Sarah's Sermons

Proper 10, Year C, 2010

11Jul10

Have you heard the story about Capt. Matt Clauer that has been circulating this week? Capt. Clauer was serving in Iraq last year when he got a frantic phone call from his wife, Mary. Together, they owned a $300,000 house, for which they had completely paid. Mary was calling because she had just learned that their Homeowner’s Association had foreclosed on the house, because Mary had neglected to pay the HOA dues two months in a row, worth a total of $800. By the time he returned from Iraq, the house had been sold at auction for $3,500 and resold again for $135,000. Mary and Matt are still living in the home, and fighting in the court of law to reclaim it.

If they were here today, they probably would have a thing or two they would like to say about neighbors. I wonder how many of their Texas neighbors, members of the HOA board, are sitting in churches today, listening to the story of the Good Samaritan. I wonder if the Clauers are in church this morning, hearing this story and wondering how in the heck they are supposed to love neighbors like theirs.

I wonder if any of you, thinking about your neighbors, are wondering how you’re supposed to love them?

That’s the thing about neighbors—they are just around all the time. In Charlottesville, I had a neighbor who always raced at least ten miles over the speed limit through the neighborhood AND who let his dogs poop wherever they wanted without cleaning it up. He drove me crazy because there was no way I could get away from him.

And neighbors are problem enough, but what about friends and family? They are really hard to shake off.

I wonder, if in the story, we hear today, whether the priest or the Levite knew the poor unfortunate soul lying in the ditch. I wonder if they passed by and said, “Oh Frank. Always getting into trouble.” and walked on by. I wonder the intimacy, the neighborliness they might have had with our victim actually prevented them from helping.

As lovely as it was for the Samaritan to help this guy, helping a stranger is sometimes easier than helping someone close to you. If an out of work alcoholic comes by the church needing a little help, we can graciously point him in the direction of several places that can be useful to him. If I had an out of work alcoholic relative approach me, I’d probably feel a lot less gracious toward them.

When the person in our lives who is in trouble is close to us, we know that there is danger in our lives being disrupted. If we enter into another person’s crisis, we run the risk of getting entangled in their lives, creating a web of obligations and favors from which we may not be able to extricate ourselves.

And yet, Jesus calls us to be that kind of neighbor. He calls us to act like the Samaritan, even when we’re not breezing through a strange town. Even when the person in the ditch lives next door and you well know you might need to pull him out of the ditch a second, or third time.

The Samaritan does set a good example for us in terms of boundaries to help us with these challenges. The Samaritan does not take the victim home with him. The Samaritan takes him to an inn, does what first aid he can, makes sure the innkeeper will check on him, and then leaves town.

The Samaritan does not appoint himself the victim’s social worker for life. He sees an acute crisis and responds. And then he goes back to Samaria.

Knowing how to respond to a neighbor, friend, or relative in crisis is really difficult. But knowing what our role is can be helpful. First of all, it is important to remember that we are not God. Now, I know that can be difficult to remember, but just absorb it for a minute. You are not God. Your role is not that of omniscient being who has the power to solve everything. All we can do is our loving best.

If the crisis happens to our spouse, child or parent, our role may be to function as that person’s advocate, making sure they get to the doctor, to court, or to rehab when they are scheduled to do so. If the person in crisis is a friend, our role may be that of listener—giving our friend a safe place to express all her fears. If the person in crisis is a neighbor, our role may be that of practical help—mowing the lawn, bringing over a meal. Our response will change depending on who is in trouble and what their circumstances are. Sometimes our response will be pointing our neighbor in the direction of people who can be more helpful than we can.

Whatever our role is, the Good Samaritan challenges us to live out our faith. He challenges us to pay attention to the world around us. He challenges us to respond to another’s pain, when it would be just as easy to walk on by. He challenges us to live the way Jesus taught us to live: We shall love the Lord our God with all our hearts, and with all our souls, and with all our strengths, and with all our minds; and our neighbors as ourselves.

Amen.

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Proper 8, Year C, 2010

27Jun10

The word freedom means many different things to many different people in our culture. Lately there has been a lot of conversation about Stewart Brand’s 1984 speech in which he declared that “information wants to be free”. (In the same paragraph he said that information also wants to be expensive, but that part of the quote has disappeared in our public discourse.) People are ruminating on whether that sentence means that information is inexpensive, whether information wants to roam without limitations, whether it wants to be politically free. For twenty-five years we’ve been debating what Brand meant and that is just one use of the word free! Freedom also has powerful political connotations. We are the land of the free, we let freedom ring, when we’re mad at France we call our fried potatoes freedom fries.

