The Reformation and Acceptance

Wow.  It’s going to be 500 years.  To be honest it’s hard to know what to say.  Like the anniversaries of so many momentous events, whether they be of the birth of a nation, the calamity and tragedy of an attack, or the commemoration of the actions of a lone priest and Bible professor in Wittenberg, Germany, it is difficult, indeed, I daresay impossible, to sum up in one 15 minute speech all the change, all the emotion, all the personal meaning that would be found in four small nails on the doors of that rather unassuming little church half a millennium ago.  I mean, what do we say?  How do we even begin?  Do we quote important speeches, do we go into history and catechisms and confessions?  I don’t believe I could do all of that justice in a semester let alone in just one sermon. 

But as a Protestant, as a long standing fan of Mr. Martin Luther, and as someone who  simply tries to embody the best of what the Reformation stands for, I believe all of the Reformers, be they Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist or otherwise, would simply say, “Don’t”.  They would say, “We did not fight for the Reformation … we did not fight for denominations, for seminaries, or 16^th century theology - we fought for the gospel.  We weren’t seeking something new; new traditions, new ways of doing things; rather we sought the return of something very old – something that existed from the very beginning.  We wanted the Word unburdened and that is all.” 

As such, ladies and gentlemen, I do not believe I have it within me to describe to you all that the Reformation means.   I can only take to heart its one true lesson: Preach the gospel … and do so by means of a Pixar movie.  Ok, I admit it.  I made that last part up.    

“Pixar?”, you may ask.  What do the Reformation, our gospel lesson, and Pixar have to do with one another?  Well, in this case quite a bit.  Amongst many of Pixar’s films, there is one in particular that has stuck with me over the years.  It is a film called, “The Incredibles”.  Now, if you are not familiar with this title, “The Incredibles” details the story of Robert and Helen Parr, Mr. and Mrs. Incredible.  They are not just normal every day people.  They are superheroes, but they are forced to live like normal every day people.  In a society that no longer values the miraculous, in a world that no longer wonders at the impossible, Robert and Helen Parr must hide their incredible gifts  - even if it means they can no longer help others in the process.  Indeed, instead of stopping robberies and saving innocents from disaster, Robert now works in the insurance industry of all places, and his boss is Robert’s opposite in every conceivable way.  Robert, of course, has his problems, but overall he is a compassionate, selfless, and loving human being - a big man with a big heart who is forced to exist in a world that’s suffocating him with its smallness.  Gilbert Huph, however, is Robert’s supervisor.  In contrast to Robert’s big-ness, Gilbert Huph is a reprehensible little rat of a man.  He is greedy, underhanded; He is the kind of man that only does the right thing when the law requires him to, and he make’s Bob’s life absolutely miserable. 

Gilbert Huph, you see, is a Zaccheus character.  That is who Zaccheus is in the text.  Zaccheus is not some misunderstood short-fellow with a heart of gold.  In the first century he is a short, ridiculous little money monger, a chief tax collector who got wealthy selling out his own countrymen - the very people he was supposed to help.  He is cold, He is uncaring, … and he has all the power.  No, in our gospel lesson, Zaccheus is not the hero.  

But this doesn’t sound like the Zaccheus we know at all does it?  Zaccheus isn’t supposed to be this way.  He’s the example we love to set for ourselves.  “Be like, Zaccheus!” we’ve been told.  Zaccheus did everything he could to meet Jesus. Be bold and let nothing stop you in your quest to meet the Christ.  This has largely been the message of American Protestantism.    It’s a good message.  As one of your pastors, yes, I implore you to not let anything hinder you from meeting Christ.  I guarantee you, you will not be the same because of it.  But while I would agree that this message is good, as a believer in the Reformation and what it stands for, I must be honest.  The message is good, but it is not accurate.  Indeed, I would not only call it inaccurate but a dangerous diversion from what Luke is trying to say.  It is not the first time the Church has done such a thing.  The Church over time co-opts many of these stories and coerces them to mean something that they don’t, something much nicer and easier to swallow.  It is like the myth concerning Jesus’ statement about camels and the “Eye of a Needle”.  As the myth goes, the Needle’s Eye was supposedly a very narrow gate into Jerusalem, quite the squeeze for a merchant to bring his camels through.  Jesus didn’t really mean that it was easier for literal camel to go through the literal eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.  That couldn’t possibly be the case because I myself want to be rich.  So rather than taking Jesus seriously, rather than coming to terms with the fact material wealth often has spiritual consequences very few of us are born to handle, we believe something easy, something convenient, and something entirely made up.  In the same way we have taken this Zaccheus story and made it more palatable to our own tastes.  

