Lord God, I thank you. I thank you for this moment in the history of our nation. I thank you for this assembly of your Kingdom. I thank you that we have gotten past the celebration of the coming of your beloved son. This morning, through your Spirit, I’m inviting us to draw attention to the questions: What now that you have come? How we are to respond to your coming?
Well, good morning to you, the Eighth Day community. When I was listed as a guest, I had some mixed feelings about that, because many of you I know quite well and work with from time to time so I don’t feel like a guest. But there are others for whom I really am a guest, so that balances it out, and I feel comfortable in saying that I really am a guest.
Greetings from Friends of Jesus church! You have been faithful in working with us, and we see you as friends and neighbors in this journey. The scripture you just heard was the gospel part of the lectionary, but this morning I want to talk a little about what I think. I would like for you to be asking the Spirit to guide you in hearing what you hear me say.
I am undone and painfully aware that I need God’s guidance all the time. For the sake of time, I would ask you in the next few days to pick up your Bible and read the full 10th chapter of John. One of the passages in that tenth chapter is the one about the man coming and asking How do I get eternal life? If you recall, he answered correctly to Jesus’ question about what the Scriptures said: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.” And I suppose the man could have left it there, but he asked, “Well, who is your neighbor?” That question is one of the things I want to ponder about and think together about. As we recall, there were two religious leaders, as Jesus told the story, that walked past the guy who had been beaten. And then another person came along and he picked him up and carried him to an inn and provided for him. After he provided for him a day, he gave coins to the innkeeper and said that he would be back through and would take care of whatever more was needed.
Often when I think about that particular passage, I think that for me it cuts to the heart of what my trying to grow deeper in Christ is really all about. In my imagination that wounded guy woke up, and he said, “Where am? I How did I get here?” What happens in my imagination is that when he woke up and the innkeeper told him who the person was, he said, “Wow. Let me get out of here. I want no part of that.”
While in this story it’s a Jew and a Samaritan, I would like for you to think of him as anybody that you’re not sure of, anybody that you have fears of being in relationship with.
I don’t know (and I want you to answer for yourself) how you finally came to deal with that scripture. The question for me is really not how he dealt with it. For me and all of us in this room in the kingdom) the question is how and at what price do we make the choices in dealing with the neighbors whom we find difficult to deal with. I am reminded that Maria just told you that I have a call of reconciliation, more specifically for me it’s been racial reconciliation. I want to say categorically, however, that I don’t feel that racism is the unpardonable sin.
I, however, have spent 18 years or more working on reconciliation, specifically racial reconciliation. Why do I spend my time on it? It’s a specific call on my life to engage in and participate in, first of all, giving honor to God and loving Him with all my might and then loving my neighbor. Now, having worked together in this community trying to bring about reconciliation, I want to say that what I feel reconciliation requires may or may not be what someone else thinks it requires. Each of us falls short of what it is that is really needed.
I am convinced that what I need to do to deepen my faith and my relationship with God is to be able say No to my darker self, that self that is not in the image of God. I will submit to you for your thinking and praying about in the coming weeks if what I just said is true. It’s been easier for me to say No to some other people about what they are telling me, but the most difficult thing for me is to say No to my own dark self. What I would ask each of you is to ponder that question. If Eighth Day church is going to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and love our neighbor likewise, I believe that we’re going to have to give up the fear of and the need to satisfy what I have described as the darkened self. We need to give up that false self.
In my limited time I want to suggest that what we might want to do, or at least think about doing, is to draw closer to and be able to face our own messiness. (And indeed each one of us has a mess inside of us. That’s the dark side that I made reference to.) But in order to do that, we have to be willing—when the challenge comes—to draw closer first of all to God and then to our neighbor. We have to be willing to allow those fears and to grow into and get closer to them. We have to ask God, who came here in human form, to teach us how to be loving. He set the example. We are those two religious persons who walked away and left him there. It is our goal, I believe, to move those barriers.
Now you’ve heard what Harold believes and thinks. What I would invite you to do, and I plead with you to do, is to talk in the next few days to the God that we celebrated just a few days ago and to really in your celebration ask him or her what is it that you are fearful of. Or, in my case, what is it that Harold is so fearful of and so unable to confront to make me a loving person that God is calling me to be. It’s a big challenge; it is not for each of us the same thing.
We all have been at one point or another in our life hurt by someone or something. One of the major challenges, I believe, is to first of all to forgive ourselves for what it is that we have done to others. And sometimes in asking forgiveness, it requires that you walk away and allow that person to get to a point where they can ask God what it is that they need to do. Now this might be a real challenge. It might mean that as you think about how you want to grow deeper, you might need to spend some quality time in silence alone with the God we just celebrated this past Christmas. It is my hope that, if we can set the example as a church, the difficult road that we have ahead will seem less difficult. I believe that we’re in a war. The war is against me, Harold, to deal with my false self.
We’ve got an election coming up; we’ve got a whole lot of things that are going to be coming up in the coming days. So first of all, let me remind you again that the essence of the total Scripture is to love God with all our hearts. To the extent that I’ve been able to do that, I feel that I am more like Him than I was in 1996, when I walked in this door. Personally, I had some issues with white people … real issues. Through the Servant Leadership School courses that I took, through everything else that I got, I was able, with God’s help, to move much further than that. For me personally, race is not the biggest issue in my life. My biggest issue is drawing closer to God.
I need your help. I know you’re not perfect and you’re going to say some things I’m not going to be particularly fond of; you can trust that I’m going to say some things that you’re not particularly fond of. (Or perhaps I said some things already this morning.) But take whatever it only onto your shoulder; don’t take it in too deep. If it has some real meaning for you and you want to move deeper into whatever it is, then in one way or another discuss it, pray about it and decide to act upon it.
It is indeed my pleasure to come and stand before you for a few moments. My prayer is that you will ponder this question. If for any reason some of what I said is confusing for you, know that it’s confusing for me. I don’t have the answers to much of what I say. I’m on a journey to deepen my relationship with God and my relationship with my neighbor. I believe that my neighbor is any human being, any person that God, not me, puts in my life. I didn’t ask for the Church of the Saviour in 1996. I was just asked by a guy to come over here one time to drop him off. And now for nineteen years God has kept me on that journey. As I said earlier, I believe that each one of us has made that commitment that we want to deepen our relationship with God. Let us ask God to grant us the ability to listen, to listen to His voice and come to grips with those dark inner pieces that are a part of each of us.
Lord God, I have, to the best of my own personal ability, shared where I am this morning. I pray that you will in the weeks and months ahead answer my prayer of drawing closer to you and drawing closer to my neighbor. I pray that each person within the sound of my voice will hear not my voice but your voice calling him, as an individual first, to eliminate those darkened spaces in themselves, so that they can become the loving person that you called them to be. It is in your beloved son’s name that I pray. Amen.