For us, freedom means we don’t have a King, that we rule ourselves. But it also means we can do whatever we want and we resent when government interferes with our bodies, our guns, our money. Freedom evokes summer vacations and the backseats of cars and long stretches of highway. And sometimes our use of the word freedom makes no sense at all. This week Fox and Friends, a morning cable news show, was doing a Fourth of July food special and they had representatives from the restaurant Hooters there and the news anchor said, “Nothings spells freedom like a Hooters meal.”

In today’s world, and in the ancient world, the word freedom meant many different things to different people. The apostle Paul knew he had to be careful when he used the word in his letter to the Galatians.

Paul and the Galatians go way back. Paul started the churches in Galatia and knows them well. He writes this letter to them out of frustration. He has heard that since he’s left, some teachers have come to the churches and instructed their members that they must be circumcised and follow more of the Jewish law in order to be Christians.

The letter to the Galatians is argument against circumcision and the need for Christians to follow the Jewish law. Paul is arguing that following Christ means one no longer has to follow every detail of the Jewish law, because Christ fulfilled the law himself. However, you can imagine the reaction if one of our modern politician’s platform was to abolish our laws entirely.

We would be upset! As much as we may talk about freedom in our country, if suddenly murder or theft or brutality was legal, we would be seriously unhappy. We know that laws are necessary to reign in our wild, jealous, angry, selfish impulses.

In the same way, Paul is predicting his audience’s objections. Paul knows that the Galatians are afraid if they abolish the law, that people will just run wild! If there is no law, what is to stop people from adultery and murder and generally bad behavior?

When you are free, it means you used to be bound to something. In our country’s case, that was English rule. In the Galatians case, it means the Jewish law. But Paul explains that in the freedom from Jewish law, they are now bound to something else—each other. Paul says, “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.”

The thing that will keep the Galatians in check is their love for one another. When a person acts out of love for the other, he or she will refrain from doing harmful things. Paul reminds the Galatians that the law can be summed up as “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In this new freedom, Paul calls them to live in that spirit of love, rather than gratifying everything their bodies might want. Paul does not want them to be slaves to the Jewish law any more, but he also doesn’t want them to be slaves to their bodies either. Following the spirit is the third option.

So, what does it mean for us to be free. Are we slaves to each other in love, or are we yoked to something else?

Somewhere in the last week I read or heard a story about a woman from a Middle Eastern culture who came to the west for the first time and was shopping. Now we in the West might look at a woman in a head scarf or hijab and feel real pity for the oppression she is under. We might long to show her the freedom women in the west experience. This particular Middle Eastern woman was not used to shopping by sizes. In her home country, she had a relationship with a dressmaker who would make things just for her. So, she had no idea what size she was. The shop she was in was pretty fancy and when she asked the shopkeeper for help, the shopkeeper sneered that they did not have sizes that would fit her. She said that women should be a size six or smaller and if they were not, the store did not carry their size. At that moment, the woman from the Middle East had an insight. Western women were just as oppressed as Middle Eastern women—just by a different power. Western women were oppressed by the cultural pressures to be thin and attractive. Never before had this woman worried about her shape or her weight. She had always been at home in her body, but in an instant she saw herself as unworthy and ugly.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that story. I don’t consider myself enslaved by our culture’s idea of beauty, but I spend well over a thousand dollars every year on haircuts, make up, whitening toothpaste, pedicures, new clothes. And every morning I spent at least twenty minutes putting on make up, blow drying my hair, straightening it, making sure I’m wearing earrings and clothes that match. I think sometimes we can be so entrenched in our culture, that we don’t even realize we’re at some level enslaved by it. I’m certainly not going to experiment with freedom by not grooming myself any more.

We are all bound to things that are not God. We may be bound to dysfunctional families, our work, expectations that others have for us, expectations that we have for ourselves. We may be bound to more ominous things: abusive relationships, drugs, alcohol, adulterous sex, power, money. Trying to extricate ourselves from all these binding things so we can live in the freedom of Christ can be tricky.

