From the Shadows into the Light:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

I've been thinking all week long about Mary Bjorndahl, a girl in my grade school class.  A girl I never really saw.  A person I rarely noticed.  Someone I never really knew.  Mary was different from all the other kids in the class.  More than quiet.  She was timid.  Or was it a quiet strength she had that I just didn’t understand.   Who knows.

I googled her this week.  Not a lot there.  Only a picture of our 7th grade homeroom.  Turns out Mary was in my mid-school homeroom!  Then she disappears from sight.  No trace of her. Except the questions that  still linger in my mind.  

Why was she so quiet?  What was going on with her?  What kept me from asking? After all, we were in school together for nine years.  She lived next door to my good friend's grandmother and across the street from the school.  What kept me from linking my arm in hers and saying, "Let's go play"?  Then I might have found a window into her life.  A window shedding light into the world we both shared.

When I have my dark nights of the soul, my mind often returns to Mary Bjorndahl.  Sometimes I focus on the other kids in the class.  Did they know her better?  Did they, like I, look past her?  Or did they see her and get to know her?  Did they bully her?  Or disparage her?  Or ignore her?  I don’t know.  I probably never will.

On my darkest dark nights I wonder what it was like for Mary.  How did it feel to go school every day with people who didn't even see her? Did she know, deep in her heart, the grace she had?  The gentle goodness?   Was invisibility a cloak we draped over her or was it a strategy she adopted in the face of our indifference? Likely I'll never know.

It's a parable we didn’t hear this afternoon that makes me think of Mary Bjorndahl once again.  A parable known as the parable of Lazurus and Dives, the beggar and the rich man. The way Jesus tells the story, there was a rich man who lived high on the hog.  He had all he needed and more.  There was a beggar named Lazurus who lived by the gates of the rich man's house.  The beggar lived on the crumbs he scavenged at the rich man’s gate. His body was filled with sores that the dogs licked.  One day, the beggar died.  He went to heaven where he was loved and treated tenderly.  The rich man also died. He went to hell where his torment was great.  One day, he looked up to heaven, saw Lazurus there and asked Father Abraham to send Lazurus to him to relieve his suffering.  You can imagine Father Abraham's response.  "No way," said Father Abraham, going on to point out that in their lifetimes Lazurus had plenty of sorrows and the rich man had plenty of comfort.

I bet that rich man never even saw Lazurus begging at his gate.  I bet he passed by him every day never even wondering "Who is this man begging at my gate?"  "How are we connected he and I?"  Just like my classmates and I did to Mary Bjorndahl so many times over so many years.  We didn't see her, so we didn't see the things that made her happy, the things that made her sad, the things that troubled her, the things that gave her joy.  We surely didn’t ask why Mary fell outside our line of sight.  In our blindness, I think we missed a part of her and a part of us as well.  

I suspect those Saint Anthony Park Elementary School kids of so long ago are not so different from folks today—you and me, our neighbors and our friends, our fellow inhabitants of the planet Earth—for we, too, often fail to see the need and pain and wondrous possibilities before our very eyes.

And yet seeing and responding to the need and pain and strength before our eyes lie at the core of what it means to be Christian.  In a few minutes, Jagand will stand before us all for the sacrament of Holy Baptism.  He will make vows and we will together reaffirm our Baptismal vows.  We will all promise to seek and serve Christ in all people, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.

Doing that is hard work.  It doesn’t come automatically.  It comes with God’s grace and our own sustained practice—practice scanning the horizons of our worlds and the close-at-hand as well in order to see Christ in and respond with loving kindness to people others overlook or ignore.  Practice training our eyes.  Practice training our hearts.

