know I’m gonna be like you.

And the song goes on like that; in each verse, a different stage in the child’s development presents opportunities that are missed by this father, to be a part of his son’s life. Until, finally, the son is grown, the father is retired. And now when the father has time and wants to be with his son, the boy has grown into a man who is too busy for his father. And in the last line, the father realizes his son was just like him. He’d grown up just like him.

Kim remarked that it was such a sad song. A song of opportunities missed and relationships that drift apart, or just never happen.

A song about how we learn who we are … and how we should live … and what to value.

As we have been working through this letter to the Ephesians, we have been paying attention to what it is trying to teach us. So far, we have learned that God has drawn us into God’s family. That we are all, in a sense, adopted children of the Lord. We have learned that it is God’s divine plan to gather up all of his children into one big family. And that it is hard for us to be brought together, because we resist this lumping together of disparate parts. We don’t necessarily want to be in the same family as SOME PEOPLE. But, nonetheless, God has called us to put aside labels and judgments that divide us.

And we have learned that what it will take for us to be brought together, the thing that will finally be our common ground, is our brokenness. We are all, every one of us, broken – broken, but loved.

It is the power of God’s love that brings us together and makes us whole again, in the communion of God’s love. That’s the first three chapters:  We are a beloved community of God’s children.

And we, the beloved children of God, may seek to be like our heavenly parent, if we remember who we are, whose we are.

But we don’t always remember who we are.

In our Tuesday Bible study a couple of weeks ago we talked about a recent poll that was taken in England in which almost half of the respondents thought the world would be a better place without religion. They were inclined to believe most of the wars that are fought are caused by religion. And even though they tended to acknowledge that these problems are largely caused by religious extremists, they seemed to feel that it would be best to just get rid of religion altogether.

As a community of people who gather around the table each week to study the word of God, to strengthen our faith, this was disheartening to hear. But I think we have to acknowledge that religion, particularly Christianity, has gotten a bad reputation in our society. Those who are on the outside of it, too often see us on the inside as being narrow-minded, judgmental, and failing to practice what we preach. In a word, hypocrites.

That feels like unfair criticism. We just aren’t perfect and we never will be perfect. But rather than be offended by it, perhaps we should be prompted to ask ourselves how well we are living into the calling to be a community of God’s grace.

If we are, indeed, the beloved children of God, how do we live in the world?

Some would say that the way to do it is to separate ourselves from the rest of the world – the pagan world. That to retain our identity as Christians, we must avoid contamination from non-Christian influences. However, I would say to them: show me where Jesus practiced that kind of lifestyle, because I cannot find it in any of the gospels. I’ve looked, and that’s not what I’ve found. Here’s what I’ve found: Jesus hanging around the fringes of Jewish society – the sick, the downtrodden, the homeless – and listening, healing, feeding, loving. Accepting.

And he said to his followers, Go and Do likewise.

We must go back to these scriptures to find and claim our identity as God’s beloved children. It tells us the kinds of things we should put away, or cast off – lying, bearing grudges, taking from others what is not yours to take; and the kinds of things we should put on – kindness, tenderheartedness, forgiveness. We get so far away from the gospel truth, and we must continually go back to the scriptures and seek to know how we shall live as God’s beloved children. To know what to cast off and what to put on.

It is as though we are children who are trying to dress just like their parents. We want to be just like them. When my son Joe was four, he had carefully observed how daddy dressed every day when he went to work: wool gabardine pants, a button-down shirt, and a tie. He wanted to be just like him. I had to search hard to find some nice gray dress pants for this little boy, to go with his oxford shirt and his clip-on tie, because he made it very clear that khakis just wouldn’t do. He felt that rough cotton fabric, looked at that wide elastic waistband, and looked at me. He said, “that’s not what daddy wears.” He wanted the real thing. He wanted to be just like dad.

How, then, shall we dress like our father or mother in heaven? How can we be most like our God of love?

The good news, you might say, is that it is the little things to which we should attend, the day-to-day behaviors that matter.

It is to be kind to others, even the strangers. It is to speak honestly, so as not to let lies become barriers between us. it is to avoid letting anger fester, but seek reconciliation with others. To be peacemakers.

And lest we should think that to make peace is to smooth over and tamp down differences and troubles –

That’s not peace. Not really.