Thankfully, Paul gives us markers to look for to see if we’re living into our freedom by following the Spirit. These markers are a gift from God that are given out of God’s grace. They are the fruits of the Spirit’s work in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Everyone knows someone they think of as a saint. Some person who is just so kind, it’s almost hard to believe. Well that person often can be described as having several—if not all—of the characteristics described above. We are all eligible to receive those gifts—and it starts with choosing the freedom Christ offers us from whatever it is we are bound to. Christ has the power to unshackle us from whatever we are enslaved to, but then, of course, we are bound to him and bound to one another.

And that may be too threatening for some people. Being bound to Christ and to other Christians can be challenging. Real, deep relationships take enormous effort. Learning to love your neighbor as yourself is no picnic. Especially when your neighbor is a big pain in the neck. But that kind of intimacy and conflict and reconciliation are the kind of experiences that start shaping us as people of patience and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control.

The messy, human, holy relationships of Christians loving God and loving each other is freedom, even if that freedom feels more like a hot church on a Sunday morning than something more ecstatic and fitting the word “freedom”. But freedom is as much an internal shift as a set of external circumstances. A single, unattached, independently wealthy man who rides his motorcycle along the shore of northern California, may not experience nearly the freedom of a little old lady in a nursing home who has said her morning prayers faithfully for 80 years and knows with all certainty that she belongs to God.

For true freedom comes when are bound—bound to God, bound to love, bound to one another.

Amen.

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Proper 7, Year C, 2010

20Jun10

I spent the summer I turned 21 in India, as a short term summer missionary with a group called Youth with a Mission. I had many interesting experiences, but the most disturbing was when our group was meeting some religious leaders in a slum in Bho Pal. An older man pointed out a young girl—I would guess she was about eight years old—and told us that she was possessed by a demon and they were going to do an exorcism later that day.

Now at the time, I was coming out of a conservative American religious tradition that used the language of demons and angels periodically, but no one I knew had ever claimed to know someone who was possessed.

I was too young and inexperienced to say much of anything or to ask any questions, so I stood there, dumbfounded.

When I became an Episcopalian, I expected the language of demonic possession to fade into the background of our religious discourse. And mostly, of course, it has. But every few years, someone will come by a church of a friend, convinced they are possessed and ask for an exorcism. Even I have been asked to bless a home the owners were convinced had some evil presence in it.

So, I frankly, don’t know what to think about demon possession. I would like to think that it is outdated imagery based on a pre-scientific understanding of mental illness and epilepsy. We all know how frightening it can be when a loved one disappears right in front of us, because suddenly they are overcome with symptoms of depression or schizophrenia or addiction. We know how frightening it is when WE disappear to ourselves for the same reasons. The experience of mental illness can certainly feel like one has been overcome by an outside malevolent power. But maybe there is another, more spiritual category in which we can be overcome. We may never know for sure. What we do know for sure is that Jesus demonstrated his power over the unknown by healing the man from Gerasene.

Whatever our understanding of what was plaguing the man from Gerasene, his story is a poignant one. His choices were to live in community, but be shackled; or live freely, but alone. The man keeps breaking through his shackles and is forced out of community, so wanders alone through the tombs.

When Jesus heals him, in an instant the man from Gerasene is brought from brokenness to wholeness; from solitude into community.

The eighth and ninth chapters of Luke show Jesus demonstrating his power over and over again. He calms a storm, he heals the man from Gerasene, he heals a woman who has been bleeding for years, and he brings a young girl back to life. Jesus could have continued doing tricks with the weather to show his power. He could have caused tornadoes to come and whisk the Pharisees away when they bothered him. He could have made double rainbows appear every time he made a speaking appearance. Instead, Jesus uses his power over and over again to heal people. He reaches out to people that are ill in ways that estrange them from their communities—the man from Gerasene who could not be in community because of his strange behavior, the woman who had a uterine condition that was considered unclean, the young girl who had already passed beyond all community into death. He reaches out to those who are beyond community and heals them, bringing them back in the fold.

Jesus shows us God’s character through these healings. When we are in relationship with God, God is at work in us moving us from brokenness to wholeness, from isolation into community. Whether we have miscarriages that we feel like we cannot talk about publicly, or cancers in places we’d rather not name, mental illnesses that leave us not feeling ourselves, God moves toward us, never away from us.

Our illnesses do not separate us from God, even if we feel like they separate us from our families and friends.

Last week, I received a really nice letter from a woman who had come to one of our Wednesday healing services. She was a visitor to the congregation going through chemotherapy. We said healing prayers for her and in the letter, she said for her the service was an experience of both spiritual and physical healing and that she has recently been given a clean bill of health from her doctor.

