A Portal for God's Peace We warmly welcome single persons, people of all races and families of every kind.   Sunday Service: Holy Eucharist at 9:30 am Child care is available   Church of Our Saviour 191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094 Map and Directions   Tel: 201-863-1449 Fax: 201-863-1474 Mark A. Lewis, Vicar MLewis@secaucus.org Dorothy Fowlkes Pastoral Associate   This page revised 29 Aug 01 http://www.secaucus.org/ oursaviour		The Church of Our Saviour in the Town of Secaucus, New Jersey Home | Welcome | News | Sunday | Bulletin | Sermons Bookshop | Stewardship | Justice | Community | Links ----------------Leave frames---------------------   The narrow door: open to all Reflections on the lessons for the Twelth Sunday after Pentecost, 26 August 2001 By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar Isaiah 28:14-22 / Psalm 46 Hebrews 12:18-19,22-29 / Luke 13:22-30   I can't make up my mind whether I was raised in a Christian home or not. I think the people in my family thought that's what they were doing. Or at least would have said that was the plan. But, really, the most Christian thing about my upbringing wasn't anything my family thought or said or even did. The most Christian thing -- looking back -- about us all is that we were on our way somewhere. It seems to me that none of us back then knew all that much about being Christian. But I think that -- over the years -- most of us moved fairly steadily on toward the Kingdom of God. That's a Christian life, if you ask me: People doing the best they can with what they have but never settling for what they have. Always looking forward and pushing closer toward God. Heading through a door, Jesus says. My early religious education was kind of spotty. And highly biased by a few fervently held opinions my grandmothers were pushing at the time. If I had to sum it up in a sentence, my childhood catechism might go something like this. "You'd better watch yourself. Because God is watching you. And if you misbehave -- even if you're not caught -- you will be punished for it beyond your wildest imagination. And here is a list of things you must not do ." Then there followed a list of fairly tame prohibitions that had lots to do with what adults worried about. It was never clear why God was so concerned about me doing the Twist. But I knew I was not supposed to ask about that. And I also knew that I was supposed to finish out the list of taboos myself since it was embarrassing for the adults in my family to talk about some of the bad things boys might do. They were people who loved me and meant well. They were doing the best they could. And that counts. But now I think that a better summary of the faith to plant in young minds could be taken from today's lessons. You can't top the way Jesus calls to look at the world around us "Some who are last will be first and some who are first will be last." Like it or not, that's what the Bible places before the people of God: A scandalous paradox that upsets ordinary human expectations. Not a rational rulebook that helps keep the status quo going strong. It's everywhere you look in the Bible. Isaiah says that whether we like it or not God is perfectly happy to welcome renegades and foreigners into service. Paul says that God doesn't hold back from chastising even people who behave very properly. And, most importantly, Jesus says that the last shall be first and the first last. All these things don't necessarily seem fair at first sight. But the challenge is to look at them with the eyes of God's new creation and decide for yourself where you sit with that. If you do decide to buy into this way of seeing things, the Bible says, you will be saved. Take a look at one of today's stories. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. He knows there's trouble waiting there. But on he goes. The story of the gospels is a story of Jesus' struggle to be true to God. And, right in the middle of it all, someone asks Jesus whether few or many will be "saved". We don't know what that someone meant by the term "saved," but from Jesus' answer we can figure out what it meant for him. It meant to be able to live here and now as though living in God's own house. Where all kinds of people from east and west, north and south, Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female can sit down together and all feel like they belong. Really belong. Belong so completely that no one needs to judge anyone else in order to feel better about himself or herself. Once you're through the door and in God's house, first and last and all the other categories people seem to cling to just don't mean anything anymore. Everyone belongs. The yearning to belong is very deep in the human heart. Lots of people -- and you're lucky if you're not one of us -- feel that longing most poignantly when we look at our own family sometimes and wonder if we really "belong" there. Sometimes they seem so distant, so different. I wonder who those people are and they must wonder the same thing about me. That feeling must be stronger for those of us who have left our birthplace behind and gone someplace new. But I hear that it's also possible to feel like a total stranger right in your own hometown sometimes. I'm going to Texas in October for my niece's wedding. We were inseparable when she was a baby, but I've barely seen her in the 20 years since I left home. And I'm downright nervous about it. I do weddings one after another all year long. But this one has me getting fidgety, wondering what to say to this grown woman -- a stranger, really -- since I can't sing "Eensy weensy spider" to her anymore. At the wedding, I'm going to be the odd one out. The only one who's showing up from way out of the ordinary. My mother and everyone else there have been together through ups and downs all those years since I've been out of the main picture, off doing my own thing. But they are calling me back in now through a narrow door. There is, for me, a narrow door back into the bigger picture of my very patched together family. And I can come back in even though lots of choices I've made -- for other families, this congregation, this town -- have put me out on sort of a limb in their eyes. But for me to pass through that narrow door, I just have to remember who I am. And then there I am, back home again. In a bigger picture, Jesus' talk about trying "to come in through a narrow door", might appear to be harsh. To people who worry about getting into some longed-for community in spite of all kinds of obstacles, the suggestion that the only way in is through a "narrow door" smarts. Yet what Jesus is talking about is the opposite of despair. The "narrow door" is good news, not bad. He's describing an entryway that is available to everyone. I think the narrow door is that still, small place in the heart where one says "yes" or "no" to what you know is true. It is the one place where no outside force -- social pressure, family expectations, some religious bully -- can enter to coerce your faith. To tell you what you are or what you are not. The narrow door opens onto what the 16th century mystic St. Teresa of Avila called the "center of the soul where God dwells." I think that a general tendency to limp and stumble toward the center of the soul is what allows my own family to come together in ways today that we didn't even know about when we were all younger. We call that grace. And I think shooting for that narrow door into God's house -- where God dwells within us -- has helped at least some of my folks get past simple human logic and start to believe weird but true things like "the first shall be last and the last shall be first". When you see things that way, you start to understand that it's not how we behave, but simply who we are that makes us worthy of love. There's your salvation. There's a whole new kind -- an eternal kind - - of life that it took the life of Christ to show us. -- Mark Lewis   Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org. Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page. © 2001 -Church of Our Saviour Home | Welcome | News | Sunday | Bulletin | Sermons Bookshop | Stewardship | Justice | Community | Links http://www.secaucus.org/oursaviour Webmaster - DRoberts@Secaucus.org