The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
July 19, 2009
7^th Sunday after Pentecost

Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Isaiah 57: 14-21¹

¹⁴It shall be said, “Build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstruction from my people’s way.” ¹⁵For thus says the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite. ¹⁶For I will not continually accuse, nor will I always be angry; for then the spirits would grow faint before me, even the souls that I have made.

¹⁷Because of their wicked covetousness I was angry; I struck them, I hid and was angry; but they kept turning back to their own ways. ¹⁸I have seen their ways, but I will heal them; I will lead them and repay them with comfort, creating for their mourners the fruit of the lips. ¹⁹Peace, peace, to the far and the near, says the Lord; and I will heal them. ²⁰But the wicked are like the tossing sea that cannot keep still; its waters toss up mire and mud. ²¹There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.

Epistle – Ephesians 2: 11-22²

¹¹So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision” — a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands — ¹²remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. ¹³But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. ¹⁴For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.

¹⁵He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, ¹⁶and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. ¹⁷So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; ¹⁸for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. ¹⁹So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, ²⁰built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. ²¹In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; ²²in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

Gospel Lesson – Mark 6: 30-34, 53-56³

³⁰The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. ³¹He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. ³²And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. ³³Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. ³⁴As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. ….

⁵³When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. ⁵⁴When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, ⁵⁵and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. ⁵⁶And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.

“There Is Something in Us that Doesn’t Love a Wall.”

I was gifted this past week to receive yet another wonderful (but also hilarious) series of photographs of one of our grandchildren – this one of grandson, Gavin, being given his first solid food. Not surprisingly he ended up wearing most of it. It led me to ask myself, yet again, though: what happens between infancy and childhood? And I’m not talking about the process where children grow physically, emotionally and spiritually into maturity, but the process through which we all, as human beings, change in our attitude toward the very young as they become adults. How can we look at an infant, for example, make ridiculous cooing and lip-smacking sounds in its direction, say “What a beautiful baby!” and then only in a few short years wish that the child never existed? How can a baby be made such a fuss over, praised for his or her beauty, and yet years later – because of this child’s race, nationality or sexual orientation – be perceived as a potential threat or barred from the company of our own children and grandchildren? What happens to babies that causes our attitudes to change so dramatically?

The babies, of course, or their development into the adolescents and adults that they become, have nothing at all to do with it. We’re now in the realm of the brokenness of humankind, and the prejudices that far too many of us do not conceal very well. Whether it’s feeling uncomfortable sitting next to an ethnic minority on a BART train, or laughing at a cruel joke about gay people, we expose our unreasonable hidden animosities toward certain people based solely upon the adults that they’ve become – when they may have been no different than they were as infants.

Jesus succeeded in giving us the vision of a new society, however – in fact a new humanity – in which alienation of any kind must give way to reconciliation, and hostility to peace. “For he is our peace,” we read in the lesson from Ephesians for today; he “has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”⁴

We hear these words (and maybe we even affirm them), but we can’t help but wonder if attitudes have really changed over the years. People still harbor unreasonable prejudices over the color of a person’s skin, their sexual orientation, their religious beliefs and even the country of their origins.

Adrienne Rich, in her stunning poem “Yom Kippur 1984,” writes of the possibility, but also the danger, of moving beyond these kinds of separations. She writes:

To wander far from your own or those you have called your own
to hear strangeness calling you from far away
and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk
to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon,
protection nowhere on your mind
(the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for
another Jew
the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street:
Make those be a woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe
in a woman’s god.⁵

We who call ourselves Christian believe that Jesus always walked in the direction of the Stranger, not calculating the cost, but accepting the risk. You and I haven’t always been so good at following that direction, have we? The lepers portrayed on our bulletin cover today⁶ were despised and shunned every bit as much as many ethnic minorities and gays are today; the only difference is a Muslim from Palestine or lesbian from Napa are not diseased, just not welcomed into many parts of our community.

What’s the meaning of such a separation for us? When, if ever, is it holy and life-giving; and when does it crush the life out of the one who is shunned? Just as Jesus sought out deserted places “to rest a while,”⁷ we, too, must be grounded in time apart – Sabbath time – spent with God. If you and I would live out our faith in that very same one who breaks down dividing walls of hostility, we too must walk in the direction of the Stranger, knowing that in this world such a walk may very well be filled with danger.

As Adrienne Rich goes on to say:

…when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew,
howling our loneliness within the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile’s child
re-open the blasted and forbidden city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men
are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted,
what will solitude mean?⁸

Rich closes her poem with this stanza, questioning the final emptiness of hostile separation and the possibility of solitude and connectedness in the world as it might be. We have a part in making that world possible.

I recall someone who had recently moved into a gated community explaining at a dinner party why he’d chosen to live in such an insulated housing development: “Remember what Robert Frost said, ‘Good fences make good neighbors!’” If our host hadn’t quickly moved us on to another topic, I might have subjected the table to a lecture straight out of my freshman English class on this well known poem entitled “Mending Wall.”⁹ You’ve got it all wrong, I wanted to interject. Frost is being bitingly facetious in that poem, quoting somebody whose opinion he doesn’t respect at all. Fences aren’t useful unless there are cows to be kept in, but where the neighbors are walking the wall there are only trees. As a line from the poem goes:

My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

I can also hear a gay couple saying to that conservative Christian, “Our love for each other will never come into your home and be what threatens your marriage.” The very first line of Frost’s poem gives away his opinion (and my own, by the way) of walls that continue to divide us: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”¹⁰

I’m also reminded of a very perceptive article by James Fallows entitled “The Invisible Poor” that was in The New York Times Magazine almost a decade ago.¹¹ It was accompanied by some astounding pictures of people living on the edge in various locations across the United States. The author’s contention is that we no longer need gated communities to separate us from the people we fear. We’ve erected, instead, a more pernicious wall around those who are not in the same ethnic, cultural, sexual or economic class as we are. We have found a way to make them invisible.

We know that barriers can come down. The Berlin wall has been flattened and parts of it made into a plaza surrounded, now, by government buildings and a luxury shopping mall. The wall of laws that institutionalized apartheid in South Africa fell, and, like the sound of trumpets it was said accompanied the crumbling walls of Jericho, the celebration can still be heard. What are the stumbling blocks and obstructions that you can see all around us that still have to be removed from people’s way?¹²

The prophet Isaiah knew about leaders who were too preoccupied with their own well-being to see the disastrous effects of inequity on the people they were called upon to lead. We know all about that kind of pattern among Christians through the past centuries. The result of self-centered leadership, according to the prophets, is that people are thrown out, dispersed, separated from each other and their homes and families. Speaking for God these prophets express their own anger at leaders who continue to sacrifice the good of the people only to take care of themselves. As we see all throughout the Bible – but particularly in Jesus’ ministry – God’s interest in the leaderless “sheep” is astonishing. Far from being removed, far from acting like an unfeeling tyrant, the prophet sees and hears the people’s cry and says, in the name of God,

I have seen their ways, but I will heal them; I will lead them and repay them with comfort, creating for their mourners the fruit of the lips. Peace, peace, to the far and the near, says the Lord; and I will heal them.¹³

There is something in us that does not love a wall – that wants it down. In the end, the only fences that make good neighbors are the ones that have gates through which anyone can pass.

* * *