True peacemaking, my friends, involves working through those disagreements, seeking better understanding, striving for compassion. This is, indeed, the only way we can be the one family God desires for us to be.

Seek to be imitators of God, beloved children, living in love. These are the words of the scripture. This is just what all the words that come before, from Genesis on, are leading us to.

Be kind, be honest, be forgiving. Let go of anger, seek reconciliation, share with those in need. Offer encouragement, give grace as you have received grace. The more we are doing these things, the more we are living into the likeness of God; the more we are representing the beloved children of God.

Know who you are: children of the living God. And seek to be just like him. Just like him. And when we live this way, imagine what the world would think of us then?

Photo Credit: By State Library of Queensland, Australia - https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryqueensland/6504265771/, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53526373

No Longer Strangers, Part 3: God's Powerful Love

Ephesians 3:14-21

I have an app on my phone called Ceaseless. Every morning at 8:00 it pings me and asks me if I would like to pray. Sometimes I say, “later.” And that is okay, because it is always there for me.

It gives me focus for my prayers. Each day this app randomly pulls three people in my contact files and suggests I pray for them. I never know whose name will pop up.

So it happens, sometimes, that it is the name of a person I am angry with. Or it may be the name of someone I am deeply concerned about or anxious for. It could be someone I haven’t thought about in ages, someone I’ve lost touch with and I have no idea what is going on in their lives.

And Ceaseless asks me to pray for them. Sometimes, though, I don’t know how to pray for them.

If it is someone I am angry with, how can I pray for them? Maybe I should be praying for myself, that my heart would be more forgiving and the anger would go away – but how should I pray for them?

If it is someone I have lost touch with, I look at their name and I wonder what in the world is going on with them. Where they are, what their life is like, if they are even still living. I have no idea what they need, and I wonder, how should I pray for them?

But I think sometimes the hardest of all are the ones where I do know what’s going on in their lives. Sometimes I know the challenges they are facing and I am sure I know the many ways they make their challenges even more difficult. And I think to myself, if only they would do more of this or less of that! And a part of me would like to pray, God, make them do more of this and less of that. So when their names pop up on the screen, I wonder, how should I pray for them?

Have you ever thought that you just don’t know how to pray? Annie Lamott said the most common prayer in the world is “please, please, please,” or “help, help, help!” And the second most common is “thank you, thank you, thank you.” But I think it’s a distant second, because we are just more likely to turn to prayer when we feel the need for something.

Perhaps you have had the occasional night of little sleep, when something is weighing heavily on you and as you toss and turn you make your fitful prayers to God. Little cries to a supreme being who, you feel, may or may not be listening. And they might sound like,

“Make it stop!”

“Save him!”

“Make this pain go away!”

“Keep her safe!”

Whatever is keeping you awake, whatever is giving you great anxiety, this is your focus and your sole desire is to fix it. Asking God to fix it. Our cries of desperation, these are the rawest form of the “Please, please, please” prayers.

And then, if God does make it stop, save him, make the pain go away, you might return to God with a deep sigh of “Thank you.”

But if not … If not –

What happens to our prayers when we don’t receive the answers we wanted? What happens to our faith when we are disappointed?

When the addict keeps on using. When the pain does not cease. When the problem doesn’t get fixed. Then we might wonder if prayer is worthwhile – just a tiny drop in the ocean. Or, if we still hold on to hope, we might wonder: If not like this, then, how should we pray?

I remember a man who had prayed ceaselessly for his grandson who was an alcoholic. It seemed like nothing could stop this poor soul on his path toward self-destruction. The grandfather said, “I don’t know how to pray for him anymore. All I do now is say his name and offer it to God.

Scripture gives us a lot of examples to help us with our prayers. The first thing I believe we can learn from them is that all kinds of prayers are good prayers. To pray what is in your heart is not wrong. There have been times I have tried to second-guess my feelings and muster up what might be a proper, respectable prayer. But I am not fooling God. I am only hiding from myself.

Opening our hearts to God is the beginning of prayer.

But here in this portion of the letter to Ephesians, we find an astonishing example of prayer that both strengthens our hope and gives us something to aspire to. This prayer for the church is that they might begin to comprehend God’s powerful love.

