I’ve been thinking lately about just what it is that a priest does. What’s the value of the collar?

After a service a few weeks ago in which I was the preacher, I went over to the rector’s house for lunch. On the way, we had to stop at the grocery store to pick up a few essentials.

It was a wonder to watch this particular priest in that Safeway. He knew the name of virtually every employee, asked real questions about their family members, and was a generally positive and supportive presence. His wife later told me she calls him the “Chaplain of Safeway.” He told me he’s baptized one of the employees and counseled others in difficult times.

I loved this model of ministry, not least because it spoke directly to the kind of incarnational ministry of presence I have been urging in virtually every sermon I preach of late. This rector made a decision to share an existence with a group of people that don’t usually darken the door of his church and great ministerial blessings were flowing from that decision.

The question I asked myself later was this – does he have to be ordained to have this kind of relationship? I think the answer is yes, or at least, it’s a lot easier. I think the employees are likely more willing to open up to him because they see him in his clericals than they would be to an equally friendly and compassionate person not in a collar.

This experience was also one more data point in my new movement to create a new sacrament. (Isn’t it odd how you start divinity school and all of a sudden embark on a heretical crusade?) There are seven at the moment in the Episcopal Church and I’d like for there to be eight – the sacrament of presence, or, to give it a name I heard once, the sacrament of the present moment. I think adding this sacrament would give us helpful language to describe what it is that the bulk of a priest’s ministry actually consists of.

Part of the problem with this idea, no doubt, lies in defining just what is meant by sacramental presence and I’m not sure I can define it myself. But I know it when I see it and I saw it in Safeway a few weeks back.

I’ve been in New Haven two months now and I feel like I know my way around pretty well. At least, I have well-worn paths to all my usual haunts.

One such haunt is the gym, which is a gigantic seven-story structure that looks like a fort. I go swimming there and since the locker room is close to the pool, I usually don’t bring my towel with me to the pool.

The other day, a little dazed after my swim and seeking a shortcut back to the locker room (again, it’s not that far so my usual path from pool to locker room should have been just fine), I walked out a different door than normal. All of a sudden I was in a stairwell and it was cold. The door back to the pool was locked so I tried another one. That set off an alarm. I went down a level and tried another door. That set off another alarm. Eventually, I had to walk all the way down to the ground floor, walk through the foyer – in my sopping wet bathing suit, goggles in hand – and climb back up the stairs to the third-floor locker room. I may or may not have been the funniest thing the security guard saw that day.

It’s a reminder not to try too many new things when your head is still in the pool and that I shouldn’t feel too comfortable here yet.

Here’s my sermon from today at the Church of the Epiphany in Wilbraham. Close readers will notice that I don’t take any cheap shots at Yale but I did wind up and take a great big one during Diocesan Convention on Saturday. The opportunity was ripe and I couldn’t pass it up.

25 October 2009
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52
Church of the Epiphany, Wilbraham, MA
Jesse Zink

Let us pray.

Dear God. Why is it so easy for you to perform miracles and so difficult for us? And how can we be more like you? Amen.

Some of you may know that for the last two years I was a missionary of the Episcopal church in a town called Mthatha in South Africa. I worked in a clinic that served a shantytown called Itipini. Itipini is a word that means “at the dump” because this shantytown was built on the site of the municipal garbage dump so people could scavenge off the garbage. Their homes are made out of old pieces of tin, tarp, old car parts, milk cartons, beer bottles, literally whatever will work. Although it was a difficult place to work, I love talking about my experience there. But instead of talking about Itipini, I want to begin this morning somewhere else: the movie theatre.

How many of you saw the newest “Star Trek” movie this past summer? I did. Twice. I loved it. What stayed with me after the last explosion was the dialogue, especially on board the space ship Enterprise. Have you ever noticed how Captain Kirk gives commands? “Alert the sick bay to prepare to receive injured crewmen.” “Fire on enemy ships!” “Energize!” “Enterprise, get us out of here!” or my favourite, “Mr. Scott, maximum warp!” He just says what he wants. And the shocking thing is that he gets it, every time. The injured crewmen are treated, the enemy ship is fired upon, Kirk is transported into or out of whatever danger zone he chooses, and the Enterprise does go into warp speed.