Now, I have to admit, I was totally shocked by her letter! I am so used to the church’s ritual of healing prayer, that I can forget that healing prayer can have real power. But quietly, every Sunday, our prayer team prays in the Lady Chapel for those who need healing, and every Wednesday we pray and have Eucharist together.

The power in healing prayer is not the priest’s power or the congregation’s power, the power of healing prayer is the same power that Jesus demonstrated when he reached out to the man from Gerasene. The power of healing prayer is that same power that reaches out to us when we are feeling our most vulnerable and afraid and alone. Through healing prayer, God reaches out to us and begins to make us whole again, begins to draw us out of solitude, into community.

Even if healing prayer does not instantly heal our illnesses, the act of praying when we are ill or afraid or alone reminds us that God’s power is stronger even than the power of illness and death. In children’s worship we occasionally sing the song,

God is bigger than the boogeyman.
He is bigger than Godzilla or the monsters on TV.
God is bigger than the boogeyman,
and he’s watching out for you and me.

The song is meant to comfort children who are afraid of what might be lurking under the bed or in the closet, but we grownups have our own set of fears that keep us up at night, and we, too need to be reminded that God is on our side and that he has great power.

Princeton can be a town of great isolation and great loneliness. And I know in many of your lives you are going through difficult times. I see God at work in Trinity moving people out of isolation and fear into community and love and I encourage you to reach out to one another and to be part of the healing work that God is doing in this place.

For Jesus is not done with his healing, he is still at work right here, right now, in our lives, exorcising the demons of our fear, loneliness, disease, anxiety, depression—all those things that weigh on our hearts and souls.

Thanks be to God.

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Trinity Sunday, Year C, 2010

30May10

Have you seen the movie Wall-E? While the protagonist of the movie is an adorable trash compacting robot, what I found really interesting was its depiction of humanity. In the movie, humans have evolved in such a way as to spare them any suffering. They float around in chairs, so they don’t have to walk. They stare at screens instead of engaging in risky human interaction. When they are hungry or thirsty, robots hurriedly bring them refreshment.

We are not quite there in our society yet, but there is a lot of money made every year on products trying to make life a little less painful. We make luxury cars with surround sound satellite radio so commuting is comfortable. We make diet pills and elaborate exercise machines so we can lose weight without making too many sacrifices. We make lightweight electronic books, so we don’t have to schlep around ten pounds of novels when we’re on vacation.

We are incredibly lucky to live in a society where we can protect ourselves from an enormous amount of suffering—we have running water and indoor toilets; our doctors are trained in hygiene and anesthesia; our police, fire brigades and EMTS protect us without bribes.

And yet, even with all of our advances we can never protect ourselves fully from suffering. Our hearts will still be broken. Our loved ones will still die, some years before they should. Our bodies will still betray us. Suffering is a fundamental part of what it means to be human.

Now, if I were marketing a religion, I would make sure that part of the package would be a promise of relief from suffering. I would tell my followers that if they just followed my God, they would receive an easy life, filled with pleasure. Paul, however (and that’s St. Paul, not our rector), does not seem to be working with a PR consultant.

In the letter to the Romans, Paul acknowledges what all of us know. Suffering is part of life and a part of faith. None of us can escape suffering, no matter how much we try to pad our life with luxuries. Paul captures this beautifully in the 8^th chapter of Romans, writing:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

This image of all of us, along with all of Creation, leaning forward, groaning, waiting for God really captures the human experience. When something awful happens: a child’s death, long term unemployment, hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil about to destroy miles of coastline, there is nothing we can do, but groan our prayers and hope for redemption.

But, Paul’s view of suffering is not entirely negative.

Whenever my sister and I grumbled about doing something that annoyed us, my father would tell us, “You’ll build character!” At first Paul’s stair step argument in Romans 5 can feel a little bit like a parent telling us to grin and bear our suffering.

Paul writes that we can boast in our suffering and that our suffering will lead to endurance, which will lead to character, which will end in hope.

We all know that suffering does not necessarily produce that outcome. We all know people for whom suffering has done nothing but embitter them. So, when we read this text, we may read it cautiously. We may hold it at arms’ length and think to ourselves, “Oh yeah, Paul? Prove it.”

We are helped when we understand the context in which Paul is writing. Paul has been telling the Romans how no one is righteous. No one can keep the law. No one can earn righteousness before God. Paul goes on to explain that through Jesus ‘ willing sacrifice, we are granted righteousness before God. That righteousness is given to us as pure gift.