“I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Consider this.

He does not pray that the Ephesians will be healthy. He does not pray that they will be wealthy or successful. He does not pray that they will live their best life now, as we might have heard some preachers say. He does not pray that they will triumph over enemies, whether they be people, corporations, nations, or diseases. He simply prays that they will know fully, deeply, completely, the power of God’s love through Christ.

And to know the breadth and length and height and depth of this love is not to take its linear measure. It is not to know its precise dimensions. To know its measure is to know that, for us, it is immeasurable.

His prayer for us, God’s beloved, is to know God’s power is love and that love is immensely powerful – so powerful that it is beyond anything we can ask or imagine.

Beyond anything we can ask or imagine.

It would not be a bad thing for us to think of these words when we pray – for ourselves or for others. When I try to pray for someone I am harboring a grudge against, I might recall that the power of God’s love can accomplish far more than I can ask or even imagine. And when I am trying to pray for someone I want to fix, because I can see several ways they might live their life better than they currently are, I might recall that the power of God’s love can accomplish far more than I can ask or even imagine.

When I am losing hope for someone, I might recall that the power of God’s love can accomplish far more than I can ask or even imagine.

When I don’t know how to pray, I might recall that the power of God’s love can accomplish far more than I can ask or even imagine. And this may strengthen my hope: To know the answers are not in my hands; they are in the power of God’s love. God seeks to put his power within us, rooting and grounding us in love.

Imagine, if you will, how much we could do with the power of God’s love.

This, my brothers and sisters, is the beginning of living the life we have been called to. God has drawn us together under the banner of God’s love.

The letter to the Ephesians will go on to speak more in detail about how we might live in the likeness of Christ. There are parts of this letter that might irritate us, parts that might puzzle us; but, while the details might change over time, the fundamentals remain the same: God’s power is love and God is still seeking to fill us with this love.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

No Longer Strangers, Part 2: Aliens Brought Near

Ephesians 2:11-22      

In 1871 two archeologists found a piece of engraved stone from the Jerusalem temple with Greek writing on it. It held a stern warning: “No foreigner is to enter the barriers surrounding the sanctuary. He who is caught will have himself to blame for his death which will follow.”

This was one rule they were, evidently, pretty strict about. No gentiles were permitted to enter the temple. But it was not the only rule. There were degrees of acceptability in the temple worship of the time.

The outermost area of the temple was called the court of the gentiles, and it was a large, open, public area. Anyone could come into the outer court. But within this courtyard there was a barrier, called a soreg, which surrounded a wall defining the perimeter of the outer court of the temple. The outer court was also called the court of the women, because this was as far as Jewish women were allowed to enter. Further within, there was an inner court, the place where the burned sacrifices were made. Jewish men were permitted to enter the inner court, as long as they didn’t have certain conditions that would make them disqualified. And finally, the innermost region, called the Holy of Holies, where only the purest ones could enter.

When you read the Old Testament you notice that there were many types of people who were restricted from participating in temple worship. Foreigners, or those of mixed race; women; eunuchs; anyone with a skin disease; these were all barred from entering. But additionally, Jewish men who were deformed in some way were prevented from entering the inner region. The scriptures speak of the blind and the lame, dwarves, and hunchbacks, all excluded. Anyone judged to have abnormalities or imperfections, excluded. There were many ways a person could be shut out.

We talked a bit last week about insiders and outsiders, and the ways we tend to separate the world into these two categories. The human mind likes order, and if we can’t find it in the world around us, we will create it and impose it. We divide people up into categories, and then judge those categories. So, in the end, there are those who are like us and others. These others might be frightening to us. They might just be perplexing to us. Or they might somehow seem wrong to us.

In the first century, as the church was yet small but growing fast, who should belong was still an open question. But it was becoming increasingly clear that many different, diverse peoples were going to belong. Among those who gathered to worship, there were differences in race and culture, which would not easily be erased yet must be overcome. No longer, in the church, would there be the circumcised and the uncircumcised, but there would be one body in Jesus Christ.

These issues are raised in many of the New Testament epistles, seeming to indicate that this was a common problem at the time. The Spirit of God was crossing over boundaries and drawing diverse groups together in Christ – but those people were, maybe, a little averse to being drawn together. They were too preoccupied with their differences, and the ways those differences made them uncomfortable with one another. And in their own ways, they were prone to judging those who were different.

