Sermon: "Talking to Strangers"

Sunday, January 6, 2008, Epiphany.  Kay Campbell, Faith and Values Editor, The Huntsville Times

Hope Presbyterian Church, Huntsville, AL

I stand before you today qualified to be here only because I belong to the priesthood of all believers. Call this a sort of demonstration of Protestantism. This is a case not of preaching to the choir, but of a choir member preaching to the saints. Today we’ll test the theory that God, who could speak through a donkey, can, perhaps, speak even through a reporter.

When Jim, showing worse judgment than I knew him to have, asked me to speak during this holy time, I said "yes" for several reasons.

One was that the only other time I’ve been asked to present a sermon, I found myself blessed by the study I did to prepare. Jim’s call felt, to me, like homework from God. And I knew at least one person – me – would be listening.

Also, I said ‘yes’ for the reasons I encourage all people to sing. If you do it well, those around you can enjoy it. If you do it badly, well, those around you know they might as well sing, too, since they’ll certainly sound at least as good, if not better, than you do.

So that’s my prayer for today: That in these next few minutes, you’ll hear something that you can use in your own life, or that you’ll hear something that reminds you that God has given you a witness you should use that couldn’t be any worse than mine.

I come, on this day of Epiphany, as a wise woman wanna-be from not so far, bringing greetings from north of the border, from First Presbyterian Church of Fayetteville and the Presbytery of Middle Tennessee -- despite the fact that you all stole Warner Darnell from us. I suppose that is the final reason why I agreed to come: In these dark days of anti-denominationalism, we Presbyterians need to stick together.

When the Wise Men from the East – we’re pretty sure all three were men since it took them two years to get to Bethlehem, a time span which, even given the distance, makes it sound like they did not stop to ask for directions – when these strange foreigners arrived, can you imagine Mary and Joseph’s surprise?

I wonder if the Wise Men brought their own interpreter. I wonder if they themselves were surprised to find the heavens rearranged merely on behalf of the son of a carpenter in a religious minority’s home in a backwater of the Roman empire. I love the legend that the three were later baptized by St. Thomas as he missionaried his way into India, but I can’t picture these guys ever not being mystics, men who paid attention to their dreams and watched the night sky for signs and wonders and to their dying day, prayed to Jehovah under the name of Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian name for God.

We should be like the Wise Men, huh? Seeing something significant where others see only the ordinary things of everyday life? Willing to go on impossible quests at God’s leading? Not afraid, or, as Isaiah might put it, fearing not to speak to people outside of our own circles?

Before Christians could be missionaries, they needed missionaries to come to them from another country, another language, another religion. They needed these strangers to come and said, "This baby matters, and not just for the Jews, and not just for the people of Galilee. This baby has caused changes in the universe itself."

By recording their coming, Matthew ties Jesus not only into Jewish history, as he does with his opening genealogical list, but opens the doors to the wider world.
The magi, I believe, were Zoroastrians, the religion founded about 600 years before Jesus’ birth that, with its monotheism and insistent linking of light to knowledge, left an impression on Judaism, particularly upon Jews during their years in exile.

"Arise, shine, for thy light has come," Isaiah writes, in lines that would ring true even today for the orthodox Parsi, who practice a modern version of Zoroastrianism.

Christianity’s first missionary work required sacrifice and travel from strangers, not from believers. This message, God seemed to be saying, was going to be for the Gentiles whether or not Jewish Christians did anything about it. All Mary and Joseph had to do was to open the door.

This makes me think that Mary and Joseph may have also been the first Presbyterians. They didn’t proselytize, after all; they simply answered the questions of people who’d managed, against all odds, to find them.

For Mary and Joseph, in fact, the Magi were the ideal foreigners and the perfect Gentiles. They came, they bowed, they gifted – and then they left.

That makes things easier, doesn’t it?

Mary could ponder these things in her heart without feeding the stinky camels or living, day in and day out, with people who didn’t speak simple Aramaic, a language so easy even babies in Bethlehem could babble in it. They didn’t have to start a second service to accommodate people who wanted to include, say, fire play in church, or put up with people who actually wanted to, say, kneel down when they prayed.

Mary and Joseph could simply ponder the affirmation that their miracle meant something big. But the rest of us have the warning from that early event that Christianity is going to be a very big tent, indeed.