It reminds me a bit of how Jesus acts in this morning’s Gospel lesson. Blind Bartimaeus asks Jesus to make him able to see again? Jesus simply says, “Go, your faith has made you well” and all of a sudden he can see again. This is a theme that is repeated throughout the Gospels. Jesus is able to perform miracles simply by visiting and speaking to sick people.

Let me just say that after two years in South Africa where I knew countless sick people and watched helplessly as many of them died, despite my best efforts to prevent it, this Captain Kirk/Jesus Christ way of looking at the world seems improbable, impossible, out of touch, unrealistic, and, quite frankly, downright insensitive and rude. South Africa has the greatest number of HIV-positive people in the world and all the health indicators in Mthatha and Itipini are among the worst in the country. There are plenty of sick people in Itipini and when I sat in a tumble-down shack next to people about to die, no matter what I said, no matter what I did, they were just never able to get up. Miracles are for Jesus. That connection between word and deed epitomized by Captain Kirk is imaginary and represents a point none of us will ever attain.

That’s what I thought at least. And then one day in South Africa I performed a miracle of my own.

I first met a woman named Pakama after I had been in Itipini a year or so. She was in her mid-30s and when we met she was very sick. Her HIV infection had turned into AIDS and she had tuberculosis as well. She had just started taking the life-saving anti-retroviral drugs that combat AIDS but for a variety of reasons she still needed to make numerous trips to a local clinic and the doctor to change her ARV prescription so it would be compatible with her TB treatment.

The trouble was that Pakama was quite weak. The clinic she needed to visit was a 15-minute walk away, uphill. Actually I should say, it was 15 minutes away for someone like me, a young healthy person unaffected by HIV. For Pakama, it was impossible. She couldn’t even make it to our clinic under her own steam and we were only 200 meters or so away from her home. When she talked, she had to take frequent pauses to catch her breath between words. She had severe gastro-intestinal problems, likely brought about by the HIV, so she couldn’t eat, which just made her weaker. By the time I met Pakama, I had known lots of other people in similar situations and virtually all of them had died. I didn’t have a lot of hope Pakama would be any different.

In Itipini, they speak a language called Xhosa and in Xhosa the word pakama means get up. It’s the imperative form of the word so it means “get up!” When I would find Pakama lying in her bed in her shack, I wanted nothing more to tell her what Jesus tells some of his patients in the Gospel healing accounts – “Get up, stand up.” Of course, she couldn’t.

Over the course of several weeks, I drove Pakama and her mother to appointment after appointment, in a seemingly never-ending quest through the bureaucratic maze of the health-care system to change her ARV prescription. There were numerous hurdles but day by day we knocked them down, only to be confronted by new and different ones on the other side. Pakama’s health got worse. She could no longer walk at all and had to be lifted into the car and then wheeled around the clinic. I was hopeful but a gnawing voice in the back of head told me not to be surprised if I showed up one morning and learned she had died the night before.

I’ll spare you all the details but eventually Pakama got a new ARV prescription and began taking the right pills. We didn’t have to go to so many appointments anymore but she was still too weak to come to the clinic for her TB treatment so I visited her every day to give her that. Progress, if it was visible at all, came slowly. She spent most days under a pile of blankets on her bed, complaining about the cold.

It was about that point that I took a break from South Africa and returned to the U.S. to raise some more money to support myself. Pakama was on my mind while I travelled and when I returned to Itipini one of the first things I did was seek her out. I found her in her shack, standing up and doing the laundry. After I asked how she was, I had one question, “Uyakwazi ukuzihambela? Can you walk by yourself?”

She glanced away as if embarrassed to remember her previous condition. But she nodded slightly.

“Ndibonise,” I said. “Show me.”

And so on that warm, spring day, I made Pakama walk back and forth in front of her shack. It had been obvious to me from the moment I saw her doing her laundry that she was much better. But watching her sashay back and forth unassisted like that convinced me that she was well on the path to recovery. But I didn’t think of it as a miracle.

A few months after that, Pakama finished her eight months of TB treatment. As I filled out the paperwork to formally discharge her from treatment, I mentioned to Jenny, the missionary I worked with, that Pakama was finally done. Jenny smiled and looked at me. “You know,” she said. “You saved her life.”

Me? I had saved a life? Impossible! Saving a life is a miracle. I couldn’t do that! The idea made me uncomfortable and Jenny could tell so she dropped the subject. We didn’t mention it again.