What would life be like for us--as individuals, as Live at Five, as St. Michael's--if we trained our minds and eyes and hearts and ears to be mindful of the people we usually overlook, pass by, ignore?  What would life be like for us and for the Mary Bjorndahls in our lives if we trained our eyes and hearts to focus on the unseen?  What if we together adopted a Mary Bjorndahl practice of going through our days--one in which we not only saw but also included the Mary Bjorndahls in our lives?  Maybe then  the invisible would show us the way to the reign of God.  Maybe then our prayer, “Thy kingdom come on earth”, would take on new gusto not only as a petition but also as a call to action.  A call to live out our baptismal vows.

Shortly before he died, my father wrote a prayer.  Please pray with me:

Our Father, we pray for the qualities which can help build thy kingdom on Earth.  We ask that we may be given the wisdom to see thy will, courage to do it, strength to resist our own desires which might cause us to put our will before thy will, humor that we may be acceptable to others and not foolishly pious, and kindness because we know that thy will must be done through love.  Amen.

Today’s readings offer so many things to talk about. Idolotry, repentance, perversion, wrath, tax collectors, sinners…were they stories from the bible or a new reality show starting up in the new fall TV lineup?

Actually in the reading from Exodus, I was a little afraid of how close God came to just getting rid of the whole bunch of them. They had completely turned their backs on God. They even created an idol, a golden calf, to worship and had even sacrificed to it. A stiff-necked people God called them. I can’t help but think that God thinks the same of many of us today, a stiff-necked people who have completely turned our backs on God. Oh maybe we haven’t created a golden calf, but there are many new idols that people are worshipping; I know people who practically worship the phone, ipad or computer…can’t live without them. Can’t go more than a few minutes without checking in. Or maybe the idol is an ideal or political view that is so far from what Jesus taught but they are blinded by hate or prejudice. I hope we all realize that golden idols don’t have to be large to be real. The little pocket sized idol can be just as dangerous to our spiritual life because we think they don’t really hurt anybody and that we can handle them. But they can grow into big idols if we don’t get rid of them now. We don’t need golden idols, we have Jesus.

As the reading continues, Moses implored the Lord and talked God out of wiping out his people. We’ve heard before that Moses was a stutterer and was afraid to speak, but if I ever needed anyone to speak for me, I would call on Moses. Anyone who could talk God out of wiping out his people after they had turned their backs on him obviously had a gift of persuasion that the best attorneys today could only dream of. And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.

Then there’s today’s gospel. I would like to focus on the ninety-nine sheep. Everyone usually focuses on the one lost sheep who was lost and is found. But I think there are a few lost sheep who just hang around with the large group, pretending to be found. They act like everything is OK. I mean they come to church every week, they are in the bible study, the men’s group, the ladies’ auxiliary…but still feel lost inside. I was talking to a friend who has been a member at one of the large mega-churches in town for over ten years and he mentioned that he has never met the pastor. I think one of the things I really like about St. Michael’s is that it is not a huge mega-church where you can get lost in the crowd. People know each other and look out for each other. The pastoral staff has made new and existing members feel welcomed and a part of the flock. When someone does feel lost, there are always people around to come to their aid. We are getting a new shepherd, but our new priest doesn’t need to worry about finding lost sheep all by himself.

Another thing to remember about the ninety-nine sheep is, the angels rejoice when we repent as well. We may not be turning our lives over from a horrible life away from God like that one sheep, but when we ask God for forgiveness, angels still rejoice. I remember as a young man in the Catholic church standing in line for confession trying to figure out how many times I had lied to my parents or punched my brother and I would see the same old ladies and sometimes the nuns in line and wonder, “What could they be confessing? All I ever see them doing is praying and going to mass? Do they even sin?” Now, all I know is, we all sin, in some way, every day. And sin, hurts God and us. And we need to repent. And when we do…there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. So we have a choice, stiff-necked people or people who bring joy to angels.           

At the Threshold:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

There they are.  The people of the Exodus. People poised on the border of the Promised Land. People weary after forty long years in the wilderness.  People wary of what lies before them.  People standing on a threshold.  There they are listening to Moses.

