The Number 7 Train is a beautiful train.
It is one of the most wonderful places in the world…
Why?
Sure, it’s dirty and loud, like all the other subways in New York City – but…
but here, as the train leaves Times Square, crosses the heart of midtown, the Number 7 train hits Grand Central and then plunges under the East River on its way to Queens. This route, that terminates in Flushing’s lower rent districts, is the expression, in hurtling metal, of Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Bring me your tired, your poor… your Eritrean cab driver sleeping off the dregs of his night shift. Your Haitian personal care attendant. Your petite Vietnamese manicurist. Your Cuban gentleman exile in fading shirtsleeves… yearning to breathe free. Send
these the tempest tossed… to spice the pullman kitchens and fill the walkup tenements of Flushing with life…
**
In the passage that I just read for you, we overhear Jesus sending his twelve disciples out into the surrounding towns of Galilee to heal the sick, and proclaim that “the Kingdom of Heaven has come near”.
Before sending them forth, though, he instructs the disciples regarding how they should act when they go off on their own.
Whatever town or village you enter, he says, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.
When I read these words, I cannot help wondering what would happen if one of the disciples came to my door?
Would the disciple “let his peace come upon” my home?
Or would he depart and take his peace with him?
I wonder…
Would a disciple “shake the dust from his feet” as he left my door?
It’s a good question.
I am quite taken with the phrase: “Shake off the dust from your feet…”
It’s such a wonderfully physical expression of rejection:
“Shake off the dust from your feet…”
Still, I must say, I would hope that Jesus would want his disciple to give me a spiritual thumbs up. I would dread getting foot-dust-shaking treatment!
Would I pass the old “shake-dust-off-the-feet” test of spiritual worthiness?
I’m not sure…
The first thing to figure out is the criteria for judgment.
Jesus tells the twelve that when they get to town, they will find some people who are worthy and some who are not worthy.
OK… but how, according to Jesus, are the disciples to tell which is which?
Jesus comes at this sideways. He does not tell the disciples what makes a person worthy. Rather, he tells them what makes a person unworthy – that is, what should inspire them to shake the dust from their feet:
If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, he says, shake off the dust from your feet…
All we have to do then, is apply simple logic to understand that, in order to be deemed worthy we must welcome the disciple and listen to their words.
That seems simple enough.
Maybe I can pass this test…
But wait.
These disciples have only just entered my town right?
They are strangers.
Not only that, Jesus has instructed the disciples – these strangers who have just wandered into my town – to travel with almost nothing but the clothes on their backs:
Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts,no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff…
So this man, who has showed up at my door, has no money, no luggage, is barefoot, and is empty handed.
This guy looks pretty suspicious to me.
He looks like a homeless guy. And now he is asking me if I have any demons that I want him to chase off.
This homeless guy seems really eager to convince me that “the kingdom of heaven has come near…”
In order to pass the old “shake-dust-off-the-feet” test of spiritual worthiness, I will have to welcome this man into my home and believe, with all my heart, everything he says to me.
Hmmm…
**
Back in 2007 a story that showed up in the news about two men who broke into a house in a semi-rural neighborhood in Connecticut. The two strangers, in a cruel frenzy, sexually assaulted and killed all three women in the family, and then burned down the house.
The father survived the ordeal, but with severe injury and permanent trauma.
Living in a semi-rural area ourselves, it was impossible for Cary and I – who were then in the midst of raising two teenage boys – not to imagine that a similar nightmare scenario might happen to us.
Suddenly, the sight of any unusual person walking down the side of the road, prompted a shiver of very real fear.
We started locking our doors at night.
Almost twenty years later, Cary asks me the same question before we go to sleep each night:
“Did you lock the doors?”
**
My mother was born, Lois Rozendaal, in Sioux Falls South Dakota in the Spring of 1927. This means that she was a little girl of two when the Stock Market Crashed in 1929.
My mother was the third of five children: 4 girls and a boy. She is the little girl on the left standing below her big sister Jane in the picture on the cover of this morning’s bulletin. The man in the picture was, of course, my mother’s Daddy, my maternal grandfather, Henry Rozendaal – a Minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. Henry served small rural churches here and there, mostly in the Dutch speaking areas of South Dakota and Iowa. My mother told me that he preached two sermons each Sunday: one in Dutch and one in English.
