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You can imagine how complicated it is for me to stand before you, Epiphany, a community where every single person is welcome, no matter who they are, where they come from or what they believe; and together hear Jesus instructing his apostles: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Proclaim to them the good news that the kingdom of God has come near.” (kingdom of God = kingdom of heaven)
This sits in direct tension with what Kate preached about two weeks ago: that the kingdom of God is to be revealed to all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So how do we get from here to there? How do we move from this bounded definition to a God for all people, places and times?
It might be best to begin at the beginning with Abraham. He meets God, at night, alone. There is a fire, a pot, and some dead animals. (It is a weird story for another sermon) but God shows up and makes a promise. “I will make of you a great nation, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen 12:2-3) A blessing meant for everybody begins as a blessing given to somebody.
This is a pattern, in fact, it is the pattern we see over and over again, because it is the pattern that reveals how the kingdom of God works.
We see it when Jesus feeds the five thousand. Nobody delivers 5000 lunchables to a park by the Sea of Galilee. There was one boy, with one small lunch, five loaves and two fish, and out of that sustenance abundance reaches everyone. That is not magic. That is kingdom of God physics. If you throw a stone into a pond the wave hits all edges.
The kingdom of God is less a place and more a method. It is a way of acting. And when kingdom of God ways become the habits of each particular person, the universe is revealed for what it is – a place where everybody belongs. The particular, in other words, is not the enemy of the universal. The particular is the method for revealing the universal, inclusive love of God.
Let me tell you a story from my days as an international relief worker that supports this truth. My job back then was to fly into war zones or disaster sites to save the people with the supplies we brought.
It was 1991. I was in Iran, in the city was Urmia. We had set up a camp to care for around five thousand people streaming across the border, escaping the war with Iraq. The camp was overseen by the local mullahs, with whom we had a precarious relationship, partly because they had a precarious relationship with their own government who was our sponsor in the country.
One day the mullahs pulled our permit to stay at a local hostel. Needing to act quickly I snuck out of the camp on top of a semi-trailer, and headed to Urmia to find the Governor who had helped us when I first arrived.
I got to the town with no idea where to find him, where I was, with no language skills, no map, unable to read the signs. Just standing there on a street corner.
A young man approached and asked if I was an American- who could have guessed? He was wondering if he could practice his English with me. I said yes. We had coffee.
After getting a sense of him I asked if he could help me find the Governor. We went to the administration building. It was closed.
Evening had set in, it was getting dark… and I was pretty sure I’d be sleeping on some bench. So I happily accepted his invitation for dinner at his house. I met his wife and his mother, who lived with them. It was a small house; I could never find it again.
Dinner extended into an invitation to stay the night. He showed me to my room, which I only realized later was the master bedroom. He and his wife slept on the floor that night.
I have no way to thank him. I am not sure I could pick him out of a lineup. But he showed me something about the kingdom of God; a lesson about hospitality and care of a stranger that was specific and particular. There was nothing universal about it. No reciprocity. No quid pro quo. Sort of sounds like Jesus: He received no payment. He gave without payment. (Matt 10:8)
Here’s what happens when we lose sight of this pattern of the kingdom of God, when we forget this methodology the universal drowns out the particular.
I’ll circle back around to the Iranian story in a minute to make, I hope, this point more concrete, but first I want to share with you scene from The Brothers Karamazov.
A troubled woman comes to the elder monk Zosima and confesses that she dreams of giving her whole life to serving humanity. But she admits she’s afraid, afraid that if the people she served were ungrateful, her love would curdle into resentment.
Zosima tells her about a doctor he once knew, who said that the more he loved humanity in general, the less he could love any actual person in particular, so much so he could not bear to be in the same room with another soul for two days in a row.
And then Zosima said to her: love in dreams is greedy for grand gestures performed in the sight of all, but active love is labor, spent quietly on the one person right in front of you. Paraphrase Part I, Book II (“An Inappropriate Gathering”, Chapter 4, titled “A Lady of Little Faith.”)
It is the difference between parachuting in to save the people and sleeping on the floor for just one person.
In the kingdom of God we reveal the inclusive, universal love of God by descending into the particular. The counterfeit of this, the sin, the perversion is when we universalize to escape responsibility for the particular.
This has a name: “what-aboutism” – what-about this other community, what-about that other policy, what-about that other thing that happened in the past… What-aboutisms dissolve the particular into the fog of everything. And once that is done, there is nothing left. Nothing we have to do. No question we have to ask. No accountability we have to take. We can then just scamper into the fog.
What-aboutisms employed obfuscate the particular need as a way of avoiding doing anything. Just like the troubled lady and the doctor in Dostoevsky’s novel.
Here is how we know the particular action is the design mechanism for revealing the universal, inclusive love of God- two words: birth and death.
No one is born in general. One child, one day, one body, one mother, one place we did not choose. The most particular thing ever to happen to you, to every one of us in this room, is the particularity of our birth. Each of us was uniquely invited into this world by the God who loves us.
The same is true of death. No one can die for you. We will all meet death, each in our own way: some by surprise, some after a long-anticipated end, some grow old, some not. But each of us uniquely will return to the God who loves us.
The way we come in and the way we go out perfectly represent how the kingdom of God works, utterly particular, universally applied and all about love.
That is what Jesus is saying in the Gospel. Go talk to the people right in front of you. It is not that Jesus was keeping the Gentiles out, or the Samaritans out.
He was teaching us something about the particularity of the kingdom: start with the person in front of you. Don’t universalize the issue. Don’t obfuscate by drowning the particular in a wave of “what about this” and “what about that” – ignoring the fact that we were born and we will die… All of us, uniquely in our own way.
We see this at Pentecost. The fire does not burn in the air above the crowd: it rests on one head at a time, particular and personal. And we see this most of all in “the Word made flesh who dwelt among us.”
God does not engage the world from a distance, but as one particular person, who sends twelve ordinary people to the people in front of them one person to another to another, until it leaps the fence to Gentiles and Samaritans, and crosses the centuries, to arrive here, in Madrona, to meet us.
This is the movement, the particular to the universal, that takes us from today’s Gospel to Kate’s sermon about God’s love for all people, all nations, across all time.
Which means the kingdom of God is not waiting for the world to change. It is waiting for us to turn toward one person who God has already placed in front of us. The young man in Urmia did not set out to save the people. He simply took in the stranger standing lost on the street.
That is where the kingdom always begins – not in the fog of everyone, but in the face of someone.
So when you leave here today, go find somebody to attend to, and in doing so you will reveal the universal, inclusive love of God.