I think what made me most uncomfortable about Jenny’s assertion that I had saved Pakama’s life is that it gave me too much credit. What did I do? I drove the car. I lifted Pakama in and out of the passenger seat and in and out of a wheelchair. Surely such simple acts can not lead to such tremendous results?

But as time passed, Pakama gained weight – always a good sign when you have AIDS – and kept improving. I moved on to other patients and she carried on with her treatment and the normal course of her life. As I watched this, I couldn’t help but think back to my early doubts that some morning I would arrive in Itipini and see the hearse in front of Pakama’s shack. And I had to acknowledge that somehow my efforts had helped prolong her life. There was never a “go, your faith has made you well” moment like with Bartimaeus but a miracle had occurred. Somehow I had found myself accidentally stumbling along a path that Jesus intentionally followed in his ministry.

It’s tempting to look at the miracle in this morning’s Gospel passage as an isolated event. But we shouldn’t ignore what precedes it. Immediately preceding the healing of Bartimaeus was a journey. Jesus’ ministry was not stationary. This morning’s Gospel passage begins with “They came to Jericho” then “As they were leaving Jericho” and at the end of the passage, they are all on the road again. This is not an uncommon thing. Gospel passages are always beginning with phrases like “Jesus had crossed to the other side” of the sea or “Then he went among the villages” or “He left that place.” Jesus’ ministry was a journey, ranging far and wide over the Holy Land.

I went on a journey with Pakama. It was an actual physical journey of countless car rides to and from clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, and so on. If there was anything I did, it was simply to help her find the way on this journey, to point out where she had to go when she didn’t know, to follow her when she knew the destination, and to help her along when she was too weak to go herself. Mission is a journey. Our task is to accompany our brothers and sisters in Christ on their journeys and let them shape ours.

So Jesus didn’t heal people, like Bartimaeus, from a distance. Before he spoke to them and healed them, he went to them. And Jesus’ decision to go to sick people wasn’t made, say, when he decided to go to another town or decided to cross the sea. Preceding the journey part of the healing was a much more basic – and also much more consequential – decision, the decision to be Incarnate among humans, to take flesh as one of us, and be Emmanuel, “God with us.” This is the obvious point but Jesus would never have healed anyone if he had stayed in heaven at the right hand of the Father. If I had stayed in North America, I never would have been able to accompany Pakama on the journey that led to her healing. I chose to share an existence with her.
Jesus’ command to Bartimaeus is simple – Go. This is a phrase that is heard time and again in the Bible. God says this to Abraham, to Moses, to Isaiah, to Jonah, to name just a few of the people who learned they couldn’t serve God where they were but had to move someplace else to do it. Jesus’ healing words to Bartimaeus are as much meant for us as they are for the blind beggar he is healing on that particular day. We need to get up and go to the people who are different than us, to share an existence with them and begin a journey.

The healing of Pakama and the healing of Bartimaeus share common antecedents – a decision to share an existence, a decision to being a journey. The analogy begins to break down in the actual healing itself. That’s because unlike Bartimaeus, Pakama had an imperfect and sinful human accompanying her – me. There was never a moment when someone said to Pakama “be healed.” Healing does not come in a moment, as it did with Bartimaeus, but over a lengthy journey. Our job is to choose to take that journey – by faith and with thanksgiving – and pray that we are headed in the right direction.

I know that sometimes when I start talking about people living with HIV in a far corner of the world, it can seem pretty remote from Wilbraham and this congregation. It is. The tendency – and I’ve seen this in many other congregations – is to pat me on the back, congratulate me on the difference I’ve made, and then blithely forget everything else I’ve said.

But there is a way to unite what goes on in Western Massachusetts with what happens in Itipini. And the way to do that is to go back to a word I used earlier to describe myself. I was a missionary of the Episcopal Church. That word missionary can be so contested and difficult to hear sometimes. It certainly has a mixed history. Pakama’s recent ancestors could no doubt tell us stories of missionaries of the church in Africa who did not embody a message of grace and love but one of sin and law and who did a lot of damage as a result. I know all about missionaries who count their success by the number of people they baptized and how many churches they established. That has never appealed to me and yet I still cheerfully and proudly describe myself as a missionary.

A missionary, to state the obvious, has a mission. And who does that mission belong to? Does it belong to the missionary? To the missionary’s church? It is none of these, I think. Mission belongs to God. And God’s mission, throughout the course of history, has been the same: the restoration of right relationship between people and God and between people and each other so that together we may journey together towards the righteousness and wholeness that God longs for us to have. In a word, God yearns for reconciliation.