It was the Depression.
Shoes were mended and skirts were patched to survive being passed down the line of all four girls. One year, as the story goes, instead of paying my grandfather a salary, his congregation gave him a milk cow.
My grandmother’s name was Cora. I want to share a story about Cora Rozendaal that my mom wrote. I quote this story from a letter that my mother wrote to me about 10 years before she died. My grandmother, apparently:
…set up a little table on the back porch where she would sometimes give meals to wandering tramps. She was generous toward them. In that Depression time there were lots of them, men who couldn’t find work at home and just jumped a freight train and went off – probably hoping to find work somewhere. She would slip a little tract into the bag if she sent them off with a sandwich, but I don’t think she ever tried to admonish them. Once one of them looked into the bag and got angry and threw it behind a billboard. Sister Jane was watching and told my mother. Later, Mother asked one of the tramps why they all came to her house? “Well,” the man said, “there’s a little map that leads us here, drawn on the wall of the toilet in the train station.”
**
Jesus tells his disciples how to tell the difference between those who are worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven, and those who are not.
The difference appears to be how the person responds to the challenge that is presented by the stranger.
There is no question in my mind that my grandmother, Cora Rozendaal, must have had this gospel story in her mind, and that she made a choice to try to live up to the challenge that it presents, when she chose to feed those wandering Hobos.
Perhaps she was also thinking about the verse from the Letter to the Hebrews, when the Apostle Paul wrote:
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. (Hebrews chapter 13 verse 2)
And yet…
And yet… what about that Connecticut family?
It’s true that a stranger might be an angel… but isn’t also equally possible that the stranger could be a demon?
A stranger, after all, is a person, and there are as many different kinds of strangers in the world as there are different kinds of persons in the world.
Some people are undoubtedly good, kind, compassionate people. Others are undoubtedly mean, cruel, psychopathic.
Does Jesus want us to always welcome and listen carefully to the stranger? If we do, and chance brings us into contact with a demon rather than an angel – won’t we end up placing ourselves in terrible danger?
To be honest, making one size fits all decisions about strangers feels unnecessarily foolish.
We can’t assume that every stranger is a good person.
But neither can we assume that every stranger is a bad person either…
There are people – many people, who have followed this deeply tragic view of the world – people who interpret every chance encounter with another human being as a brush with a violent killer.
Indeed, as we have seen all too clearly in recent days, there are even some among us who purposely inflame that fear in order to gain political power; people who use their power to blame, oppress, and even destroy others who are different.
Others who are different.
Difference.
This is at the heart of the problem isn’t it? To be confronted by a person who speaks a different language, eats different food, has a different belief system, has different shaped eyes, or skin color…
We don’t know this person. All we know about them is that they are not like us.
Similarly… When they come into town they are also profoundly aware of this difference – that we are not like them.
What are people like in these parts? Will I be welcomed? Or will I be held in suspicion? Are these people controlled by fear, or will they, maybe, be compassionate?
From both sides, this interaction is a challenge. A spiritual challenge.
I would be irresponsible if I, as your pastor, recommended that you go and invite the first stranger you meet into your home.
I don’t recommend that.
I don’t think Jesus does either.
Jesus himself did not advocate blind trust. In his instructions to the disciples he left them room to discern which people were worthy, and which folks were not.
Surely we, who are in a position of hospitality, are also free to make the determination – not, perhaps, who is worthy and who is unworthy, but rather, who is safe, and who is unsafe to bring into our homes.
We have our guts – our intuition, to help us connect with, or be wary of the individual stranger.
The real spiritual problem – the bad news, which is the opposite of Christ’s good news – happens when all strangers are automatically feared.
This is a kind of spiritual death.
Why?
Because it is the opposite of compassion. It makes life a kind of movement from hate to hate.
It makes us small. Diminishes our experience of the great abundance of humanity.
Awake to the God of the number 7 train. The stranger reveals to us the staggering abundance of God – how the divine is expressed through the immense diversity of the human spirit.
Remember: We are only strangers to each other.
Closer to us than our own breath, God knows no strangers.
Amen.