Not Only People “Like Us”

Image credit: Rembrandt (1642)

Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C
30 March 2025

Joshua 5:9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Community is easiest when it’s with people like us, whoever the “us” is. People with similar interests, social standing, and conviction. It’s one of the reasons people choose a neighbourhood or a school. I remember a conversation with Susan, a neighbour in Winnipeg. Margot was in pre-school or kindergarten. Susan’s observation was that any special program in schools, no matter which, means that parents will be more involved and that that creates a different climate for learning. It’s an irony that Jackie and I always thought that we wouldn’t send our children to a Christian school, not only because we couldn’t afford it, but because we don’t think children, or anyone for that matter, should be segregated, and then we have our kids enrolled in special programs and they are segregated anyway. There were reasons why they were in the programs they were in, and their high schools were inner city schools. But they were segregated just the same.

Churches can be like that, not only doctrinally, or liturgically, but they can be like country-clubs. When I was at seminary there was a church I felt we couldn’t join because my wardrobe couldn’t keep up. People may not have cared, but I noticed. In my first parish there was a member who twenty years earlier had married a young woman from the congregation. Even after 20 years he was still considered a newcomer.
It’s easy to be with people who are like us, and it’s easy to be with people we know.

But the church is supposed to be a place where everyone is welcome. Allowing people to enter the building and take a seat in the pew is one thing, showing interest, building relationships, including people in conversations, allowing people to serve, is another thing. A church consultant the Manitoba Northwestern Ontario Synod worked with used to say that an indicator of the welcome of a congregation was who was allowed in the kitchen. I don’t think that’s a problem here, but you get the idea.

In Luke 15 we learn that all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the religious authorities were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’
I suppose one could say that if Jesus had wanted to be with people like him, Jesus never would have come among us but would have stayed in the perfect unity of the Holy Trinity. But he chose to come among us and to become like us. St Paul tells us that, For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
We are sinners and in an act of divine solidarity, Jesus takes on our sin. Remember when John baptized Jesus with a baptism of repentance and people we questioning why? As Jesus takes on our attributes, he shares with us his attributes. This is how Paul can say that God made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. This exchange not only forgives sin but makes us the new creation, sharing in the power of Christ’s resurrection.

Living in the power of Christ’s resurrection then puts us beyond a life marked by being drawn only to people we perceive to be like us but frees us to live like Jesus in the way that Jesus welcomed sinners and ate with them.

A number of years ago I read the autobiography of Will D. Campbell.¹ Campbell was born in 1924 into a dirt-poor family in Mississippi. He was educated at Yale Divinity School, and ordained for the ministry in the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1957 he was the only white participant who joined Martin Luther King at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Soon afterwards Campbell escorted black students through angry protesters decrying the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Campbell joined the Freedom Riders in 1961 and accompanied King for the marches in Birmingham in 1963 and in Selma in 1965.

Historian Charles Marsh writes about a visit with Campbell in 1993, “He recalled one especially contentious meeting with white southern ministers in Atlanta during the civil rights years. Campbell knew the men were disturbed by his application of the New Testament to southern race relations. But not wanting to address the race issue directly, one of the pastors said he would like to know a little more about Campbell’s theology. (…) Campbell had just spent the better part of an hour telling them what he believed, so he cut to the chase.
“My name is Will D. Campbell. I am who my momma and daddy named me the night I was born. I live in Tennessee. I have three children. I am a preacher of the good news of Jesus Christ. I believe God poured his love out for us in Jesus Christ, reconciled the world to himself, saved us from our sins. But I know why you’re asking where I went to school. (…) [But] Once a man has truly seen the truth it doesn’t matter where he’s from, what his race is, or where he went to school. None of that matters.
I believe God was in Christ, not maybe and not perhaps, not just if we’re good boys and girls, but God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. That means it’s over and done with. Our salvation is accomplished. We are one people. We have been reconciled to God and to each other. And so racial prejudice is a violation of that fact. Nations are a violation; classes are a violation; joining the Country Club is a violation. I believe God was in Jesus Christ. Goddammit, that’s what I believe!”²

This is pretty good, but to us whose sins of exclusion look different, perhaps it’s only the beautiful story of a beautiful life. But remember when Campbell says that nations are a violation, classes are a violation, joining the country club is a violation of the reconciliation God has worked in Christ? The Gospel places a claim on us that goes beyond our norms and expectation.