The questions a missionary needs to ask, then, are these: Where is God’s mission around me and what role am I privileged to play in that mission? To ask it another way: Where is reconciliation needed and how can I help make it happen? And if we ask the question in this way, it becomes clear that missionaries are not only the people who move to Africa for a time. Not everyone or even most people are called to work overseas. The great South African Desmond Tutu says, “We are all missionaries or we are nothing.” We become missionaries by virtue of our belief in Christ, not by our decision to move across the world. The need for reconciliation is as strong and urgent in Wilbraham and western Massachusetts as it is in a shantytown in Africa. The need takes a different shape but the question remains the same: what role are we privileged to play in God’s mission here and now?

So when we think about where God is calling us, let us begin by asking this question: how can I be incarnate among these people I want to serve? This may seem obvious – well, I live in western Massachusets and there are people suffering here. But is that really incarnation? Incarnation is going someplace and choosing to share an existence. Just because we know somebody is suffering doesn’t mean we’re sharing that existence. How do we enter more fully into a shared existence with the wild diversity of the members of the Body of Christ instead of retreating to our familiar groupings?

And after we share that existence, let us ask this: where is this journey going? Is it headed in a direction towards peace and righteousness? Or do we need to redirect its trajectory in a new direction? Martin Luther King Jr. often said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Indeed. But maybe we need to pull on that arc so it bends a bit quicker towards that righteousness we yearn for.

None of this is easy. Being incarnate among a people can be difficult. It’s worth noting that Jesus’ decision to be Incarnate led to his death on the cross, the same place many of Jesus’ followers ended up. Moses followed God’s call and ended up wandering in the desert for 40 years. Working on a dump gave me countless illnesses I would have avoided if I had never gone to Itipini. There are countless speed bumps and road blocks we encounter on our journeys, some brought about by the failings of the world and some by our own failings.

So incarnation brings risks, both from without and from within. But neither would Jesus have saved the world if he had never been Incarnate. And neither would I have experienced a transcendent journey in mission had I stayed here. Incarnation requires a certain willingness to open oneself to what may come, a willingness to be vulnerable, that is not common in this world of ours that seeks to control everything. But I think we’ll find that the benefits of the decision to be incarnate, to share an existence far outweigh the costs.

Jesus did not come to heal the world. If he did, he would have made a beeline for the leper colonies and gone to work. Jesus came to teach and to save. He left the healing up to us. It is our job to heal the brokenness of the world and work towards peace. That’s what mission is all about. It can seem like a tall order and it is. But miracles happen every day in this world. And they are performed by people like you and me. It’s simple and straightforward. It begins in the decision to get up and go, to go to where there is hurt and suffering in the world, and then to choose to accompany these brothers and sisters of ours on a journey into mission, poking and prodding that journey in the direction of righteousness and peace. We may not know where the path leads or when the journey will end. But it is our calling to set out on that journey nonetheless.

Amen.

I go to church a lot. That seems to be a basic shaping factor of my life these days.

There’s morning prayer with the Episcopalians, daily ecumenical worship with other divinity students, and a variety of denominational worship opportunities in the evenings. That’s just on the Divinity School campus during the week. There’s a plethora of churches in New Haven and worship opportunities in other parts of the university. On top of that, I have been traveling on the weekends to various churches that supported me while I was in South Africa, preaching and showing pictures.

There’s an interesting contrast. At the Divinity School, the worship is fantastic. I often gently poke fun at people who think so much about liturgy but the fruits of that effort are on display every day and in every service. The music is also amazing. It’s led by talented people and everyone who is there wants to sing, which is a far cry from most Sunday services I’ve ever been too. Yale Divinity School attracts some great preachers, some of the best in the world, and they are a highlight of every service.

Down the hill – that is, at places other than YDS – the picture is a little different. Pews are empty. Huge, beautiful churches that I’m sure were once packed full are now a quarter or less full. People don’t like to sing or they sing softly. So many of the churches I visit, it seems, are in some kind of financial difficulty and I hear stories of many more. This is the reality of the church these days, especially the mainline Protestant ones. People just don’t seem to show up.

For people preparing for careers in ordained ministry, I think the services at YDS can lull us into a false sense of what the church is. If all I knew of church was what I saw at YDS, I’d be a lot more inclined to devote my life to the church. So I’m grateful for the balance in perspective I receive on my weekend travels.