From its very beginning, Christianity has been a religion of crossing borders, something that is always scary. The Holy Spirit crossed divine borders to bring Jesus’ divine life into the body of a human. Joseph crossed cultural borders when he married a girl who had been knocked up not by him. The shepherds crossed class borders when they came into town. The magi crossed international borders and language borders to come bow to a child – an act that, in itself, required crossing a boundary of traditional respect from younger to older, not elders to infants. Then Joseph and Mary reprised the ancient border crossing of their own people, fleeing to Egypt for shelter. The communion meal we will share in a few minutes was a way that Jesus helped the disciples cross the border from their Jewish practices to new, Christian ones.

Christians, from the beginning, were called to be border-crossing beings.

And, people, I’m convinced we are continued to be called to cross borders today.

I was thinking about our texts for today all this week, including Thursday night when I attended the local hearing of the state’s Joint Interim Patriotic Immigration Commission.

Let me say this about that: By the year 2042, should present trends continue, non-Christians will outnumber Christians in the United States. From what I saw Thursday night, I would say this may already be the case here.

The majority of the people in that room needed to hear Isaiah’s refrain, "Fear not; be not afraid, and remember the poor deserve justice, not judgment."

I’m not saying we should open the borders. But I am saying that we must have this discussion with the understanding that message of Isaiah must prevail, that taking care of those who need help is what Christians do.

The world out there is a fearful place these days. Like Herod’s reaction to the news the Wise Men brought him, many people’s reaction to something new coming into their lives is a defensive, even murderous fearfulness.

"If we had an armada off our shore steaming our way, we wouldn’t hesitate to use guns or bombs or whatever it takes to defend our land," one man said.

But this armada of immigrants is not packed with conquering soldiers, but with starving men, women and children – people hungry, in no small part, because of the unintended consequences of greedy American policies over the last 150 years.

Americans have a shameful history when it comes to boatloads of desperate people. You know what we did with the boatloads of hungry Haitians. And we turned back a shipload of Jewish children in the late 1930s – children thus returned into the mawl of the European holocaust. We sent those children back to die.

Oh, but that decision wasn’t about race, but about the law, those bureaucrats would have said as did all the self-righteous anti-immigrant speakers Thursday night. Perhaps, not coincidentally, so did the segregationists not very many years ago. But that statement about the law ignores the fact that our mid-century immigration laws were stacked, as they still are, in racist, classist ways against the people who most need the American dream. just because something is legal does not mean it is moral.

I know our denomination is fighting for its life right now, but people, I’m convinced we need to quit defending our borders and start going beyond them. All of us Presbyterians need to learn the language of witness, including the witness of kindness and justice in these times when the Mexicans among us have become the new niggers.

We Presbyterian Protestant Christians have a truth the world needs – that things should be done decently and in order, that everyone – even a laywoman or a foreigner – has something of value to say, that justice and equity need to prevail especially for the poor and needy, that God has predestined all of us to be saved, that our lives are blessed as we bring them into harmony with God’s plan, and that God demands that we protect the homeless and help the poor, not steal their cars because they don’t carry a piece of paper we wouldn’t give them, even if they said "pretty please."

Out there, darkness has covered the earth and gross darkness the people. But the Lord rises upon you. Nations will come to your light – Lift up your eyes and look about you. You, Hope Presbyterians, are ideally positioned to make a difference, even a bigger difference, in the world. Your debts are paid off, you’re ready to hire more staff, to strengthen your programs, to extend your reach. You have a beautiful building, a pretty smart pastor, with the present lapse in judgment excepted, and Lou Harvey is hugging strangers at your door. You have smart children, some really cool members, like Bettie and Charles Higgins who know about facing down hatred, one of the city’s best organists, and a great location.

You also have the tradition, already, of crossing boundaries, since you are a union congregation, a joining of Cumberland Presbyterians and Presbyterians (USA). Our denominations need you. And the city needs you, and through your work here, you can effect change in the entire state and beyond.

So, on this day of Epiphany, I’m not a wise woman, yet, and I don’t worship God as Ahura Mazda, tho I do drive a Mazda, and as a Tennessean I’m only barely a foreigner, but I bring you the same message the Magi brought Joseph and Mary: What you nurture here matters beyond borders that aren’t even on your maps. What you have been birthing here in your 22 years of work is bigger than you ever imagined. What God has delivered to you is a miraculous gift of love desperately needed by the whole world.