An EfM Graduation Sermon
Allen Stout | EfM Graduate, St. Thomas of Canterbury, Long Beach, Diocese of L.A.
Who am I? What am I? What am I supposed to do about who or what I am?
That’s what EfM is all about, isn’t it? Am I an individual ego in an impersonal world Or, am I a child of God, inherently in relationship with the three persons of the Trinity, with rest of mankind, and with the natural world? Am I spirit in a “meat body,” or an incarnated unity of God and “I”? And, once I figure that out (or IF I do), what am I supposed to do about it? What does it mean? What is my calling? My “vocation”?
What follows is less a homily than it is a stab at a theological reflection – though I suspect that some of the best homilies tend to be just that. So, let me start with some rubrics that we have used in the program.
We were presented a framework for developing a balanced theology of spiritual maturity. Let me start with that, and with my own answers, as they have developed over the past 4 years:
Desires: What do I long or yearn for? My most recent answer is “peace” and “harmony” A vision of the Kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb -metaphor, not literal
Questions: What do I wonder about or doubt? How do the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and Christian history help me to answer?
Explorations: What possibilities do I want to explore or test? Who AM I? What AM I? WHAT am I supposed to do (& is “supposed to” meaningful?
Affirmations: What am I coming to believe or affirm? I am coming to believe and affirm that I can find God in the Bible, but that the Bible is not God. I find, in the conflicting history of scriptural interpretation and Christian activity, that a coherent path can be discerned (while not saying that there is the same path for each of us).
Imperatives: What should, ought, or must I do? Finally, with this question, we start to get at “vocation.” Let me flesh out this theological reflection as I attempt to answer that… for me.
A second rubric that we were presented was the ABCD: What amazed, what bothered, what confused, and what delighted us?
What amazes me is that, after a lifetime of poo-pooing the Bible, I now have a profound respect for what it offers, in both “testaments.” I still deny the value of fundamentalist or literalist interpretations, but given the license to wander outside those narrow descriptions of a transcendent God, I find myself wandering through the groves of the biblical orchard, picking ripe and nourishing fruit.
What bothered me was that very limitation that so many Christians seek to impose. That, and the sheer confusion of the 66 (ish) books of the “Bible,” and the over 2000 years of debates about scripture, meaning, ecclesiology and life. Yet, while this bothers me, it also is a positive, allowing me to seek those unique and multifold pathways to the divine.
What confused me was the sheer complexity of the questions, including their associated history, events, theologies, and outcomes.
What delighted me was actually finding a pathway, though it is and will remain conditional, tentative, and subject to discovering new paths, as the Spirit leads.
So, what did I actually find. Or, in the sense of arriving at the end of a 4-year lectio divina, what “leapt out at me?” The answer to that is found in today’s readings. In particular, the idea of hospitality to the stranger.
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You who are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:31-46)
In Matthew’s Gospel, we are told in no uncertain terms that the stranger IS Jesus; that Jesus IS the stranger. That, in one way of thinking, should count as an unequivocal and binding obligation on all persons.
So then, remember that at one time you gentiles by birth,[e] called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”—a circumcision made in the flesh by human hands— remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us, abolishing the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both to God in one body[f] through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near, for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone; in him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are built together spiritually[i] into a dwelling place for God. (Ephesians 2:11-22)
In St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, this idea is expanded upon. We are “one body.” The dividing wall, the hostility between us, is broken down by Christ. We “are no longer strangers and aliens, but (we) are fellow citizens…” together!
Now, Paul is talking about Christians and Jews, but is that message limited to only these two bodies? What about the rest of the world? Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and atheists, among others? By my reading, no… HELL NO. Jesus draws heavily from Deuteronomy and Paul draws from Jesus.
“So now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you? Only to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the LORD and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being. Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the LORD your God, the earth with all that is in it, yet the LORD set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the peoples, as it is today. Circumcise, then, the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stubborn any longer. For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the LORD your God; him you shall serve; to him you shall hold fast; and by his name you shall swear. He is your praise; he is your God who has done for you these great and awesome things that your own eyes have seen. Your ancestors went down to Egypt seventy persons, and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars in heaven. (Deuteronomy 10:12-22)
In the Torah, in Deuteronomy, we hear the precursor words that “the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe (or tribe?), who…loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.” We are commanded, “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Praise the LORD!
Praise the LORD, O my soul!I will praise the LORD as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God all my life long.Do not put your trust in princes,
in mortals, in whom there is no help.When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
on that very day their plans perish.Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the LORD their God,who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them;
who keeps faith forever;who executes justice for the oppressed;
who gives food to the hungry.
The LORD sets the prisoners free;the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;
the LORD loves the righteous.The LORD watches over the strangers;
he upholds the orphan and the widow,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.The LORD will reign forever,
your God, O Zion, for all generations.
Praise the LORD! (Psalm 146)
The psalmist, in poetic language, prefigures Jesus’s parable in Matthew: “the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.” Who are the righteous? Those who care for the stranger. Who are the wicked? Those who do not. Sheep and goats.
That is what the scriptural tradition teaches us. The history of Christianity and Christian culture has often been a record of our collective failure to live up to this clear commandment. My experience of trying to balance this against the news of building walls, rounding up immigrants into camps and deporting them by the millions, of claiming the worst about them (though “some” might be OK), and through acts of public violence (often perpetrated by Christians) is anger. Righteous anger, prophetic anger. While recognizing how such adjectives can be misused to great destructive effect, they do communicate the feeling that this raises in me.
Finally, this brings me back to the question of vocation, that imperative that the rubric leads us to. What should, or must I do? I’ll answer this using one final rubric (I’ll bet you’re sorry that we had so many to work with now, aren’t you?): The micro, meso and macro levels of the human experience.
At the micro level, I recognize that one of the strangers to me is…ME. Whether thinking about this in Freudian or Jungian terms, of id, superego, anima and animus, or our shadow selves, we have an unconscious or subconscious mind. We wear many masks, and often, we mistake our own masks for our true selves. I cannot answer the Who or What I Am questions without taking this into account.
So, the first stranger, who I must care for, is that part of me that I hide from myself. And I care for him (me) by seeking him out and getting to know him (including that gender fluid anima/animus, yin/yang aspect of my true self).
At the meso (local) level, I see homeless encampments. I see workers lining up outside lumber yards, hoping to eke out a day’s wage. And I see cities, dominated by a culture of NIMBY (Not in my Back Yard) and IGMISU (I Got Mine, Screw You) making it so much harder to build the housing that is needed for our vulnerable populations of “strangers.” And I see the widespread contempt heaped upon them.
At the macro (national/global) level, I recall the policies I mentioned earlier: walls (despite St. Paul), mass deportations, libels and slanders and public violence. I recall that a megachurch in Houston refused to house people made homeless by a hurricane because they had just installed new carpeting. I also know that economics, violent repressions and global climate change are going to create millions of new refugees in the next half century. MILLIONS,
So, we come to the crux: WHAT AM I TO DO? Everything I have experienced in these four years has led me to this question and this particular issue.
Write articles?
Contribute a voice to social media?
Demonstrate?
Donate?
Volunteer for IRIS, or, Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services? [time commitment]
That is the question I now have to answer. It is no longer an academic question to share with my fellow EfM group but one that must be followed by an answer, a commitment, and, subsequently, action.
I pray that I do so, and I invite your prayers to help me. And I invite your prayers for each of us who are facing this very question in your own lives with me.