No, Zaccheus in the ancient world is hardly someone to aspire to.  As a tax collector, indeed as the chief tax collector he would be largely uncaring of the poor.  The poor would have been how he made his money, for the poor would be least able to fight him.  Likewise, Zaccheus does not offer to pay back those he robbed fourfold to show that his conscience is somehow clean but rather because he really did rob people.  That Jesus lumps him in with the lost in need of saving shows Zaccheus is not misunderstood by his fellow Jews.   Zaccheus is not the example, ladies and gentlemen, he’s the challenge.  Like Mr. Huph from the Incredibles, Zaccheus is the person who has literally been robbing and cheating others his entire career, becoming very wealthy and powerful off of their suffering.  In the first century, make no mistake, people went hungry and may have even died because of people like him.  He is the villain, and like Mr. Gilbert Huph, he is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the system.  He is not the man looking to finally show people what a good person he is, Zaccheus is the black sheep of the Hebrew family.  He’s the guy who takes advantage of people, never gives back, and then because of this one act wants to be forgiven for a lifetime of misdeeds … and Jesus gives it to him.  Do you get it?

Living in 21st century America we often forget that these Bible stories are preserved for us, not written to us.  There’s a difference.  Luke, you see, didn’t know one drop of English, and neither could Matthew  Mark or John have told you remotely what an American even was, let alone where to find one.  Our Scriptures speak to us, that is part of their miracle, but we can’t confuse that with the fact that these stories weren’t told to us.  They were told to audiences with vastly different cultures and vastly different worldviews.  Luke was written to a first century Roman audience and to a first century Roman audience Zaccheus is literally the most ridiculous character they could possible imagine, and Luke just reported that they have to be in fellowship with him.  Jesus was accepting him into the fold, it’s a done deal.  To a Roman Gentile they would say to have the same faith as a Jew was crazy enough, but now they not only have to be in fellowship with the Jews but specifically this Jew.  They have to worship with Gilbert Huph, this little rat running a protection racket in Hill-Billy Judea because NOW he wants to be accepted, NOW he suddenly wants to be part of the community?  And Jesus says, “Yeah, Gilbert Huph, too.”

Ecclesia Semper Reformanda, my friends, Ecclesia Semper Reformanda.  The Church must always be reformed.  Reformation is not something “they” out there do.  It is not done by strangers, it is done by “us” and this lesson lies at its very core.  The heart of all reform asks this basic question of human compassion, “Who are we excluding?”  I won’t lie to you, ladies and gentlemen, Christianity reforms itself about every 500 years, and as a Church we are showing every sign of it.  Mistrust in the Church’s institutions, irrelevance of theology, belief, and worship in the surrounding culture - all of that was there in Luther’s time as it was several times before and is again now.  And I will warn you, how believers look in every era is very different.  Just as Roman Catholics believed the end was coming with Protestantism, just as Christians before Nicaea were deeply disturbed about Roman involvement both during and after Nicaea, in each era of the church there is this question, “How can THIS PERSON be in the same worship service … as me?”  And so, I would not be taking my duties as your pastor seriously if I didn’t warn you that the people that come through those doors in the coming decades may not be who we imagine, indeed they might not even be to our liking. 

And so, this 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, as a Protestant myself who believes in the unburdened Word, I have to ask you, who is your Zaccheus?  Who is the literally most ridiculous person you could imagine sitting in the pew next to you?  I mean, I could go on up here, hitting every point the televangelists cover, but the fact is I love you too much to do that.  We could go on about the need to forgive people with criminal records or other “sinners”, in whatever easy way we wish to define that term, but truth be told I don’t think that’s our problem as Middle Class Protestants.  So, I’ll ask again, who is your Zaccheus?  Is he Saudi Arabian?  An Iraqi?  Is he flamboyantly gay?  Maybe she wears spiked leather and black lipstick, maybe she swears a lot and is disrespectful, maybe she is really a he. 

Every congregation says it is welcoming, and every congregation believes themselves when they say that Christ died for all, but no congregation really ask themselves this question.  Ladies and gentlemen, we can’t be an accepting church unless we’ve identified who our Zaccheus are.  The fact is we can say we are a loving and welcoming church until we are blue in the face, but unless we challenge ourselves and really take a hard look at what we believe a believer looks like, if we don’t work to undo our preconceived notions we will shoot ourselves in the foot every single time.