In our passage today, Paul is explaining what that gift gives us. The gift reconciles us to God, giving us peace with our Creator. We use this passage on Trinity Sunday, because Paul goes on to say that the Holy Spirit pours God’s love in our hearts. So, the Father sends the Son, who sacrifices himself so we can be at peace with God. He in turn sends the Holy Spirit, who fills us with God’s love.

So, transformation of suffering into hope is part of this gift, too. Paul is probably talking about eschatalogical suffering here—suffering having to do with the end of times—since Paul thought Jesus’ return was immanent. But really, we are all moving toward the Kingdom of God, and we all experience suffering on the way, so I think it is fair to say that our suffering can be included in this conversation.

What’s important to note here is that this transformation of suffering into hope is not something that the sufferer does. Paul’s whole point is that that God’s gift to us is pure gift—and is not something we can earn. We can place ourselves before God and pray that our suffering might be transformed into endurance, character and hope. But we should never use this passage as a weapon against ourselves or anyone else who might be stuck in grief or pain or suffering of any kind. This passage should never be used to nag or berate. Instead, this passage offers us a beacon of hope.

Paul’s words offer us hope that our tears and pain may deepen and broaden our compassion, rather than harden our hearts. His words offer us hope that our crises may make us into more mature, thoughtful people. His words offer us hope that we might yet be transformed into people of hope—people who so in touch with God’s presence, that our hearts feel deep peace.

We don’t need to be like the characters in Wall-E, completely protected from pain.

Paul’s words give us courage to face the world honestly. They give us courage to step out of our padded luxury cars, put down our laptops, turn off our televisions. Paul’s words give us courage to face our broken hearts and bodies head on, knowing that God can transform our suffering into something that betters us.

In my last parish, I had a friend who was in her 80s. She had a series of health scares, including an episode of congestive heart failure that was completely terrifying to her. She called me in the midst of all of her struggles and asked if I could come see her. When I went to visit her, I expected to hear about her pain, her fears, maybe her loneliness. Instead, she told me, “Sarah, I want to talk with you, because my pain has made me think about all the people in pain around the world. I want to use this as an opportunity to pray for those people.”

That moment has been one of the most profound of my entire life, because she exemplified what Paul is talking about in his letter to the Romans. God gave her the grace to experience her suffering as a broadening, deepening experience. Instead of feeling sorry for herself, she found a way to reach out to the world and care for them through her prayers. The love of God flowed through her and out to those for whom she prayed.

And whether we are people who feel that kind of hope, or not, Paul is right when he says that God’s hope will not disappoint us. Because the gift of Jesus’ sacrifice, the gift of God’s love poured out by the Holy Spirit, is our gift, even in our deepest suffering. Even at our terrified, grief stricken, self-absorbed worst. Even when we feel not one iota of character or endurance or hope, God’s love pours out for us. And that love will not disappoint us.

Amen.

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Easter 5, Year C, 2010

02May10

Yes, the Peter we read about today in our passage from Acts, is the same impetuous disciple who denied Jesus three times after his death. In The Acts of the Apostles, we get to see Peter—and the other Apostles—grow up. Peter begins functioning as the head of the church.

At this time, the church consisted primarily of disciples who found Jesus through the Jewish tradition. In fact, later in the 11^th chapter of Acts, the author states the group was not referred to as Christians until a year after the events we read about today.

So, part of being an early follower of Jesus, was living a holy Jewish life. That meant living faithfully to the Jewish law, including its dietary restrictions and becoming circumcised in order to become part of the community.

Peter has a vision that flies in the face of Peter’s understanding of holiness. The vision is so shocking that we hear it twice in Acts—the first time when Peter is actually experiencing the vision and then this time when he is recounting his vision to the crowd in Judea.

To us, the vision is not that shocking. Four footed animals, beast of prey, reptiles, birds—what’s so horrible about a day at the zoo? But the animals Peter saw were all animals Jewish people were forbidden to eat. We don’t have those kind of cultural restrictions on food or much else, really, so it can be hard to relate to Peter’s deep feelings of disgust. But God is telling him in this vision to take up all these horrible, forbidden foods and eat them. When Peter protests and says “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” God says to him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Peter is receiving a life changing, world changing message, but he does not understand its full meaning quite yet.

