Sunday August 17, 2008 - St James's, Cambridge, The Rev Judy Gay

A House of Prayer for all People

Isaiah 56:1-8; Psalm 67; Romans 11:1, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28

1. OUTREACH

• The opening hymn we just sang, "Christ is the World's True Light," is one of the stirring missionary hymns that I grew up with, conveying that Christmas and Epiphany feeling of Jesus shining out as the light of the world. It reminds me of familiar Biblical passages that we associate with Christ:The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. (Is 9:2)
• A light to the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out the prisoners ... [and all] who sit in darkness. (Is 42:6)
• Then people shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nations...shall learn war no more. - (From Micah 4 and Isaiah 2)

And it reminds me of last Sunday epistle reading from Romans:

How can they believe [in Christ] if they have not heard?

And how can they hear without someone to proclaim him?

And how are they to proclaim unless they are sent?"  (Rom 10:14-15)

This missionary hymn was written in 1931 at a time when Christian missionaries were going out from Europe and America "to the ends of the earth" trying to fulfill that "Great Commission" of which we will sing in our closing hymn.  Of course we know that this period of great missionary zeal was also a period of great western expansion, imperialism and colonial domination. But there was then, and still is, a calling to put into practice that outgoing Biblical calling to share God's love and God's blessings with the whole world.

There is an OUTWARD movement running through much of the Bible - God's Spirit:

• Which called Abraham to go out in faith into a new land,
• and called his descendants to go out as a blessing to all people,
• Which sent Jesus, the Messiah, the Prince of Peace, to shine out to all the nations, and,
• as the Acts of the Apostles develops the story of the work of the Holy Spirit, "the Good News [went] out from Jerusalem to all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8)

ST JAMES OUTREACH

Now, almost a century after that worldwide missionary era, we see a very different, post-colonial world. Nations are gathered as equals at the Beijing Olympics and at the United Nations, and most recently we have seen  Anglican Bishops from around the world gathered to listen to each other and learn from each other at the Lambeth Conference. Now the Christian center sending missionaries is as likely to be in China or Nigeria or Uganda as it is to be in Jerusalem, America or Europe. But although times have changed and the church has grown, it is still called to share in that outward movement of Christians sent out from their own comfort zones to share and work with "others" around the world.

We here at St James can be proud of the way that our own church members have been, and even at this very moment, are part of that outward movement to other people and places - not because we have all the answers, but because God calls us to work alongside others, learn from partners around the world and to bring back from them new insights to enrich our own life here in Cambridge.

To mention just a few St James church members, did you know that:

Chris and Trish Morck (with their 2 daughters) are Episcopal Missionaries in Quito, Ecuador,  helping promote reconciliation within the local Episcopal church and ecumenical collaboration in the Latin American Council of Churches.

Maureene Capillo has spent the summer in Quito, Equador, working with local women priests, teaching school and helping several churches with Bible Study and other women's programs - and improving her Spanish.

Mary Caulfield is spending the summer in Brazil helping local churches develop relevant Godly Play Sunday School materials - and improving her Portugese.

Jodi Mikalachki is in Burundi for three years under Mennonite sponsorship as an educator and community development worker. She is presently in Bujumbura studying the local language but will soon move to the interior where she will be working with teachers, students and the community in a ministry of reconciliation in that conflict-torn part of Africa.

Ben Warren (Laura's brother) left two weeks ago to begin serving as a dentist in Kathmandu in the high, remote mountains of Nepal.

The entire Padilla-de Borst family is preparing to return to Latin America to live and work with the church in El Salvador at the beginning of the new year.

And at this very moment a group from St James, under the leadership of Laurie Rofinot and Carolann Barrett are in the air flying to the Mississippi Gulf Coast for a week of post-Katrina mission work.

2. INCLUSIVE - INGATHERING

Yes, God's call to go out in the Spirit of Christ, to meet and work and share the Good News with others is an essential part of our faith and life here at St James.  But equally important, perhaps more important, is God's call gathering in all people to God's self, an ingathering into encounter and community in the Body of Christ. Today's Old Testament readings make that abundantly clear.

In the words read a few minutes ago Isaiah was speaking first to the Hebrew exiles who had been suffering in captivity "by the Rivers of Babylon" but now at last were returning home to Jerusalem. Isaiah reminds them of what it means to be God's people:

they must "maintain justice" and "do what is right."

But then the Lord tells them that they must be equally welcoming to people they were inclined to reject as outsiders or outcasts. Isaiah's words (including verses 2-5 which are omitted in our reading) explicitly insist that God's community must be based on welcome and inclusiveness for all people, including and especially FOREIGNERS and EUNUCHS.  In verse 5 God promises that, even though eunuchs can't have their own sons and daughters, God will give then a monument, an even better, everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

Isaiah says that such "outsiders" should not internalize their own oppression by feeling worthless and rejected, because all people who "join themselves to the Lord," who" love the name of the Lord," who join in worship and  hold fast to the covenant values of justice - they will all be brought by God to his holy mountain where they will worship together in joy, knowing that God's house is a "house of prayer for all peoples."

This passage, and the psalm we just sang, reveal the Lord God as one who breaks down walls and gathers all people into the heart of God's love whereby we can learn to love one another in the new global Christian community to which we belong.

