This sermon was offered at Church of the Epiphany, in Plymouth, MN. It is based on Mark 6:30-34, 53-56. I was asked to supply at my home parish because our priest is on a mission trip with about 24 others from our faith community.
Let us pray. God of abundance, be with us today as we learn and grow to become transformed in and through you. Amen.
What
Jesus did in today’s Gospel was radical:
He let his schedule be disrupted.
He helped people,
healed people, and fed people who chased him down.
He opened his heart and his mind to these
people.
He listened to their
stories.
He was jostled, bumped and crowded.
He
could have tried to escape, to join the disciples in a quiet place, to be with
familiar people, to be safe and secure in the things that made him comfortable.
But he did not.
Instead,
he gave the people around him a radical welcome into relationship with him.
He
stood, surrounded by them, patient. He
did not roll his eyes or look at the time or worry that he was not doing what
he needed to be doing or wish he was anywhere but here.
Instead,
he stopped what he was doing and allowed himself to be immersed in the culture
around him and learned.
He
learned the stories. He saw the
faces. He touched men and women, old and
young. He prayed with them and for them.
He healed the wounded, the ill, blind,
deaf and broken. He opened himself to
who they each were, where they were—without expectation of anything. He walked on their streets without judgment
but instead, compassion. Their journeys
were not his journey, they may not have followed the same religion, but they
were each children of his Father and he was not going to dismiss them.
He
stepped outside of his safe, familiar circle of friends and became the center
of a pulsing circle of needy people.
He welcomed them
radically.
He exemplified
radical welcome.
Jesus
teaches us throughout the Gospels how to live in community with people from all
walks of life, but particularly with those who we commonly define as “The
Other:” people who are oppressed or marginalized. Jesus teaches us, also, how to live with one
another in our brokenness and our joys; how to meet people where they are and
not expect conformity or homogenization.
He teaches us how to think about the complexities of living and to
understand that each story is unique and special. He teaches us not to judge who needs help—he
expects us to help.
In
today’s Gospel we catch a glimpse of Jesus’ compassion when he sets out to
spend quiet time with the disciples reflecting on their ministry experiences
from where they have recently returned.
It was time to learn from one another the stories of their journeys and
to teach one another what worked and what didn’t. It was like, perhaps, the recap meeting after
A Taste of Epiphany. Though the writer
does not say that Jesus was going into retreat with the disciples, it seems
like that was the original plan.
If
you look carefully at the verse numbers of this gospel you will see verses 35
through 52 are missing. Instead of
hearing the whole chapter, we get to hear the bookends surrounding two other
pretty important stories. The first is
the feeding of the five thousand. The
second is Jesus walking on the water.
It’s easy to overlook the bookends, but today we don’t. We get to see what lead up to the miracles and
what happens afterward. Jesus teaches
the people with compassion before the feeding of the five thousand. He has just walked on water into the boat
with the disciples before they arrived at Gennesaret and he then begins to
heal. Life happened before and after the
miracles.
Jesus
teaches and heals anyone and everyone who comes to him at the shore. He doesn’t discriminate; he helps others,
even when it is inconvenient in his schedule or he has made other plans.
I
find the timing of this gospel compelling, knowing that about 25 of our
Epiphany friends are in Cass Lake on a mission trip, creating a radical welcome.
Together with people from around the
country they are beginning the work of rebuilding. Rebuilding buildings, rebuilding
relationships, rebuilding bridges broken in a community where things and people
are broken in ways beyond many of our own comprehension.
Some of our friends will be up on
roofs; others will be working with children at the Vacation Bible School, while
others will be working in the community center, learning what the most urgent
needs are this year in the community.
Everywhere, there will be hungry
people—hungry for food, for health, for attention, for love, and for
affection. Our friends will also be
hungry for food, for companionship, and maybe for home. Everyone will be hungry for the love of God.
When I was up there a couple of years
ago I had an awakening of spirit, of compassion, of the disparity and poverty
that infects our world. I learned that
this place and these people have struggles beyond anything I could have
imagined…or wanted to imagine. I was
transformed.
It’s hard to comprehend the depth of
poverty in the northwest part of our state.
Poverty that leads to a kind of desperation that looks like abuse: substance abuse, physical abuse, sexual
abuse; or looks like intergenerational collisions: babies having babies, grandparents parenting
grandchildren and great-grandchildren, death by suicide or by accidents or
murder, everyone struggling to live in the reservation’s form of affordable
housing, their version of “the projects”—fighting to have working plumbing and
working heat, where home maintenance is unaffordable, where jobs are scarce for
natives and where they live with the myth that all Native Americans receive
abundant resources from the tribe or from the casinos, but they don’t.
It’s overwhelming to stay in a resort
on one side of the highway, with well-constructed shelter overlooking a
beautiful lake and to then drive across the highway, into the ticky-tacky,
every-tiny-house-looks-the-same, kids-and-dogs-in-the-streets, sheets-in-the-windows,
few-trees, brown-grass-and-trash-in-the-yards neighborhoods designed to
segregate the poor from the resort community.
The highway feels like a wall or a barrier set there to keep the poor
out of sight.
Inside those little tiny houses is
often more than one family…sisters or friends raising their children
together. Fathers may or may not be
present, but may also have multiple kids in multiple homes. Siblings share one or the other parent or
both, but may or may not live together.
Foster parents try to raise neglected or abused children; sometimes they
can adopt them. The plumbing in those
little tiny houses may or may not work.
Paint peels, windows break, and the adults who live in here struggle to
have and keep jobs that barely provide enough income to simply feed them all
let alone maintain these little tiny homes.