Where is the church going and what will it look like when my fellow students are its leaders? By traditional measures, it doesn’t seem like it’s going on a successful trajectory.

Those of you who followed along with me in South Africa will know that I learned a thing or two about hair care while there as part of a modest micro-credit program. It never ceased to amaze me how much effort and energy – and money! – some women put into their hair when it seemed to me like there was much else to be thinking about.

So I’d really like to see this new Chris Rock movie, especially since it might finally tell me just what that mysterious “relaxer” is that I heard so much about.

There was a throw-away comment in my last sermon that was designed to get a laugh:

I’m currently a student at Yale and they teach you there that when you’re confronted with a difficult question or boxed into a corner in a conversation, the best thing to do is change the subject.

This line has been picked up on by some people here who happened to read this sermon on-line. “I liked your sermon,” they say, “but not the part where you made fun of Yale.”

First, the line did get a laugh when I preached it so it accomplished that purpose. Someday I’ll get around to posting my sermon from the week prior, which had even more mockery of Yale. It’s such an easy target!

Second, the line is an almost verbatim quotation from my ethics professor a few weeks ago. In any event, I was just struck that this would be the one thing people here would hang on to. It’s always interesting what people hear or read, compared to your intentions for the sermon.

I’ve spent some time on this blog carping about Yale. They have every right to defend this fine institution and their comments can be a useful check on what can be my spiraling negativity.

Now I have an Old Testament mid-term tomorrow morning. Look for a joke about that in a coming sermon…or not.

Here’s my sermon from last Sunday at St. Peter’s in Ellicott City, Maryland, near Baltimore. Regular readers of my past sermons will notice certain common themes. The delivery had some changes from this text but I’m not going to make them. You should have been there!

(And I don’t think I made this clear enough in my sermon but I have a great deal of admiration for the friend I mention in here and her family, even if it sometimes seems like I might be coming down a bit hard on them.)

11 October 2009
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31
St. Peter’s, Ellicott City, MD

Let us pray.

Dear God: did you really mean it when you said give everything to the poor? Amen.

There are lots of very difficult passages in the Bible, lots of passages that make us take a deep breath and think, “It can’t possibly mean that, now, can it?” This morning’s Gospel is one such passage. The rich man comes to Jesus. He wants to know what he can do to inherit eternal life. He’s already been following the Old Testament laws. He thinks he’s in pretty good shape. As I imagine it, he’s just looking for confirmation from this new and great teacher that he’s on that straight and narrow path that leads to heaven. But Jesus’ answer stuns him: “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” Then later, after the rich young man has gone away, Jesus continues, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

It is these kinds of passages that the author of Hebrews must be thinking of when he writes in this morning’s Epistle, “The word of God is…sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow.” This sort of teaching from Jesus cuts right to the core of our lives.

There are a couple of possible reactions to hearing this morning’s Gospel. One is to say exactly what Peter says in response to Jesus: “I already did leave everything behind! What do I get?” If you’ve done that, excellent. You can tune me out. If you haven’t, keep listening.

Because another possible response is to say, “Well, he can’t really mean that.” I think that’s a common tendency with a lot of other difficult passages in the Bible, especially those tough Old Testament passages. It’s easy to say, “Surely, it doesn’t mean that!” and move on. We shouldn’t do that with the Old Testament and we definitely should not do it with the red-letter words of Christ himself.

A final possible reaction is to say, “Well, I’m not really all that rich. Surely Jesus wasn’t talking about people like me.” Let me say in response that for the last two years I was a missionary of the Episcopal Church in a community called Itipini in South Africa. “Itipini” means “at the dump” and it is a shantytown built on the site of a landfill. It was built there so that its residents could scavenge off the refuse. They make their homes out of pieces of tin, tarps, old car parts, milk cartons, rocks, mud, literally whatever works. There is no running water or electricity. When it rains, not only the roofs but also the walls leak. When I first went to Itipini, I had previously been an AmeriCorps volunteer with a small stipend and before that a student with a very part-time job. I thought I had no money. In comparison to the people in Itipini, however, I was that rich man who approached Jesus this morning.

So what do we do with this passage? What does Jesus mean? The short answer is I don’t know.

I’m currently a student at Yale and they teach you there that when you’re confronted with a difficult question or boxed into a corner in a conversation, the best thing to do is change the subject. So I want to ask instead, What would happen if we gave away everything we had? Why would Jesus want the rich young man to do such a thing?

