Pentecost 4 - B

Re-Arranging the Walls

I read a story about something that happened in Poland during the Second World War.
This was a time when the nation was, by and large, a Roman Catholic nation; and it so happened that in a particular village there was a man who was well known because of his care and compassion for others.

He was not a particularly wealthy man, nor was he a native of the village, nor did he attend the village church. In fact he was not even baptized and showed little interest in rectifying that situation. But both before and during the War he just did so many good things for those in his adoptive home town that he was very much loved by everyone.

If a stranger came to the village and needed a place to stay, this man would offer a cot in his little home. If a village family ran out of food, he was among the first to offer a loaf of bread or some flour from his meager supplies. If someone was in trouble with the authorities, and it seemed like someone always was; or if the Germans or, later the Russians, were performing a sweep of the village to collect up the young men for either imprisonment, or to force them into the army, or worse… he would help hide the would be victims in the woods outside town or in some other way.

It seemed he was a friend to everyone, right up until the day he died.

The villagers prepared his body for burial and proceeded to the village church where they asked the Priest to perform the service and to bury the man in the church cemetery.

And here is where the story got interesting. The priest, who knew and loved the man as much as anyone, agreed that he would conduct the funeral service - but he insisted, despite many pleas from the villagers, that he could not bury the man inside the church cemetery because he was not baptized.

Don’t think too badly of him, this was the 40’s. it was the Old Catholic Church, and things were done one way, or not at all… people who were not baptized did not get buried on holy ground.

Period.

Now… this just did not seem right so the villagers appealed even more earnestly to the priest, saying that the man was a good man and surely loved by God as much as any of the baptized, perhaps even more on account of all the good that he had done – it was just an oversight.

The priest agreed with them regarding the virtues of the man, but insisted that the rules of the faith were clear and could be not be broken. Finally they all came up with a compromise that he hoped would satisfy everyone. "In recognition of your love for him - and his love for you and all of God's people in this village", he said, "I will bury him on church land, near to those who have gone before him - those whom he has loved, but it will have to be beyond the fence that surrounds the consecrated ground of our cemetery."

Well… that was, I guess, good enough. And on the appointed day a grave was prepared just outside the fence that surrounded the church cemetery, and the body of the man was processed by all the villagers to the site where the priest conducted the ceremony - and then the grave was filled in and a stone placed before the night fell.

Now, a curious sort of thing happened that night… early the next morning the priest was making his way to the church to say mass when low and behold, the fence had magically moved to include the new tombstone…

I don’t know – maybe you have heard the story before… but I think it is pretty cool, not only that, but I think it captures exactly what Jesus was about, what the good news of the Gospel is all about - namely the fact that the love of God really is for everybody…

As the villagers expanded the fence, which divided sacred blessed land from unblessed land to include the grave of the man whom they loved - so Jesus expands the boundaries of the sacred to include both those whom the rules of our religion would exclude - and those that the ways of this world would exclude.

Really, that is what we see today in the Bible readings is it not? David is actually morning the loss of his enemy. Sure, Jonathon was his friend at one time, as was Saul, but they became bitter rivals.

Jesus heads off to cure the daughter of a Pharisee… one of the enemies… the people who would one day soon be putting him to death on a cross…. And along the way he heals a street woman, a nobody, an outsider…

There is a pattern here.

The English writer Rudyard Kipling once wrote, and I quote him here because most of us have no idea, myself included that it was this guy, the author of the Jungle Book, who actually said it… "East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet,"

Could it be that there is something deep in human nature that makes us want to divide the world into "us" and "them," that causes us to choose sides, to draw dividing lines, to build walls?

There are so many ways in which we do this! In some places it's about the color of your skin; in others it's about which side of the tracks you come from. Maybe it's about Protestant versus Roman Catholic, Christian versus Muslim, immigrant versus native born, labor versus management, rich versus poor. We're asked to declare our political party affiliation and even which major league baseball team we prefer. It's still a world of "us" versus "them."

What we need to keep being reminded of, however, is that this is not the way of Jesus Christ.

I know that we have heard it before, and some part of us knows, or remembers that we should know, that God loves everyone… but it is hard… everyone? Really?

The truth is that we are on the front lines trying to change the world through this simple and yet powerful belief. So we need to keep rethinking our own behaviours… We need to look again at those we call "strangers". We need to see them not as different from us, but as essentially the same.

Then we need to look at the barriers we have set up, or that are already a part of the local and larger world in which we live….

If we are really walking in Jesus footsteps then those barriers simply do not exist for us.

So think about it… who are the outsiders for you? Who do you find it the hardest to love, to help, to believe in? Now, ask yourself, how do you contribute to those barriers, how do you add bricks and mortar to their construction?

Think of the groups you name, and the divisions you maintain by doing that – we all do it. But our faith tells us that all are one in God’s eyes… That is what we are supposed to be about most particularly in the United Church of Canada. This is our ethos, what we are all about. Our crest says we are UNITED AND UNITING.

Beyond that, this is Canada… part of the great melting pot of nations, where we have built a country by seeing the best that each person can bring. Not always, and not easily… but it is the truth nonetheless…

"East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet”?

Naw… how about this: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."
In a world that constantly encourages the "us versus them" mentality; the Christian message is that there is no "them." There is only "us" – all of us. We are all in the same boat.

I think that there is hope in that message. May God give us strength to live it.