But here is the good news.  We don’t have to be ready for whomever God throws at us, be it within these four walls or out there in the world.   We don’t have to have plans for every single contingency, nor do we have to spend hour upon hour trying to be prepared.  God does not require us to be ready, for that is impossible, we just have to be willing. 

Amen and Amen.   

Bitterness and Regret

Good Morning!  Pastor Keven is not here today.  My name is Yehudah.  Pastor Keven talked to me earlier in the week and he felt it best if I got up and spoke to you today.  You see, I am one of the lepers.  Now, Yehuda, I understand that name may be a little difficult for you to understand.  In English, I believe, you pronounce my name Judah and in the Greek of Jesus’ time, you might have called me Judas.  No, don’t look at me like that.  I’m not THAT Judas.  You see, the Jewish people often emulated the people in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Lots of people in my time were called Judas, Levi, Joseph, Miriam (or Mary), and even Joshua, whom you now pronounce as Jesus…or Josh in some cases.  Yes, in my time Jesus’ name was pronounced Yehoshua, his name means “God Saves”, and He did, many, many times.  Pastor Keven asked me to speak today, because this story is the story of my salvation, not once but twice.  My name, however, is my shame.  Yehudah in my language means “grateful to God”, and I wish to Heaven I had been named anything else.

What’s that?  What was it like being a Jew of my time?  A Palestinian Jew in the time of Jesus?  Well… like all of you we grew up with our stories.  We grew up with our religion, of course, the stories of Moses and King David just as you did.  But also like you, we just didn’t have our religious stories, we had our national ones.  Here in America you have The Boston Tea party, the Boston Massacre, the Battles of Yorktown and Valley Forge.  Our experience was a little different.  We had a man, his name was King Antiochus IV.  Antiochus Epiphanes the IV.  Literally, “God Manifest”.  You see my friends, fter Alexander the Great conquered his Empire, conquered Greece, Egypt, Israel, and all the way the Himalayas and India, he died… so apparently he wasn’t that great.  Pretty good maybe, but “Great”?  I don’t know.  But when he died his Empire was left to his top four generals, and Antiochus was their descendant.  I had a great grandfather who lived under Antiochus – and I will never forget the look in his eyes.  Antiochus, did not like Jews very much.  On the rumor of a revolt in Jerusalem, he came.  He came with his armies and his machines of war.  He broke into Jerusalem and he killed our people by the thousands.  He stole our women and our children.  His soldiers murdered our priests and stole all the artifacts of the temple.  But, worse than that, he would do something that would leave a scar in the minds of every Israelite for centuries to come.  He broke into the Holy of Holies, the most sacred place in the temple, in all of Israel, and erected an idol to Zeus and sacrificed a pig to it on our altar.  From that moment on, my religion was banned.  We were to worship the gods of Olympus.  He burned our scrolls and condemned anyone practicing the religion of our ancestors to death.

That was our national story.  Now, God was faithful to us.  Antiochus may have won that battle, but his actions erupted into an all out war.  Though his armies far outnumbered ours, the Jewish people were united under a man named Judas Maccabeus.  Under his leadership, we were victorious over the armies of Antiochus and we reclaimed our land and our temple.  We were free!  We rededicated the temple to Yahweh, and we called the celebration Hanukkah.  And Antiochus Epiphanes, he died pathetically of bodily inflammation and madness.  Hmmph, God Manifest (pretend spit).

But that was our story.  It was the narrative that explained who we were as Israelites, just as your Revolutionary War or your Constitutional Convention does for you.  But whereas you kept your freedoms, your ancestors kept watch to ensure their freedoms were passed on to their children, mine did not.  We did have independence for a time, but the Jewish kings proved only marginally better than the Gentile ones and when their greed and in-fighting reached its height, we were all but sold to Rome so one of our princes could depose his brother and gain the throne.  That is why shame was not new to my people.  We had independence, but our faithlessness and violent evil bought us exile.  First, came Persia, then Babylon, the Persia again, then Greece, and finally Rome.  We are a conquered people, and the only freedom we ever tasted we traded away. 

We longed for a good king.  A Jewish King from the line of David to protect our people.  We longed to return to the Golden Age of Israel, to the times of David and Solomon and we cried out to God day and night for a king that would set us free.  Free from the gentiles, free from our own corrupt leaders, and, though we did not know it, free from a backbreaking Judaism that hurt more than it healed, and most of all freedom from our sinful natures.  That king came, he came right when our desperation reached its peak, but there were many who did not recognize him.  That was to our shame, too.