To answer that question, I want to tell you a little more about Itipini and about a friend of mine named Vuyelwa, for short.
Itipini is on the outskirts of a much larger town called Mthatha. During apartheid Mthatha was the capital of a neglected part of the country called the Transkei. This was a section of territory the white government nominally “set aside” for black people. That way, the white government could act as if it was giving some black people self-determination and local control in their own land when really they were just dumping them in a part of the country they wanted nothing to do with. As a result, Mthatha and the surrounding region are decades behind the rest of the country in development. Even today, Mthatha has a bad reputation in South Africa. It’s said to be dirty, dangerous, and full of gangsters. There’s a national highway that goes right through Mthatha and when you ask someone from, say, Cape Town or Johannesburg if they’ve ever been to Mthatha, they say, “Oh, yes, I’ve been to Mthatha – I mean, I’ve been through Mthatha.” They might sometimes add, “I’ve driven through Mthatha with my windows rolled up, my doors locked, and a look of terror on my face.” If this is what Mthatha is like, you can imagine that Itipini, the community on its garbage dump, is even worse.

Partway through my two years in Mthatha I met Vuyelwa. Vuyelwa was born and raised in Mthatha and I met her because she was interested in volunteering in Itipini with me. Now usually when a new volunteer showed up in Itipini, I would give them a tour, walking among the shacks, driving around that section of town, pointing out the government housing built for people like those who live in Itipini and other sights of interest. But with Vuyelwa, I did it in a sort of half-hearted way. After all, she had been born and bred in Mthatha and lived there much longer than me. But as I showed her around, it became increasingly clear to me that although she had lived in Mthatha for 20 years, she had never visited any of the places I was showing her, places that I visited every day.

Vuyelwa’s family has some money – not a lot, but enough that they don’t have to worry about the next day’s meal, that they can eat meat with every meal, which people in Itipini can’t, that they can afford the fees at the good schools, and, most of all, that they never have to travel near places like Itipini. I realized that for Vuyelwa her family’s relative wealth had created a situation in which she never had to interact with the poor people I saw every day. The Mthatha she knew was completely different to the Mthatha that I experienced.

How true is this situation for us? I used to live on the south side of Chicago, the poorest part of the city. I know that for many of the people who worked inside the business district in Chicago, the south side was a whole other world to them, one they never touched. They got off the El before it went that far south. When they had to leave the city, they got on the interstate that went through the south side without ever actually encountering it in any meaningful way. I have heard this is true in other cities in this country as well, for instance just down the road in Washington, D.C. – the capital of the richest country on earth surrounded by some of that country’s poorest neighbourhoods and with almost no non-criminal interaction between the two.

Our wealth then allows us to create a space where we don’t have to worry about interacting with people who are poorer or less fortunate than us. We know this was true in the Bible. When Jesus was traveling from town to town, beggars and lepers and the blind cried out to him. Oftentimes, it was his followers who tried to quiet those people and put up walls between those excluded people and Christ in the middle of the crowd. In Mthatha, there are divides between the rich and poor, families like Vuyelwa’s that can live their lives without meaningfully thinking about the daily life of poorer people. In our lives, I am sure we can identify walls of our own, walls between the races, walls between rich and poor, walls based on sexual orientation, even walls that sometimes cut right through a congregation and right down the middle of a pew. We know that Jesus’ ministry was all about the tearing down of walls, between men and women, rich and poor, insider and outsider, Jew and Gentile, alien and native, sick and healthy, and on and on. This, in fact, is a central feature of Christ’s ministry. Love your neighbour. And who is your neighbour? Everyone.

But before Jesus could break down those barriers between people on this earth, Jesus had to break down another major barrier, the barrier between the divine and the human. This is what we call the Incarnation, the decision by God to become human. I’m taking a course right now on the theological debates of the early church and while they didn’t agree on much, many of these early theologians did see a sharp gulf or wall between the realm of the divine and the realm of humans. The divine realm is perfect. That’s where God dwells. The human realm when God created it was perfect but our sinfulness and fallenness turned it into the imperfect creation it is today and so the fallen creation separated from the perfect realm of the Creator.

