Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
August 28, 2005
Romans 12: 9-21
Charlie Brown is talking to Snoopy, warning him not to go near Lucy’s house. “She’s having a crab-in today,” says Charlie Brown. Instead of heeding this warning, Snoopy proceeds directly to Lucy’s house and knocks on the door. When the crabby Lucy opens the door, Snoopy gives her a great big kiss. As he trots off, he says, “Now that’s how you break up a ‘Crab-In.’” Lucy might not totally agree, but sometimes we just need a little face to face contact.
I think of this story, a fable really, told by Henri Nouwen, about a young fugitive, trying to hide from the enemy. He came to a small village. The people were kind to him and offered him shelter and food. But soon the soldiers came and searched for him. When they could not find him, they threatened to burn the entire village and kill each and every person in it, unless the fugitive was handed over by dawn. It was then that the people went to the village priest and asked for advice. Torn between the agonizing choice of turning the boy over to the enemy or having his people killed, the priest retreated to his study and opened the Bible to read and search for an answer. In the early hours of the morning, he found the passage in John 11 where the high priest Caiphas, in talking about Jesus, says, “It is better that one man dies than a whole people be lost.” The priest closed the Bible, called the soldiers, and told them where the fugitive was hiding.
The people of the village wanted to honor him for having been courageous enough to make the choice which had saved them all, but the priest was overcome with sadness and remained in his room. That night an angel came to him and asked, “What have you done?” He answered, “I handed the fugitive over to the enemy.” The angel said, “But don’t you know that you have handed over the Messiah?” “How could I know?” the priest replied. Then the angel said, “If, instead of reading your Bible, you had visited this young man just once and looked into his eyes, you would have known.”
Ah…the importance of allowing ourselves to come face to face with the other, with the neighbor. For it is face to face that we recognize each other; it is face to face that we see each other as individuals with hopes and dreams as well as needs and fears; it is face to face that we do the work of loving and supporting one another; it is face to face that we meet Christ in our midst.
Last week we heard Paul, in the first section of Romans 12, speak of the church as a community, not of conformity, but of transformation. Today I want to suggest that in the second section of Romans 12, which we just heard, Paul gets specific about what such a transformed community looks like. What are the signs of transformation? How does this transformed life begin to take flesh in our life together? “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor...rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another…do not repay anyone evil for evil…live peaceably with all…”
This summer at the Washington Island Forum in Wisconsin, Eugene Peterson told us that to follow Jesus is to be plunged into a world of personal relationships. If Jesus wasn’t about anything else, he was about engagement, one to one, face-to-face, engagement with others. And in that engagement, he invited his disciples – and us – to discover, beneath all the superficial and artificial barriers we erect between each other, how very much alike we truly are, sharing so many of the same hopes and dreams and fears. Indeed, he suggested by his words and actions that such engagement might transform us, allowing us to see a person where before we had seen only a label, a stereotype, an enemy. Think of the transformation in the story of Zacchaeus, or the woman with the flow of blood who touches Jesus’ robe, or in the journey of Mary Magdalene, or Saul, the man of violence, who becomes Paul.
Toward the end of the musical, Wicked (the untold story of the witches of Oz), Glenda, the good witch sings to Elphaba, the so-called evil witch – they have become friends – “I don’t know if knowing you has changed me for the better, but I do know I have been changed for good.” Well, friends, to follow Jesus, to enter with him into relationships, is to be changed for good.
A pastor shares this story: “Over the last several years I have had the opportunity of being part of a program which has provided opportunities for volunteers to come to the Cabrini Green Public Housing Development in Chicago, to work side by side with the residents there in a variety of ways, mostly in painting and fixing up the apartments and the public areas of the buildings. Many of us have pictures in our minds of such ‘projects’ as they are called and the kind of people who must live in them. When new volunteers would gather on a Saturday morning, we would always spend some time in preparation for the day’s work talking about what to expect. There were always questions about security, as you might expect, since the press bombards us with stories of the gangs and crime in Cabrini Green.
“One of the most rewarding aspects of this work for me was in experiencing how people’s perceptions changed and understanding grew as they actually spent some time moving through the halls of these public housing buildings. A big surprise was always the discovery that people are actually living there, many of them living in ways that are very little different than anyone else. There are families – parents, grandparents and children. There are people shopping cooking, playing, going about their lives; people making a life for themselves in conditions that yes, at times are not much different from a war zone, but most often are just like any neighborhood with its characters and its shared experiences. On these Saturdays, barriers dropped and bridges were built between worlds. People were brought into contact, worked together, met each other at the point of their vulnerability, at the point of their need. Fears born out of stereotypes were confronted and people were put in touch. That’s what love of neighbor is.” “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep...live in harmony with one another.…” You just might find yourself changed.
I want to take a brief detour and think about Paul for just a moment. We are familiar with his conversion on the road to Damascus – the blinding light, the voice, the transformed life as Saul becomes Paul. I know that in my case, there is a tinge of wistfulness, almost yearning, as I reflect on that story. Wouldn’t be nice to have the definitive proof of Christ’s existence and love that Paul experienced on the road? No doubts, no questions – just me and Jesus. But Mary Schertz, a New Testament professor, points out that the key issue in Paul’s conversion is violence. Paul is on his way to Damascus to do violence to the Christians in that city. He has already approved of the execution of Stephen and has been described as dragging followers of Jesus from their homes and imprisoning them. Schertz writes that early in the book of Acts, Paul is described almost exclusively in terms of violence and it is this violence that Jesus addresses when he speaks from within the light on the Damascus road: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
But it isn’t just the light and the voice that transform Saul the violent persecutor into Paul. There is also a role for relationship and community. Recall that Ananias and the believers in Damascus, in spite of their fears, take Saul in and minister to him. And gradually, a man of violence is transformed into a missionary for God. Trusting in the community and the relationships he establishes in that community, Paul is able to relinquish the violence in himself and in his culture. And so it is out of his own experience of transformation that he can say, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil…so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all...love one another with mutual affection.”
This is our hope in a violent and broken world. We don’t have to give in to it, we don’t have to accept it. We too can be transformed. I think of the challenging words of an aboriginal woman in the Australian outback spoken to arriving Christian missionaries: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your transformation – your wholeness and well-being – are somehow bound up with mine, then stay and let us work together.”
To follow Jesus is to plunge into a world of personal relationships. Face to face is how we recognize each other, our hopes and dreams as well as our fears and needs; face to face is how we prepare ourselves to do the work of loving and supporting one another; face to face is how we put on Christ with hope and high expectation; face to face is how love triumphs over fear, community triumphs over violence; and face to face is where genuine transformation happens.