I met him, you know.  I was a leper then as I said.  Now, leprosy then wasn’t what leprosy is today.  Leprosy today is called Hansen’s disease, but back in my day it was not just one but many different afflictions, and that is exactly how we thought of it – as an affliction.  Yes, we understand leprosy today as a disease but in my day leprosy was the worst of all possible curses.  For us, it was literally a living death.  Many of the writers of my time would talk about it, and it was widely known that neither priest nor magician, neither prayer nor sorcery could be rid of this terrible, terrible fate.  Because God alone had the power of life and death, only God could bestow leprosy on a person, and because only God could bestow it, only God Himself could remove it.

You don’t know what it was like, being a leper in those days.  The Jewish law declared us unclean, and so we were exiled - exiled from our families and villages, exiled from our people, exiled from life.  There was nowhere we were welcome, nowhere we could go.  That is why we hung together in groups, you see, for protection.  To be a leper was to be despised and feared, called a sinner and treated as an abomination.  We were told that God was angry with us, angry at our terrible sin, for what other reason would God afflict us so?  We couldn’t even go to the temple to atone for it!  We were lost, afraid, and hated.  Penniless and dying, even beggars could at least go into town and beg.  I cried out to God, “Why?!”  WHAT DID I DO!?  To deserve…this?  And for years, nothing.  God’s answer to me was always … nothing.

We were wandering the countryside in those days, near a village on the road to Jerusalem.  There were ten of us, and we heard of this new rabbi that was in Judea.  Oh, but he was more than rabbi.  Some claimed he was a prophet, some claimed he was a king, maybe even THE King, but all held he was a worker of miracles.  We had heard that he had even cleansed leprosy.  Leprosy!  Many Jews didn’t know how to feel about that.  God alone had the power to remove such terrible things and our stories were rife with warnings about people claiming to be “God Manifest”

I don’t know why we did it.  But we saw him enter the village and we raced after him.  We kept our distance, though; we shouldn’t have chased him into town as it stands.  We didn’t want to either make him unclean by touching him nor did we want to invite violence upon ourselves for coming in.  Not knowing what to do, we all cried out as one person, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”  Heh.  We knew what we were asking, we knew that only God himself could remove our affliction and yet we used “epistates” the word for a human overseer. Epistates?  Kurios!  Adonai! Was what we should have called him!  LORD!  Maybe it was because we didn’t want to give the villagers further excuse to hurt us.  Maybe we really couldn’t handle the idea of a Human God, but we cried out just the same.  “Jesus, Master, heal us!”

And that look in his eyes, that look of kindness and compassion.  Here we were, pitiful pathetic wretches, asking Him to do something only God could do, believing that He could do it, and we insult him by referring to him as a mere employer.  But Jesus didn’t see that.  Jesus didn’t see my sin, my terrible affliction and condemnation, he saw only people who were scared, who were forced to bear this terrible weight alone.  In his mercy he spoke to us, knowing the damage it could do to tell us to go against our religion, to act like Naaman the Syrian, he told us to obey our Jewish law, to show ourselves to the priests as people cured of leprosy were supposed to do.  And we did.  We all did.  We had dreamed of this moment every single second of every single day of our lives, when we would finally present ourselves as CLEAN.  Welcomed back into community, to hold a job, to have a family.  To be greeted with words of joy rather than thrown rocks.  We went, just as he said … and we were clean! 

But I had a problem so much deeper than rotting skin, and it took a foreigner, a Samaritan, of all people, to show it to me.  I am not Yehudah.  I was not grateful to God.  I was so concerned with the state of my flesh I didn’t see the state of rotting heart.  I asked God to heal me, insulting the Doctor by calling him an orderly and then daring to ask a favor of him in the same sentence.  He sensed our fear, the damage it might do to our faith, and then in kindness he healed us through that faith, and … I didn’t care.  I was so focused on the rules, the stupid little nuances of my people’s ruthless, discompassionate interpretation of Torah that I failed to see what a thankless, ungrateful fool I had become.  Not the Samaritan.  We traveled with this man, a man who was not just a leper but a foreign leper, and he thanked God every single day for everything he had.  However badly we were treated, however terrible the day, he began and ended it with thanksgiving.  We mocked him for it, and however bad we were treated, he was treated far worse.  And yet, when I turned back, I saw him.  I saw him openly thanking God and in the sight of all the Jews he prostrated himself, kneeling before Jesus as we would before Yahweh at temple. 