Now for a long time, God tried to do something to bridge this gap. This is what we call the Old Testament. God kept trying to use people in this fallen, human realm to improve Creation, to make it a little better, to draw people a little bit closer to God. For God, this must have been a frustrating process. Every person God choose to do God’s work turned out to be not quite perfect. People in the Old Testament, even the ones we admire and hold up as models today, had a habit of listening to what God said and then kind of veering off and doing their own thing. They’re human; they sin.

So God makes a momentous decision. Instead of working through us sinful and fallen humans, God decides to break down that barrier and come to the world and do the deed himself. This is why the Incarnation is so important. It represents the destruction of a monumental wall. As the Hebrews passage tells us, our high priest is not aloof and lofty from us but has been tested as we are by the trials of every day life and able to sympathize with our weakness precisely because he broke down that barrier and became like one of us.

To return to that question then, Why does Jesus want the man to give away everything he owns, I think Jesus sees that the wealth allows the man to wall off his life and be in a safe space where he doesn’t have to meaningfully interact with what goes on around him. He wants the man to break down those walls so he can see the world for what it is and truly be a part of it.
There’s a good way to summarize all these ideas about breaking down walls both between ourselves and between God and humans. To do that, let me return to a word I used a little earlier when I described myself as a missionary of the Episcopal Church. That word, missionary, is so contested and can be so difficult to hear. History is littered with examples of missionaries who did things on their mission that were far removed from the Gospel of Christ. Shortly before I left for South Africa, I read The Poisonwood Bible. Bad idea. The missionary character in that book embodies everything that is wrong with the history of mission, preaching a message not of grace and love but one of sin and law.  I know all about missionaries who count their success by the number of people they baptized and how many churches they established. That has never appealed to me and yet I still cheerfully and proudly describe myself as a missionary.

A missionary, to state the obvious, has a mission. And who does that mission belong to? Does it belong to the missionary? To the missionary’s church? It is none of these, I think. Mission belongs to God. And God’s mission, throughout the course of history, has been the same: the restoration of right relationship between people and God and between people and each other. Bridge that divide that exists between us here on earth and God and break down those walls that divide us from our neighbours, me from you, us from them. The message of the Bible is that God longs for people to live in unity with one another and with God.

The questions missionary needs to ask, then, are these: Where is God’s mission around me and what role am I privileged to play in that mission? To ask it another way: Where is reconciliation needed and how can I help make it happen? Or, what walls can I help tear down? And if we ask the questions in this way, it becomes clear that missionaries are not only the people who move to Africa for a time. Not everyone or even most people are called to work overseas. We become missionaries by virtue of our belief in Christ, not by our decision to move across the world. The need for reconciliation is as strong and urgent in Ellicott City and Maryland as it is in a shantytown in Africa. The need takes a different shape but the question remains the same: what role are we privileged to play in God’s mission here and now?

This is all very easy to talk about but in fact is quite difficult. If reconciliation were an easy thing, everybody would be doing it. In Itipini, I encountered many situations in which reconciliation was so desperately needed and yet my ability to help bring it about was infinitesimal at best. Reconciliation can often seem impossible, as difficult, say, as getting a camel through the eye of a needle. This is a fallen and sinful world and God’s call to us to reconciliation is not an easy one.

But there’s a way forward and I want to return to that rich man one last time. We’ve seen how wealth can help us build walls around ourselves. We’ve seen that Jesus is calling us to make ourselves a little more open and a little more vulnerable to the world around us. The phrase I want to use to describe this is the same phrase that we use to describe what Jesus did – incarnation. Reconciliation begins when we choose to go to a new place in the world and simply exist. God used God’s immense power to choose to exist in an entirely new way, among humans. We have wealth and power and we must use it to exist in a new space. Sometimes that new space means getting up and moving from North America to a shantytown in South Africa. But sometimes going to that new space means simply exploring a different part of the town you’ve lived in your entire life, as my friend Vuyelwa did. Sometimes going to that new space simply means going down to the end of the pew after the service and talking to the person you’ve never met before. God’s mission of reconciliation requires of us an incarnational ministry. That means we have to simply be in a new and different way and in a new and different place. It is both a reassuringly simple and monumentally difficult task but it is at the centre of our Christian calling.

Now sometimes we’re not going to be successful. There are still walls that we let surround us. Maybe it’s a particular set of ideas or an ideology that convince us there is only one way to do things. Or it’s our own pride that tells us only we know what to do. Perhaps it is, in fact, wealth and comfort. Maybe it is our fear of rejection. In order for me to break down walls with you, one of us needs to reach out in hope and pray the other person responds the same way. That doesn’t always happen. Reconciliation takes two committed parties.

