14 Pentecost 2007 Zion, Washington

Jesus said, "When you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just." For anyone who has taken the Christian life seriously, this sort of thing simply goes without saying. Generosity is done because that's what it means to be a Christian, not because it's going to look really great in our obituary.

At first, I wondered what I would preach about this morning, since all of the readings are just reminders about what we all do anyway, day by day. You are not a congregation of people who don't know the truth in today's Bible readings. You are not a congregation who needs to be pushed and prodded and reminded to love God, to study our faith and increase your religion, to take in the nourishment of God's goodness in order to leave behind you a trail of good deeds, well done, to the glory of God and for the common good.

But then it dawned on me, that we take all this stuff for granted and so we're prone to wander off from it, little by little, rather than paying attention to it; like a person who is on perpetual medication, who feels good and starts to think that they are healed and can stop taking their meds rather than realizing that they feel good because they are taking their medicine regularly and appropriately.

Today's readings are simply one of our maintenance doses of "Gospel medicine". Nothing dramatic. Nothing special. Just saying out loud what we've all heard before. Just pointing out that there really is a connection between our worshipful faith in God in Christ through the Church and the good that we do so naturally for each other, and for all people in our spheres of influence who live all around the world.

For example, I had a friend for whom it is very important to be rude to her waiters and waitresses whenever she eats at a restaurant. At least when Charlotte and I were with her, singly or together, she never failed to embarrass us by being stunningly rude, at one point or another, to the wait-staff. It wasn't necessary. It certainly was never called for. And that sort of behavior is the direct opposite of Christian behavior, if these passages from the Word of God are anything to go by.

The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." Golly! That could include waiters and waitresses and store clerks and people behind the counter who are required to ask the musical question, "Would you like fries with that". We treat them like angels from God,... just in case!

Yes. I know. We were all taught to be polite to everyone. It's just good behavior. But what we may not realize is that "being polite to everyone" is good Christian behavior. There are cultures in other parts of the world where it is perfectly acceptable to shun and to be rude to people of lower status or of a lower caste. In some cultures, there are people who are considered to be Untouchable.

Usually, and this is across the board, the Untouchables in Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist societies, that I'm aware of, include tanners and leather workers and anyone who touches dead things. In fact, there's one of those apparently insignificant passages in the Acts of the Apostles where St. Paul goes to and stays with a leather worker.

The passage indicates that the man lived on the outskirts of town but doesn't say anything about the reasons: he was an outcast and his place stank because of the nature of his business. And yet he was the person to whom St. Paul was sent... by God. Which is to say, we Christians do not understand anyone to be an outcast.

But that position brings with it its own set of problems: because we do not understand anyone to be an outcast, the Church has become one of the last institutions in American society that enables bad behavior. The worst cases are, of course, the galloping naivete of all those Roman Catholic bishops who thought that their priests would stop their "bad behavior" (to coin a phrase) if they were simply told to stop, and moved to another parish. Consequently, all Roman Catholic priests are now looked on with some degree of suspicion, unearned and undeserved. The few have done grievous damage to the many.

But there is more wide-spread damage is done by average people who carry abnormally heavy burdens in their hearts and in their minds, and who carry those burdens to church in ways that do damage to the life and lives of the parish family. But because no one should be an outcast, we find it extremely difficult to confront that distructive behavior. We'd rather walk away from it, even if that means to walk away from the parish family.

Just walking away is not the scriptural answer to the question, "What would Jesus do?". It's not even how we have been advised, in scripture, to deal with internal friction. It's just easier for everyone to slip away quietly until no one is there except for that burdened individual, once again, standing all alone and wondering why. Sometimes, the generosity, the "brotherly love" (to use the phrase from Hebrews), that we are called on to extend to one another, is not a matter of convenience, but a matter of sacrifice. Sometimes the good we do for one another requires fore-thought and sometimes it requires more than a little effort, and sometimes that effort has to be a sustained effort over a long period of time.