But I didn’t care.  I kept walking.  In that moment all that pain, all those years of bitterness and anger, it made me into the most selfish person imaginable.  I walked and I walked, and while walking I heard Jesus off in the distance ask, “Were not all ten healed? Is the only one to come back and give praise to God this foreigner?”  and I still didn’t care.

Don’t be like me!  I understand better now.  When I asked God what I had done wrong to receive my leprosy, when “nothing” was the constant answer, I know that that was what I had done.  Nothing.  I had done nothing to earn my sickness, nothing to deserve the condemnation of my people - it was just a disease.  But I listened to them and not God, I listened to the very people who called me sinner, threw me out into the wilderness, and kicked me like a diseased dog.  I listened to them and followed after religion when I should have been chasing faith!  I let the words of those selfish, stupid fools turn my heart bitter and when the time came to either choose gratitude toward the God who loved me ceaselessly or to obey an interpretation of the religion that beat me endlessly, I chose my abuser.  

DON’T BE LIKE ME.  Be grateful for every little thing you have, sound it out in the morning, voice it at night when you go to bed.  Give THANKS.  How other people treat you, what they say when they try convince you what to believe, dismiss it for the selfish nonsense that it is!  You listen to God!  You be faithful to Him, not obedient to them.  Mere obedience, the blind discharge of duties and human expectations will turn you into something much worse than a leper, it will turn you into a heartless fool.  As a leper I was rotting from the outside in, but as a child of God I was rotting from the inside out.  Be rid of it, be free!  Anything that treats God’s children as garbage is itself garbage.  Don’t believe in it!  I failed at being Yehuda, but that doesn’t mean you have to.  Amen.

The Quality of One's Friends...

          A miraculous itinerate rabbi, a Roman soldier who loves his slave, Jews that value the gentile that built their synagogue, and a miracle completed just because of one man’s belief.  I must admit my friends, this is one of my favorite texts in Luke, superceded only by the parable of the prodigal son.  It is such a brief, odd, but incredible little story.  It is unfortunate, however, that we as a culture have lost just how odd and incredible this story really is.  We read it and see merely a soldier, a servant, and Jesus; only a tale about the ultimate power of belief.  Make no mistake, all those elements are there, but they are not the only ones.

                In seminary and law school, you learn very quickly about the incredible importance of context.  It can mean many dull hours at books too dusty and too old for reasonable humans, and it can mean a lot of discomfort as old understandings need to be tilled up and the seeds of new understandings get sown.  But this is no mere mental exercise.  For those of us called to this path it becomes very clear how important this work is because in the end you realize there are real people going to be affected by it for weal or woe.  Whether a man borrows something or is stealing something depends on the context, and whether someone kills in self defense or will be found guilty of murder depends on the knowing the exact situation in which it happened.  If context means so much, then it is clear we as faithful people are going to have to master it.

                So what is our gospel lesson in context, what did it mean to a first century Gentile living within the confines of the Roman Empire?  We’re going to find out, but instead of my usual means, instead going into the Greek, instead of talking about first century Judean history, I am rather going translate our lesson culturally, changing only the names and the setting in which the story occurs.  Listen, and see if you can’t hear the difference.

      “After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Civil War era Georgia as a black preacher.  A white plantation owner there had a female slave whom he loved dearly, and who was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he had the elders of the African- American community come to him, asking him to come and heal his slave.  When they came to Jesus, the elders appealed to him earnestly, saying, "He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our church for us." And Jesus went with them, but when he was not far from the house, the Plantation owner sent his friends to say to the black preacher, "Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed.  For I also am a slave set under authority with people under me; and I say to one, 'Go,' and he goes, and to another, 'Come,' and he comes, and to my servants, 'Do this,' and they do it."

When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, "I tell you, not even in all the South have I found such faith."  When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health.

                A little different isn’t it?  Let’s try something more modern.

“After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered modern day Palestine as a rabbi.  A Hezbollah soldier there had a gay partner whom he loved dearly, and who was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he had other Israelis ask him to come and heal his partner.  When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, "He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us." And Jesus went with them, but when he was not far from the house, the soldier sent his Muslim friends to say to him, "Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my love be healed.  For I also am a servant set under authority with soldiers under me; and I say to one, 'Go,' and he goes, and to another, 'Come,' and he comes, and to my lover, 'Do this,' and he does it."

When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, "I tell you, not even in all Israel have I found such faith."  When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the man’s partner in good health.

                Beginning to see how really shocking this story really is?  Are we starting to see the elements we have been missing?  Let us now go back to the original text, filling it in with what would have been unwritten but obvious to an ancient audience. 

