The Park Road Pulpit
Sermons
from Park Road Baptist Church
Russ and Amy Jacks Dean, Pastors
The Stranger of Welcome:
Jesus as Alien
Deuteronomy 26.1-11; Luke 9.51-62
Russ Dean, February 29, 2004
Sung as a musical introit to the worship service:
I’m just a poor, wayfaring stranger, a travlin’ through this world of woe,
But there’s no sickness, no toil nor danger, in that bright world to which I
go.
I’m going there to see my mother. I’m going there no more to roam.
I’m just a goin’ over Jordan. I’m just a goin’ over home.
I knew I was out of place from the moment the plane touched the tarmac.
The land was beautiful. The people smiled. But this was not home. My white
skin began to take on a pale, almost anemic look, as if there were something
wrong with me. My native tongue could no longer control conversations. And God
was not a Southern Baptist in this land! Though we were welcomed warmly, it
would not have taken much to convince me of a little paranoia. Was it just me,
or did someone seem to be watching me? Everywhere I went. Every… single…
move. Everyone was kind. Glad to welcome me (if only to have my tourist
dollars.) But the slightest hint of unease lingered on the edge of my
awareness. “I don’t belong here.”
And from the other side of out-of-place, I could see it as well. At
about the half-way point into the trip, some forty-five miles over the
Atlantic, between runway and runway, the feeling in that airplane began to
shift, almost palpably. If all of us bearing visas approved for temporary
travel had been seated on one side of the center aisle, and if that comfort of
true, at-home-inner-peace, could have been assigned an actual value in weight,
that plane would have listed from North to South as we approached Havana. I
think you could actually feel it. And you could see the transfer
register on the dark, Cuban faces seated among us.
Fidel might be in control. The Revolution might still live, even its life of
threat and death. The Embargo might continue its choke-hold on the people.
Unemployment might be through the roof, economic incentives down the tubes...
But we could feel it, you know. And so could they. It was in the air.
Welcome home! There’s no place like it. (No matter what.)
It was an odd feeling. One that I seldom experience. I’m used to
being in the majority. The dominant player. Caucasian. American. Male.
Affluent. Educated. Cultured. Christian. My life has been insulated, protected
every day of my forty years, by all of these signs of entitlement. On
the ground in Havana, I felt no threat. I was never afraid a single moment.
But my “out-of-place-ness” was never far below the surface. Just ever so
uneasy. I could sense a faint hint of the words of the old, Negro spiritual,
“This world is not my home… I’m just passin’ through!”
For Jesus, it was always so.
If he was the inquisitive child that I imagine, I can hear the barrage of
questions, when the family returned from Sabbath worship. “Papa, the Rabbi
read from the Torah scroll… Where is Aramea?…
(A wandering Aramean was my father…) I thought you were from
Nazareth?… Have you really wandered, Papa?” Joseph smiled, but
before he could answer, the boy who wanted to know turned his inquisition
elsewhere. “Mama, what is an ‘alien’?”
“Did the Rabbi mean that we are aliens, too?” “Where is
Egypt?” “And how did God get them out of there?”
So began his growth in wisdom. Like ours. Papa and Mama, forced to be
historians and theologians. “Tell me… how… where… and why?”
The truth, which he learned, quickly became part of his vocabulary. You could
not be Jewish and not know. There was Abraham, wandering from the land
of Ur of the Chaldeans. Going to a land “that I will show you” God
had said. (Where is our home?) There was Jacob, traveling to
Egypt in search of rescue from famine. Enslaved there. Mistreated there.
Praying for deliverance there. (Where is our home?) There was Moses,
at home in the house of Pharoah, and yet a stranger, who returned to demand,
“Let my people go.” And the children. All of the children of
Israel. Wandering. Forty long years in the wilderness. (Where is our home?)
Jesus learned. And Jesus grew. These are my
people. And this is my story. A story of wandering. We are never
at home.
And as Jesus grew, he knew that even “at home” in Promised Land, something
was not settled. There were still tensions among neighboring tribes, as if the
Jews lived on stolen property. As if this were still not their home. The Roman
occupation further enforced the sense of alienation. The sight of Roman
legions would have been a memory from the earliest of Jesus’ days.
Centurions and Roman officials everywhere. Latin spoken where Hebrew and
Aramaic should have ruled. A constant reminder to the Jews: this world
is not your home. And his religion… His wonderful, but odd religion that he
inherited was filled with reminders, too. The clothes he wore. The rituals he
learned to practice. The kosher diet on which he cut his teeth. All of this
was much for a Jewish child to take in.
And through it all, one message came through, loud and clear: this world is
not our home. We are called to a higher Law than Rome. Our citizenship is from
Yahweh, alone.
And Jesus grew. Through all of this teaching, explicit and subconsciously
engrained. Jesus grew. And through it all, burned into his consciousness was a
bearing of alienation. “I am not accepted here. My faith makes it
so.” And he thought of the messenger, of whom the Prophet Isaiah had
foretold:
To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before [God]
as a tender plant… he hath no form nor comeliness… there is no beauty that
we should desire him. He is despised and rejected… a man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was
despised and we esteemed him not (Isaiah 53.1-3).
So it was, that with this bearing (of alienation) that Jesus set out to
Jerusalem. The Gospeler named Luke recalls another passage from the section of
Isaiah known as the songs of the “Suffering Servant.”
The Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I
have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame… (Isaiah
50.7).
At every turn in Jesus’ life, he had experienced rejection and
alienation. Through his education, formal and informal, he had learned the
prejudice of bigotry, fear, and hatred. And then he learned an even harder
lesson. After his baptism in the Jordan, accepting his own calling to
ministry, Jesus returned home to Nazareth. But far from “esteeming him,”
far from greeting him, hearing him, welcoming one of their own Luke tells us
that a synagogue of enraged Jewish kin-people force Jesus out of the
synagogue, and lead him to the edge of a cliff intent on killing him, right
there.
Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown (Luke
4.24).
And here it is, again, in today’s text. The disciples have just come from
the mountain we call “transfiguration.” It is the Gospeler’s way of
telling us that in him, the disciples have seen something utterly unique.
There is something amazing about this Jesus. But uniqueness only
leads to further rejection… So
in the country of the Samaritans, outcasts of the outcasts, there is only
rejection. They did not receive him…
What is Luke telling us? That the Samaritans rejected Jesus because he
wasn’t one of them? (“You ain’t from around here, are you boy!?”)
Because he was only passing through? Because he had not upheld some kind of
established and expected etiquette? Hardly. Luke is making a theological
point. It is the reason for the rejection of Jesus in that day. It is the
reason for his rejection by the Samaritans. It is the reason for his rejection
by his own disciples. It is the reason for rejection by his followers for two
thousand years.
They did not receive him… for his face was set toward Jerusalem.
As Luke writes his story (many years after Easter), he writes knowing “the
rest of the story,” and he writes for the purpose of teaching theology, not
for the purpose of reporting the facts. Jerusalem, as Luke now knows,
is not just the name of a city in central Israel. The home of the Temple. The
center of the Roman occupation. Not at all. For Luke to say, “His face
was set toward Jerusalem” is to say, “for his face was set toward
self-denial, suffering, self-sacrifice.” No, the Samaritans did not receive
him, because Jesus’ face was already set toward his ultimate rejection.
Jesus’ face was set toward a cross.
Yet, should he have been surprised? Who would ever follow that kind of
leader?
Jesus’ own disciples made it clear that they would not. Their attitudes were
still set for retribution and revenge, “let us call down fire from heaven!”
(It is always worse to be rejected by those who know you best.) And it is so
today, still… When we say, “I have decided to follow Jesus,” he
makes it clear… But that is not my way. Jesus is never “at home”
among a world of hatred and war. Jesus is never “at home” among those who will
violence and practice apathy. Jesus is never “at home” among those who
sing their religion, but will not speak their faith. He has no home here.
And following his way will always mean rejection. Alienation. Death to self.
Maybe even death to life.
No one who puts a hand to he plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of
God.
If you read closely the Hebrew Scriptures, you can still hear the message
which Jesus learned as a child of Israel, and its history of rejection.
And in these days of Lenten Journey, if you can dare to look for “the
Passion of the Christ” you will see it clearly.
There is only one final response to rejection. And it is not revenge. It is
not hatred. It is not contempt. It is not despair.
It is active love. It divinely-inspired forgiveness. It is faith made tangible
through hands – broken, bloody, still (and always) abused by the insiders.
Jesus’ story is the story of ultimate rejection. He was rejected by those
who knew him not. He was rejected by those who knew him best.
And in those final words he cried the cry of unthinkable rejection, My
God. My God. Why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27.26).
Because he knows like no one else, Jesus, the Stranger, shows us
the Welcome of God.
To all who have been rejected… Welcome Home!
May it be so!
PASTORAL PRAYER
(sung) I’m just a poor, wayfaring stranger, a travlin’ through this world
of woe,
But there’s no sickness, no toil nor danger, in that bright world to which I
go.
I’m going there to see my savior. He’s coming back, he told me so!
I’m just a goin’ over Jordan. I’m just a goin’ over home.
Stranger of Welcome,
Call us “home” today.
Amen!
This is an allusion to
Luke 2.52, “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and divine and human
favor,” and is a focal point for this Lenten sermon series. What did
Jesus learn, from the scriptures he studied as a growing, Jewish disciple,
from his culture, his experiences, and how did these lessons influence his
self-understanding and his convictions?
Paul transforms his Jewish
experience into Christian experience as well, “…our citizenship is
in heaven…” (Philippians 3.20). There is always a tension for
those living in this world – who, yet, seek to live by “God’s
law.” Jesus recognized perhaps the most obvious tension when he replied
to the question of entrapment, “Give therefore to the emperor the
things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”
(Matthew 22.21).
The prophets knew that the
call and election of Israel was not for their own edification, and they
continued to remind the nation of the higher purpose of the original
calling, “…so that you will be a blessing” (Genesis 12.2).
Being “set apart” by God, only heightened the alienation that Israel
knew. Many scholars believe that the “Suffering Servant” is Israel, as
a whole, that the nation was to see itself in the role of “giving its
life” in the service of God.
Last week, Mel Gibson’s
much-debated movie on the final 24-hours of Jesus’ life, “The Passion
of the Christ,” opened to packed theatres, generating another firestorm
of debate and dialogue about Jesus. I could not help alluding to the
title, yet I intend none of the overly emotional (“he died for me”)
sentiment that draws Evangelicals to the movie, and horrifies many others.