There they are.  The people of the Exile.  People who fled Jerusalem.  People who left so much behind.  People struggling to find a way to live faithfully in a new land.  People wondering if and when and how they might return to the Promised Land.  There they are reading the words of the Deuteronomist.

There they are.  People standing at the threshold.  People filled with remembrance and longing.  People of fear.  People of hope.  People juggling a strange mix of anxiety and anticipation. 

They know the swirl of feelings that sweep over individuals and communities in times of uncertainty and ambiguity.  They know the rough of edges of edgy times—the unease, the little hurts, the anger, the outbursts of irritability, the bittersweet threads of sadness that wend their way through threshold times.  But they also know the hope that hovers over such times.

Are they so different from you and me?  Are they so different from us?  We, too, remember the threshold times of our own lives.  Those moments of hope and dread, of anticipation and anxiety when we weren’t sure what lay ahead.  Kids and teachers and parents too that last night before school starts again in the fall.  The jitters and thrills that often accompany the blush of new love.  The anxiety dreams that seem to go along with any big change. The tension that underlies difficult conversations that have to be had.  The stunning right-in-the-solar-plexus shock that comes with those rug-pulled-out-from-under-you moments that we all experience at one time or another in our lives—both as individuals and as communities too.

You and I, we, stand poised to enter a new era in our lives together as a congregation.  We, too, are standing at the threshold. It’s hard to peek over.  It’s hard to see what’s on the other side.  It’s hard to take that first step into the Promised Land. 

And so we stand here, you and I, on the threshold. 

God says to us as Moses said to those standing on the border of the Promised Land, “...today...I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life....”

“Today”.  That word appears over two thousand times in the Old Testament.  Today, this day.  Again and again.  In the book of Deuteronomy, that word, that phrase appear over a hundred times.  Often in the context of choice. 

It makes me think that this choice God offers us is not a one-time-only opportunity.  It’s not the choice of a lifetime.  It’s a choice we are offered over and over again throughout our lives and throughout our life together.  It’s a new-every-day kind of offer.  An offer that’s made anew to us even after we have chosen death.

“Choose life,” Moses says to those poised at the gates of the Promised Land. 

 “Choose life.”  A life of loving God, of walking in God’s ways, of observing God’s laws.

“Walk in God’s ways—God’s ways of justice and mercy.”

            —God’s ways of kindness and reconciliation.”

            —God’s ways of forgiveness and hope.”

“Follow God’s laws—care for the widows and orphans, feed the hungry, welcome the homeless into your homes.”

“Love God, love your neighbor, love the stranger in your midst.”

“Choose life.” 

That’s what Jesus did.  He chose a life of living according to God’s law of love.  A life of solidarity with those others oppressed.  A life of solidarity with those others pushed aside. A life that led to the Cross. 

Like our brothers and sisters of the Exodus and the Exile, we, too, are invited to choose life.  Like those disciples on the road to Jerusalem, we, too, are invited into a life lived according to God’s love—a life marked by that generous love, a life of blessing.  Like those who followed Jesus to the Cross, we, too, are invited to follow the path of solidarity with those others oppress and those others push aside.  It’s a path that leads to the Cross.  It’s a path that ends in the Kingdom of God.  It’s a path paved with stones of love and compassion.

You and I and this part of the Body of Christ we call St. Michael’s stand at the threshold of a new era in our life together.  A moment pregnant with opportunity.  A moment fraught with danger.  A moment filled with anxiety.  A moment bursting with hope.  All those things are true of this moment we find ourselves in.  And yet what God calls out of us in this moment and in every moment of our lives is that we choose life.  Life that leans into God’s love.  Life that leans into God’s kingdom.  Leaning into love.  Sometimes that means speaking out for those who have no voice.  Sometimes that means giving one another the space and time we need.  Sometimes that means hearing one another out.  Sometimes that means supporting one another.  Always, always, always that means loving one another as best we can with patience, kindness and hope.  Now.  In this moment.

Choose life.