If you get a glimpse inside you may see a mattress on the living room floor,
because the houses have only two bedrooms and too many heads.
There
is little privacy.
Kids congregate in the streets,
shooting hoops, riding bikes, wandering without, it seems, the watchful eye of
any adult. It’s summer and there is
little to keep them occupied except for the occasional Vacation Bible School or
Boy’s and Girl’s Club events. But
transportation is an obstacle and time is fluid, so when the bus comes driving
through the neighborhoods trying to beckon attendance, kids aren’t ready or choose
not to come out or don’t have an adult home to shoo them into organized
activity. Or there is fear and
skepticism about the program and no time to find out more.
It
feels hopeless.
And yet, we have a team of people of
all ages up there trying to make a difference, working with Valerie Red Horse
and others who have been coming here for a dozen or more years from all around
the country. The work the organizers put
into this week of hard, hard work is not measured in hours or dollars, but in
the love for the people and the devotion to this community.
This is the third year Epiphany is
working with Valerie, her family and her team.
What amazes me is that over 100 people go there every year, giving their
vacation time, their respite—their own selves to the benefit of others.
We can think of people who have
devoted their lives to the poor. People
like Mother Teresa or, more locally, Mary Jo Copeland from Sharing and Caring
Hands. People who have put themselves
into the lives, stories, addictions and diseases of others because it is what
Jesus would do. They practice what is
known as radical welcome.
What
is “radical welcome?”
According to Rev. Stephanie Spellers,
radical welcome (quote) “is concerned with the transformation and opening of
individual hearts, congregations and systems so that The Other might find in
your community a warm place and a mutual embrace and so that you are finally free to embrace and be transformed by
authentic relationship with the margins”[1] (end quote). She goes on to state that it is
“a fundamental spiritual practice, one that combines the universal Christian
ministry of welcome and hospitality with a clear awareness of power and
patterns of inclusion and exclusion.”[2]
In short, it is about your own
personal awareness of how God loves you and accepts you and embraces you and
then you taking that knowledge and leaving your comfort zone to show that same
kind of hospitality, acceptance, and love.
In today’s Gospel, we see Jesus
stepping out from the comfort of solitude and rest to help those who need
him. Jesus transforms the people who
surround him when he goes ashore.
This week, the missioners from
Epiphany and more are stepping out from their comfort of solitude and rest and
are building relationships with others who are marginalized and oppressed. They are willing to transform and be
transformed in a mutual way.
Throughout the Bible we read stories
of God’s transforming power. We see
examples of Jesus helping people living in all situations. We know that we are called to be the hands
and feet of Jesus in the world—showing compassion and love to those we know and
to those who we don’t know. It is in
reaching out to those who are different from us and embracing them in their
strength and in their vulnerability, knowing them more deeply and profoundly,
and allowing them to do the same with us that creates an environment of radical
welcome. When we mutually share our
stories we create radical welcome.
Up in Cass Lake our folks are working
alongside many people who are mostly like them, mostly white folks with middle-
to upper- class lives. They are working
for, and more importantly, with “The Other”—people who are not like them,
people who live in extreme poverty, in complicated situations, who are
marginalized and oppressed. Our folks
have come ashore this week and are showing compassion through their building,
teaching and healing. They will share
meals, they will worship together, they will develop long-term bonds with kids
and adults from Cass Lake and from across the country. Through this experience they will be
transformed.
Our incoming Presiding Bishop, The
Rev. Michael Curry is quoted saying “God is changing things so that they
finally reflect the dream of God. It
will be new to us, but it is merely the fulfillment of what God intended all
along.”[3]
Think about that. What does it mean for us to fulfill the dream
of God? What does it look like?
This week, at the very least, it looks
a lot like a mission trip to Cass Lake, working with some of the poorest of the
poor in Minnesota. It looks like
transformation within the 25 people from Epiphany, but it also looks like the
transformation for all of Epiphany…because every one of us has played some role
in this mission trip, even though we are not there.
This kind of radical welcome will come
back here with our friends. We will see
the impact their work had on each of them individually and we will experience
through them ways to practice radical welcome a little more here in Plymouth,
because once it is in you, you can’t turn it off. Not even for vacation.
I’d like to end with all of us
reciting today’s Psalm. You’ll find it
in your red Book of Common Prayer on the bottom of page 612. We use this Psalm in many ways, most often to
admit that life is not always easy, but that God is ever present for us. Let’s pray this psalm for our mission team,
that they know the depth of their relationship with the Good Shepherd and that
through that relationship and the new and renewed relationships they encounter
in Cass Lake, they will find transformation.
Let’s pray, also, for the community in and around Cass Lake, asking they
will know they are beloved children of God, and that no matter their
circumstance they, too, will be transformed.
And let’s pray for us, that we each find transformation as we become
instruments of God’s dream of radical welcome.
Let’s also pause after each full verse and reflect what each lines means
to us and to the people in Cass Lake.
Let
us pray.
The LORD is my shepherd; * I shall not be in
want. //
He makes me lie down in green pastures * and
leads me beside still waters. //
He revives my soul * and guides me along right
pathways for his Name's sake. //
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow
of death, I shall fear no evil; *
for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. //
for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. //
You spread a table before me in the presence of
those who trouble me; *
you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over. //
you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over. //
Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life, *
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever. //
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever. //
Thank you, Jesus, for
being our example of radical welcome.
Help us to be radical in our welcome and to open our hearts to be
transformed. Amen.