But we move forward in reconciliation confident in the knowledge not of our own failures but in the knowledge of God’s grace. It is that grace and power which allowed God to cross the divide that separated divine and human. It will be that grace and power that lets us move forward into new and different places. We move forward leaning on the grace of God, knowing that if we move forward in mission it will be God’s grace that will get that camel through the eye of a needle and you and me and all who join in the mission of God into heaven. It’s difficult and it can seem impossible. But the mission of God, which comes from God through us imperfect humans, is like all else possible only with God.

Amen.

It seems a lot of people lately have been asking me what I plan to do when I’m finished at Yale. My stock answer is “God only knows,” which is, in fact, true.

But the question obscures a larger point I learned and re-learned while in South Africa.

Before I left for Mthatha, someone told me and my group of missionaries at training, “Now don’t think you can start making plans for what you can do when you come back. Don’t think that you’ll be the same person after your year overseas. Don’t think you can just check off this box in your life and then return to life as usual. You have to be open to how the experience will change who you are.” This was wise advice, with its Jean Vanier-esque emphasis on the importance of becoming. (There are hundreds of people I’d have given the Nobel to this year before Obama and Vanier is high on that list.)

I, of course, completely disregarded this sage advice. At that training, I was looking past Mthatha and preparing for x when I returned. I forget what x was but it was something definite.

But then a few months into my time in Mthatha, I realized I needed to stay a second year. And then during my second year I decided I needed to go to divinity school. Two years ago, Yale Divinity School was not two years away. Yet my time in South Africa made it seem like a logical next step.

With this in mind, it seems somewhat foolish to say, “OK, this is what I’ll be doing in three years when I’m finished at Yale.” There is something to be said for pre-planning and having a little foresight but there’s a lot more to be said for allowing the journey you are on to help determine where you are going.

Have I mentioned before how much I believe the “journey is the destination”?

Here’s a president who has an eye for a catchy publicity stunt:

Maldives government ministers are taking scuba lessons and learning underwater signs in preparation for an unprecedented Cabinet meeting at the bottom of the ocean intended to highlight the threat global warming poses to the low-lying nation….

[President] Nasheed will chair a meeting of his 14 Cabinet ministers about six metres underwater on October 17, said Aminath Shauna, an official from the president’s office.

“The intention is to draw the attention of the world leaders to the issue of global warming and highlight how serious are the threats faced by Maldives as a result,” she said….

The ministers will communicate using hand gestures and are now receiving diving lessons, she said, adding that Nasheed is a certified diver.

They should do this in Shishmaref or Diomede. It might be a little colder there but the point needs to be made.

We’ve reached Reading Week. Yes, that’s right. We get a whole week off for Columbus Day next week. (It seems the more you pay to go to school, the less you actually have to attend class.)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately in these past weeks about Yale Divinity School’s location. Its founders intentionally put the school on the highest point in New Haven to be a sort of “light to the nations.” This is problematic, not least because some of us have to bike up that hill every single day and don’t care for it one bit.

But more than that, I wonder what this positioning represents. It certainly separates us from the rest of the Yale campus that is largely down among the rest of the city of New Haven. That’s kind of annoying if you want to take a class in another school or visit a professor or go the gym or do any number of things that would mark you out as a typically Yale student and New Haven resident.

But I think the biggest problem I have with our location is that it represents a certain separation from the world, as if we are saying, “We are different than the rest of you. We need to be apart from you.” That’s an attitude that is characteristic of the academic life but it’s not an attitude that should be characteristic of the Christian life. As I’ve written in the past, Christian mission is about incarnation. Incarnation requires a willingness to come down from that lofty place and get into the real world. It’s hard to do that when you’re up on a hill.

This is the tension that I think has most characterized my first few weeks at Yale Divinity School between the high and lofty and academic view of faith – the 35,000-foot view, if you will – and the incarnational and low living of faith. Having spent the last four years on this latter, lower level – sea level, perhaps – it has been a difficult adjustment.

A professor mentioned the other day that the Divinity School has traditionally been the school or department at Yale that has had the least engagement and involvement with New Haven. There are a lot of reasons for this, no doubt, but many I imagine stem from this: when you begin by putting yourself on a hill, how are you supposed to be engaged?