When Peter wakes up from his vision, he gets a visitor, a Gentile named Cornelius. Cornelius was an Italian Centurion who was a very godly person. He gave money to charity regularly, he prayed every day, but he was still a Gentile. Cornelius was instructed in a dream to go meet Peter. When Cornelius showed up at his door, Peter suddenly fully understood his dream.

While God might be changing some dietary rules, what God really intends to communicate to Peter is that he is changing the rules about who is welcomed into God’s family. No longer does someone have to be Jewish or become Jewish. God’s chosen people are no longer members of one particular family, but the whole of humanity.

This is wonderful news, of course, but not to everyone. The text helpfully points out that the circumcised believers in Judea criticized Jesus and questioned him about why he was spending time with uncircumcised people. Their complaints echo the Pharisees complaints about Jesus, don’t they? (If I were a man and had to get circumcised to join a religious tradition, I might be a little irritated with God’s new policy, too!) When Peter explains God’s new vision for humanity, the circumcised Judeans are stunned into silence. Even they cannot deny the weight of this good news.

God has been true to his vision—and God’s people now span over every continent, every race, and thousands of different languages.

And in the United States, which has embraced this same kind of pluralism, opening the doors to the stranger has been part of our religious tradition. We have not always done this well. Many a church still has the balcony where slaves sat when they were not allowed to sit next to their white masters. Some churches still resist outsiders, especially if they are of other ethnicities. But over all, Christians in this country, whether liberal or conservative, tend to believe that Jesus came for all people and that anyone who loves Jesus can become part of the family.

And this core belief is now putting religious leaders in Arizona in a moral bind. In the immigration law recently passed in Arizona, there are two clauses that have the potential to affect churches. The first is making it illegal to knowingly transport an illegal immigrant in a car. The second is making it illegal to knowingly harbor an illegal immigrant. Neither of these laws is directed at churches, specifically, but religious leaders are wondering if Christians could be prosecuted for driving a youth group that contained an illegal immigrant or whether feeding an illegal immigrant in a soup kitchen violates the law.

In the Unites States we are not often asked to choose between our faith and our country, because we are blessed to live in a country where laws generally support the principles of our faith.

However, when it comes to illegal immigration, Christians are forced to make a choice. The United States has the right to make and enforce laws about who can and cannot come into this country. Christians, however, come from a long tradition in which we are obligated to welcome and love the stranger, even if this comes in conflict with the law.

Catholic and Episcopal bishops in Arizona have made it clear that they will continue with soup kitchens and homeless shelters and youth group trips, without checking anyone’s papers. They are making a choice to follow the Gospel, even if their government is not or cannot.

And we may think we are safely removed from the situation in Arizona, but did you know there are holding pens for detained immigrants right here in New Jersey? My sister lives in New York and she is part of a ministry based out of Riverside Church that travels to Elizabeth, New Jersey on Saturday mornings to visit with non-criminal immigrants who have come to the United States seeking asylum from various countries. Individuals are held in warehouses converted into detention centers with no access to the outdoors for months and occasionally years at a time until their cases are heard and decided. And the warehouse in Elizabeth is only one of many throughout the United States.

Occasionally, my sister receives a jubilant phone call from someone who has been given permission to live in the United States, but more often people disappear and she does not know whether they have been deported or transferred to another facility.

These immigrants are not the ones that make the news. These are immigrants from Somalia, Tibet, Columbia, Guinea, Senegal, India, Uzbekistan, Guatemala, Sri Lanka. They are fleeing danger and oppression and seeking freedom in our country. Instead they are caged. The people of the Riverside Church have made a commitment to live out the full meaning of Peter’s vision—of seeking out the other, of offering love and humanity to people who have been denied both.

We may think of illegal immigrants as the lowest of the low in this country, but in God’s eyes they are his beloved children. And if they are his children, that makes them our brothers and sisters. And I know that to the good people of Trinity Church, I am preaching to the choir. One of your greatest strengths as a church is the way you welcome the other. But any of us, especially me, can be lulled into thinking that these kinds of laws and practices don’t have anything to do with our lives.

But God offers us the same challenge he offered Peter and asks us whether we can call profane a people he has made clean. He asks us if we can accept a reality in which the church includes even those our culture sees as unclean. He asks us to love our neighbor.

Amen.

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Sarah’s Sermons

Proper 10, Year C, 2010

Proper 8, Year C, 2010

Proper 7, Year C, 2010

Trinity Sunday, Year C, 2010

Easter 5, Year C, 2010

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