Campbell did not stop his ministry of reconciliation when the integration of black and white had been signed into law (which isn’t to say that racism disappeared).
For Campbell it was necessary to extend compassion, grace, and forgiveness to everyone. He explained that members of the KKK deserved compassion because many of the Southern whites who flooded its ranks were themselves the victims of dire poverty, which he called “the redneck’s slavery.” And so Campbell became chaplain to the Ku Klux Klan.³
In August of 1998, Campbell travelled to the trial of Sam Bowers, a former Imperial Wizard. During a recess in the trial, a newspaper reporter asked Campbell how it was possible for him to walk between the grieving family and the Klan terrorist, who surely deserved punishment, not compassion. Campbell’s actions were offensive to the reporter. Did he really think Bowers deserved his kindness?
Newspaper coverage had portrayed Bowers as a monster, the embodiment of pure evil. The Southern Baptist preacher adjusted his black frame glasses and offered an explanation to the journalist, why had he acknowledged Sam Bowers with a handshake?
“It’s because I’m a goddamned Christian,” he told a gaggle of reporters. He would be sitting with the victim’s family, but as a minister of the gospel, he would not forsake Sam Bowers, even though Bowers was wholly undeserving of such love.

This, I think, gives us a vision of the ministry of reconciliation that is entrusted to us. It goes beyond our norms and takes us out of our comfort zones.

Following the same-sex vote I feared that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada would now simply become another mainline church. By mainline church I mean a confusion between Gospel and culture, and when agreeing with the culture not understanding that we do so because of the cross of Christ, not because of liberal values. The problem with liberal values is that they always express individual freedoms, but often do not have a political claim on us. Yet Jesus was not murdered for personal freedom. He was also not murdered for evangelism. Jesus was murdered for proclaiming the coming Reign of God. The Gospel of Jesus Christ has a political claim on our lives.

What I think happened during and after the same-sex vote was not only what Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham acknowledged at the induction of a new priest at St. Matthew’s in Abbotsford in 2011, namely, that both sides of the issue had said things they should not have said, but that the church became a more exclusive place for people, on both sides of the issue. Sinners who don’t share our views expected or were expected to go elsewhere.

In 2014 Jackie and I joined a group that travelled the Fraser Canyon, visiting Seabird Island First Nation, the St’át’imc Nation in Lillooet, and Mount Currie. The trip was organized by Bill Chu from Canadians for Reconcilliation and included visiting grave sites of Chinese railroad workers, treated as expendable labour and left behind by the railroad. In some instances these injured Chinese railroad workers were nursed back to health by local first nations.
It was at Mount Currie that our group heard band members express that they wanted us to go back to where we had come from, and they did not mean the Lower Mainland. Though they and us both knew that that was not going to happen, it nonetheless was good for us to hear, for it allowed us to see the disruption European immigration had brought to a way of life, not to mention the attempt to destroy and eradicate the cultures we had encountered. In our bulletin we acknowledge that we live on the unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples, but what does that mean? Does simply saying such things move us toward reconciliation? Or is it just words?

Luke tells us that all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus, and the religious authorities were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
Hearing these verses does not suggest, should we congregate with people we deem not to be like us, that we do some great magnanimous work or that we in any way are like the Father in the story of the Prodigal. It does not suggest that we are pure and the “others” are sinners. It does mean that Jesus did not recognize our boundaries of sin and purity, which is why God came among us in Jesus and made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
And since we are the new creation, since we are ambassadors for Christ, since in Christ God accomplished our salvation so that we could bethe righteousness of God, we cannot make church or world into a country club, we cannot but receive others as God has received us, and we cannot but welcome others at the banquet table at which we too are only guests.

We remember that the father loves both sons and goes out to both of them and that somehow to be reconciled with the Father also means to be reconciled to our brothers and sisters. We remember that the community made possible in Christ is not only with people like us. And we remember that that is possible because in Christ God has made us the new creation.

Amen.