There were the poor Christians, some of them even slaves, and the wealthy Christians. They had dramatically different lifestyles, obviously. And the wealthy ones were sometimes unable to comprehend the unique challenges of the poor ones.

We have to admit that we are still beset by these kinds of problems. It is hard for us to understand people who are different from us. For those who abide strictly by the law, it is hard to understand the law-breakers. For those who are free of addiction, it can be hard to understand those who suffer under the weight of addiction. For those who have enough, or more than enough, it can be hard to understand those who don’t have enough and, to our minds, do a poor job of managing what little they have.

Put simply, it can be very hard for us to understand those whose path through life has been different from ours. In some cases, we admire them; in others, we disapprove of them. sometimes we are simply appalled by them.

Philip Yancey, in his book called What’s So Amazing About Grace, relays a story a friend once shared with him. A young woman came to his friend in desperate straits. A miserable sinner without a shred of dignity left, she was an addict, homeless, a mother of a two-year-old girl. She had no money and no food. She unloaded on this man a torrent of words, confessing to him all the horrible things she had done, all the horrible things that had been done to her. He listened, then he asked if she had considered going to a church for help. She looked at him with shock, and said, “Why would I do that? I feel terrible enough about myself already. They would just make me feel worse.”

To be truthful, I am afraid if I had been sitting across from the woman Yancey wrote about and listened to all the things she confessed, the thought would have entered my mind, “How could anybody do that?” And it is possible I would have judged her, condemned her, proving to her that yes, the church is there to make you feel bad about yourself, just in case you don’t feel bad enough already.

Any time we start a sentence with the words, “Why would anybody …” it is a chance to stop. Pause. Think about what it is we don’t understand. And then perhaps rephrase the question: “What kinds of circumstances might cause me to do such a thing?”

The reason Yancey told this story is because he couldn’t help but see the contrast between this young woman’s relationship with the church and Jesus’ relationship with sinners. Particularly, the stories about some of the women who came to him, miserable sinners without a shred of dignity. They were accustomed to being scorned by the religious establishment, but they looked at Jesus and saw someone they could turn to. They saw someone who would have compassion for them. Even though, as Paul wrote, he himself was sinless, Jesus put no barriers between himself and all the sinners of the world.

When we think about what the church is for, it is worth noting that it is sometimes called a hospital for sinners. No one, no matter how deep their transgressions, should be turned away from the church in their time of need. No one, no matter how appalling their sins, should ever be turned away from the church because of them. Remembering that we, too, are sinners and have found sanctuary in the church, where Christ heals us of the sickness of our souls. How could we not extend that same grace to others?

The radical thing that Jesus Christ did in his life was to draw the sinners and the outcasts to him. He healed those who had been cast out of society, giving them a chance to become reconciled with society, an opportunity to be restored to wholeness.

The letter to Ephesians speaks to the gentiles, saying you who were once far off, or aliens, have been brought near, by the blood of Jesus Christ. You who were once excluded: the gentiles, the women, the blind and lame and deformed, the sick, the imperfect. Now the walls and barriers have been removed, the gates are open. In Christ, all have been brought together.

For in him we find our peace. There becomes a whole new way to find and articulate our identity – and a whole new way to frame our outlook on the world.

You see, where we once looked at the world as a framework of lines dividing peoples into groups, separating them from others, we found our identity by focusing on the lines and what they represented: differences in acceptability, differences in belongingness. The lines represented the ways we differed, and we defended the boundary lines because they defined who we were against who we were not.

But in Christ everything changes. And we no longer look to the boundary lines, but we look to the center, which is Christ. The holy of holies. He is our center, our purpose, what we are drawn to, where we find our peace. He is our peace.

And so in Christ the circumcised and the uncircumcised came together. The slave and the free, the Jew and the gentile, the north and the south and the east and the west, all came together to find their peace in him. Turning our attention away from the lines that separate us and toward the center which now defines us.

May it be so.

Photo: A copy of the soreg inscription at the Museum of Roman Civilization in Rome. Translation is "No stranger is to enter within the balustrade round the temple and enclosure. Whoever is caught will be responsible to himself for his death, which will ensue."