After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum, a Jewish fishing village under gentile control.  A centurion, an enforcer of the Roman governor’s whims, had a male slave lover who was ill and close to death.  When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave.  They came to Jesus without hesitation, appealing to him earnestly, saying, "The centurion is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us." And Jesus went with them, but when he was not far from the house, the centurion sent his Roman friends to say to him, "Lord, do not trouble yourself, for despite my station I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed.  For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, 'Go,' and he goes, and to another, 'Come,' and he comes, and to my slave, 'Do this,' and the slave does it."

When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, "I tell you, not even among Jews have I found such faith in God." When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health - without Jesus having to say a word.”

                Reads a lot differently now doesn’t it?  Yes there is the faith of the centurion and the power of belief, but there is so much more to it.  Each character in the story is defying the supposed order of things, recognizing the era in which they live but also loving past it.  There is the centurion, a Roman soldier, the very kind of person who in but a generation will put every Israelite in Jerusalem to the sword.  But he is not cruel to the Israelites, he does not force them to worship the emperor or the Roman gods, indeed he builds their synagogue for them.  He has such a relationship with the Israelites that he can ask the Jewish elders to go talk to this dangerous new rabbi for him.  The elders, who by all accounts know that even being seen talking to this upstart, this rabbi with no formal education who constantly challenges the religious elite, could get them into real trouble, but for this centurion they do it.  And this needs to be explored further, the risks they are taking are no less phenomenal than the reasons they are taking them.  They approach this Jewish radical, this rabbi who does miraculous works on the Sabbath and that declares all foods to be clean, a man who is upsetting every Jewish authority at a time when doing so would literally get you killed.  Not only that, they are approaching this rabbi as a favor for a man viewed as a Jewish oppressor so that man can continue a relationship many Jewish leaders would not consider legitimate.  But the elders didn’t care about any of that.  This centurion had developed such a friendship, had such a meaningful impact on their lives, they approach Jesus without a second thought.  They don’t come to Jesus saying, we have to relay a message to you.  NO!  They say “this man is worthy of having you do this for him.”  In a world that would be all too quick to brand you a traitor, they knew the price of compassion in this instance and they didn’t flinch for a moment.  Their friend’s well being and joy meant so much more to them.

But after the Jewish elders show the quality of their character the Romans in Capernaum show theirs.  Jesus, of course, would know the repercussions of entering into the house of an unclean gentile, but He doesn’t care.  He goes anyway.  But the centurion, the centurion sees Jesus coming and has his Roman friends meet a conquered Jew and tell him not to come.  “Our friend knows the stigma that will be attached to you if you come to his house,” they say.  “But this is his message, ‘My Lord,’”… Incredible!  His friends see that this man of military station is debasing himself, calling a conquered Israelite My Lord, but they don’t care.  They relay the message anyway.  “My Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof and so I did not presume that I was worthy to see you.  Do not trouble yourself on my account.  Simply say the word and I know he will be healed for I myself am a man who both is a master and has a master, just like anybody else.  Just as when I give a command my will is done, I know when you issue the order thy will be done.

Jesus is astounded, amazed by this, and the story ends by Jesus doing something equally shocking.  He turns to his fellow Israelites and says, “I wish Jews had this much faith.”

Ladies and gentlemen, if the world needs anything it needs this story.  In a day and age where Christians mix with Muslims, Hindu’s, and Neo-Pagans, where those in the fishing villages of the world must live with the whims of the Caesars of the world, this story of risk-taking love and borderless compassion shows us the world as it could be.  A world where politics and disagreements mean so much less than one another’s happiness and the miracles that can happen when we do not let other people’s discomfort and disapproval rob us of our care.  But we don’t choose that world, ladies and gentlemen.  Instead we only love those like us, love when there is no cost to us.  One of my heroes, a German Lutheran Pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, coined a term for this: He called it cheap grace.  Ladies and gentlemen, I look upon an America more fractured than I have ever seen it, I look upon a world more ready to burn than I have ever seen it.  This is the answer, my friends.  If you don’t like somebody –befriend them.  If you are concerned about a social movement -  host their rallies.  If you despise an entire religion – build their synagogue for them.  Scream at the top of that mountain that no matter how different we are, how much we disagree or how much you don’t like me there will NEVER be a time when I don’t have your best interests and your happiness in my heart, that under no circumstance will I EVER be your enemy.  That is how we change the world, ladies and gentlemen, and that is how we make the miracles fly. 

Because if we only love those who love us, how is that to our credit?