This IN-GATHERING, this INCLUSIVITY, is part of how God blesses and guides us. Clearly Assyrian stories of creation and Egyptian laws and Babylonian culture and administration contributed to the survival of God's people and to the development of our Biblical heritage. So too the Greek empire of Alexander the Great and then the Roman Empire brought new religious ideas from as far away as Persia, India and Africa back to the Mediterranean world in which Jesus lived and Christianity developed.  And it is significant that in the Acts of the Apostles, the first gentile to be converted and baptized was the Ethiopian eunuch - someone who was both a foreigner and a eunuch who had been drawn to the gospel by reading Isaiah's words about a loving, inclusive God. (Acts 8:26-39)

3.  EXCLUSIVE   

But just as we begin to celebrate God's wonderful INCLUSIVENESS we must beware of the danger of EXCLUSIVENESS which rears its ugly head. The Hebreaw Bible tells us that God raised up judges and then kings and priests in Israel, but they turned around and drove out the people of the land and their non-Jewish religions. God brought back the exiles from Babylon but under Ezra and Nehemiah they turned around and in the name of nationalism and religious purity, they forced men to give up their foreign wives, reinforced the letter of the Jewish law and cast out anything related to "foreign" cultures or religions. And certainly there was this same tendency to EXCLUSIVENESS among the Jewish religious leaders at the time when Jesus lived. Maybe exclusivity is a survival strategy for people living through hard times.

Again and again in scriptures, in church history, and in our own times we see this tendency of believers to draw together into narrow, self-righteous, exclusive communities which are so sure they have all the answers that they build new walls to keep others out. Walls which, one again, God's spirit of INCLUSIVENESS must break down.

ST JAMES IN-GATHERING (not EXCLUDING)

We should rejoice and affirm the extent to which St James is not only a place of OUTREACH to the wide world and to our local  local community, but also a place of IN-GATHERING and WELCOME to all, an "open and inclusive community."  Here we sing music from around the world and listen to and learn from such a rich diversity of people who make up our church family.

I think of people from other countries who have shared in ministry here like Sakthi Clark from India, Beatrice Kayigwa, Christine Nakyeyune and Mary Tusuubira from Uganda, Paul Katampu from Ghana and new comers just arriving in Cambridge waiting to be welcomed into our midst.

I think of our own St James members who have worked and lived in other parts of the world, who have come from other countries, or who are on mission now and will soon be coming back home. What new and rich insights they can bring to us, if we only take the time to listen, really listen, to them.

I think of all the lives touched by members of our parish who work with

the Helping Hands Food Pantry,

the Thursday Night Women's Meals,

the Outdoor Church in Porter Square,

the St James Summer Shelter helping homeless people get jobs and housing,

the mid-week drop-in center for people struggling with mental illness

and for all of our other community outreach and service programs.

We can be God's welcoming arms gathering into our community of love  those who feel themselves to be "outcasts" by society.

And I think of all the new students, visiting scholars, international students and new residents in Cambridge who may wander into our church on a Sunday morning - or who would happily come if we invited them.   We can join Karen Meridith with her name tags and Cynthia Owen with her welcomers, to offer radical welcome to them, the kind of warm welcome which shows God's  INGATHERING, INCLUSIVE love. But we must be willing to really listen to people, really relate to them, really open ourselves to them and be willing to be changed in the process.

4.  WHAT JESUS LEARNS FROM THE CANAANITE WOMAN

That is the kind of amazing transformative experience illustrated in today's Gospel from Matthew (and its parallel in Mark.). This story can actually come as a puzzling shock to us: how could Jesus have been so rude to this poor Canaanite woman? When she shouts out asking for mercy and healing for her daughter, at first he doesn't even answer her. Then when he does answer, he says  that he was only sent to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" and then he seemingly insults her.  What's going on here? Is Jesus showing the same kind of exclusiveness that Isaiah condemned, rejecting this foreigner, this outcast Canaanite gentile woman?

First, it seems clear that Jesus really did devote almost all of his ministry to his own people, not the Jewish elite but the "outcasts of Israel," the poor, the sick, the peasants, the workers.  There are only two other stories of Jesus' ministry to non-Jewish people:  healing the slave of a Roman Centurion in Luke 7:1-10, and talking with a Samaritan woman in John 4:46-54. As Marcus Borg says, "this doesn't mean that Christianity was not open to Gentiles", but that "the mission to the Gentiles" and to the ends of the earth happened after Easter, in the power of the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Yet the fact that each of the Gospel writers includes one memorable story of Jesus relating to and  being moved by the faith of a Gentile suggests that this (or a similar event) was an important turning point in the ministry of this very human Jesus who was,  remember "very man" as well as "very God."

Perhaps we can see ourselves mirrored in Jesus' attitude towards the Canaanite woman. We too usually want to get on with our tasks and don't want to be troubled by a stranger's unexpected problems. How often we say "Don't bother me. I have work to do."  How often we think of "the other" as someone we don't need to listen to, someone from whom we can learn nothing.

Yet in this story Jesus shows us what happens when we really do encounter the "other."   By her persistence she keeps on challenging Jesus and when he actually begins to talk with her, acknowledging her as an equal worthy of conversation, he learns something critically important from her.  He recognizes the great faith that even someone from outside the Jewish community can hold. And because of Jesus' very nature as God, as compassion, as Love incarnate, her daughter IS healed.

Whenever we, like Jesus, really enter into a relationship and really listen to someone else, we and they will be changed. Real relationships, loving relationships, change everything.

I believe that is what we will be hearing from our Bishops as they report back from Lambeth, where the focus was on really listening to one another, Anglican bishops from around the world.

I believe that is what we need to develop here at St James as we begin a new year. Let us celebrate our diversity, our outreach and our inclusiveness, and be prepared to be changed.

And it is what we will be singing about in our offertory hymn on an insert in your bulletin:

The church of Christ in every age, beset by change, but Spirit-led

must claim and test its heritage, and keep on rising from the dead.