On this second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting the Gulf Coast, there are all sorts of parish families who are also remembering the sobering lessons that we learned when, in our own galloping naivete, we thought that taking in families of Katrina evacuees would be a wonderful and heart-warming act of Christian charity - like taking home a little puppy from the local Humane Society's animal shelter.

And, across the nation, we discovered that a lot of those Katrina evacuees really were not "people like us"; had no interest in becoming "people like us"; and were not at all eager to do the things that we really wanted and needed them to do, in order to make our Act of Charity more manageable. It felt a lot like "putting the little kitty cat outdoors for the night", only to open the door in the morning to a fully grown - and not too happy - Bengal tiger!

Letting "brotherly love continue" and showing "hospitality to strangers" are not always as simple as they sound. But they are always paths into a deeper faith in God, a deeper appreciation for one another, and a deeper understanding of ourselves - our strengths, our weaknesses, and our God-given resources, gifts and talents; and our resources for support, our mutual responsibility and our essential interdependence.

On the other hand, to quote Ecclesiasticus (which is an essentially different book from the cynicism of Ecclesiastes), "Arrogance is hateful before the Lord and before men, and injustice is outrageous to both." My experience is that arrogant people are insecure people. Arrogance is hateful because it is such a painful symptom of the interior agony going on within that arrogant person; and it's painful for a compassionate person to see anyone else in agony, even an agony that expresses itself in ways that the demean or damage other people. So our higher task is to determine if that agony can be resolved or alleviated ... or not.

As Americans, we seem to have a need to try on different forms of arrogance. In 1958, William Lederer and Eugene Burdick published the book The Ugly American, which exposed the damage that American arrogance was causing in Southeast Asia as we attempted to resist the spread of Communism. The book caused President Eisenhower to take a very different tack in dealing with that situation. And the book also pointed out the truth that not everyone was charmed by Americans when we traveled abroad and began every sentence with, "Back in America, we (fill in the blank)". Believe me, Charlotte and I got a gentle, but firm orientation on that subject when I took my first church job in a parish just south of London, England. It was an uncomfortable lesson that has stayed with both of us for the rest of our lives.

In the 1960s, our political leaders somehow thought that everyone in this nation wanted to be "just like us" and that if we gave really poor people some money so that they could buy a few luxury items, they would want to get a job and buy lots more luxury items and life would be as bright and shiny as "The Donna Reed Show" and "Father Knows Best" said it is. But what happened was that we created a welfare state that has not transformed our nation into "people like us" - in whatever way one wants to interpret the phrase "people like us".

In 1987, Michael Douglas delivered his famous line that "Greed, for lack of a better work, is good. Greed is right" in the movie "Wall Street", and named the demon that was striding through our nation, unrestrained. It was yet another manifestation of our national flirtation with arrogance; our national wrestling with feelings of insecurity. And it precipitated an amazing change of course for more than a few stunningly wealthy folks who realized that there was a greater and deeper fulfillment in generosity rather than in greed or in being miserly.

Now, we are learning that we need each other as-we-are, in order to overcome the sins and the ills of our society. Logical, rational arguments are not enough. Our transformation into a better, higher, more noble life comes from personal commitments to God and to one another, in order to transform ourselves.

For decades, the Surgeon General has labeled cigarettes with a danger warning, but now we're being bombarded by ads about people whom tobacco-related cancer has touched personally.

For years, our physicians have told us to watch our diet and get more exercise, but now we're being bombarded with TV shows about people losing immense amounts of body fat. Things are shifting from data to remote personal experiences. And the true transformations will happen when we bring all of these physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, professional and social challenges into our own circles of support and encouragement.

It's why "church" is so important, as you and I do "church". We are here to worship God, and we are here to reaffirm together our commitment to one another as beloved children of a loving God. And we go away from this holy place with a determination to live our lives as "objects of God's delight".

Consequently, we do well to identify those things that hold us back. We do well to identify our own unique gifts and talents. (And sometimes, we need each other in order to do that.) And then, to set about addressing our challenges and enhancing our gifts, so that we are less encumbered by needless burdens and more effectively equipped to do all of the good that God has called us to do, to God's glory and for the common good.