Sermon February 23, 2014

THE SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY

Year A

February 23, 2014

Matthew 5:38-48

Pastor David Tryggestad

Concordia Evangelical Lutheran Church

Duluth, Minnesota

Lynn and I just returned from taking care of Simon, our four-year-old grandson, for a week while our son and daughter-in-law enjoyed a get-away in New Orleans. They live on a small farm in rural Oronoco, north of Rochester. We lost power for almost 24 hours during the storm that hit on Thursday, as trees and power lines were covered with a coating of thick ice. We had no heat, save the fireplace, which we kept burning, no stove or refrigerator, no water, no microwave, and, worst of all, no coffee! Fortunately, after Terry, the neighbor from the next farm toward town, came the second time with his tractor to clear the almost football-field-length driveway, I could drive to the convenience store on the highway for coffee and hot chocolate. I noted that all the gas pumps on the west-facing side were coated with thick ice and unable to be used. The friendly woman in the store, after hearing of our circumstances, offered as much water as we might need.

Our usual four-hour drive home yesterday became six as we moved, caterpillar-like, in slow procession on the ice-covered Highway 52. The road beneath our snow tires felt like an old fashioned, uneven washboard. When we arrived home at 4:30, we came upon an old woman who had just then driven her car into the snow bank on the avenue next to our house. As I got out of my car to help, our new neighbor and two friends helping him move in were there. The four of us were able, with shovel and lots of pushing, to free her car.

On Wednesday this past week, I drove Simon to his preschool in Rochester and then went downtown to Barnes and Noble and from there to a coffee shop. I was seated at a booth in the back of the restaurant. In the booth next to mine sat a man of Indian descent, somewhere between 35 and 40, I would guess. He had both his laptop and electronic notebook open, going back and forth from one to another. His phone was on the table next to him. After the waitress brought my coffee, the man looked at me, smiling, and said, “Our waitress is eight-months pregnant. And she is moving very fast.” I had noted that she was expecting, but I wondered how the man had that information. A friend, perhaps. I had already decided that a very young mother-to-be would need all the tips she could earn.

“Are you from here?” I asked the man.

“No, I’m from Chicago.”

“What brings you to Rochester?”

“I am with a friend who is here for medical reasons. He has stage four cancer. I am a Christian and he is Hindu, and I am hoping for an opportunity to witness to him.” Then he said, “I take it that you’re a believer.”

“Yes,” I said, though I wondered how he might have come to that assessment. It was not my Bible sitting on my table next to me, but Mark Twain, the book I had just purchased and was eager to get into.

The man continued, “I’m praying for an appropriate way to share the hope of our Lord with him. He came to Mayo looking for hope, and he got the bad news today from the oncologist, that there is nothing more they can do for him. I want to offer him another kind of hope.”

“You are already offering a ministry of presence and accompaniment. How long have the two of you been friends?”

“Only a few days. It was announced in my church in Chicago just last week that a friend of one of our members needed someone to drive him to Rochester and to stay with him during his time here, and I offered. I’m taking my final exams for med school right now online,” which explained why he had his laptop in the restaurant, “and I’m applying for residencies. I’d like to become a medical missionary, after 17 years in IT.”

I marveled at such a sacrifice. If anyone had a valid excuse from giving a complete stranger the better part of a week at an inopportune time, this man did.

He went on, “My friend wants to stay another day to meet with other doctors about palliative care. He wants to know what to expect his last few weeks to be like. His doctor back in Chicago has suggested he might have four weeks. I’m looking online for another hotel, as I didn’t expect we’d be here this long.”

“Does your friend have a family?”

“His wife and four-year-old daughter. I’m thinking I might suggest to my friend that he write a journal for his daughter to read when she’s older so that she might have a sense of who her father was and how much he loved her.”

By now, our waitress had brought the man his order, which included a specialty from the Netherlands that I was not familiar with. He shared half of it with me.

When I finished my muffin and half of the man’s pastry, I got up to leave. We shook hands and he asked me to pray for him and his friend.

I thought of our Gospel reading for today from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “. . . if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. . . . if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?”

Taking care of an active four-year-old is a fulltime job for two people who are not as young as we were when we raised our own children. Yet, I managed to squeeze in a bit of my new book, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I had started reading the copy that belongs to our daughter-in-law, but I wanted my own copy, which explains my trip to the book store.

The narrator of the book, a successful industrialist and manager of a large factory in late nineteenth century New England, finds himself suddenly transported to England of the sixth century at the Court of King Arthur of Camelot. Because of the man’s technical knowledge and education, he is soon elevated to a position second only to the King, and becomes known throughout the last as “The Boss.”

Our narrator is astonished and appalled by the squalor and indignity of the lives of the large masses of people who are subjugated and even enslaved by the very small but powerful minority of the aristocracy. Our narrator—or is it our author himself, Mark Twain?—is scandalized by the institution of the Church of the time, which helped to legitimized and perpetuate this system of inequity and injustice. Our narrator cites Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in general, and the Beatitudes in particular, as some of the key texts used—or misused—by the Church to justify this injustice, insisting that it is the lot of the common folk to submit, to be meek, to turn the other cheek, to be poor.

It is a scathing indictment. And it is not unfounded, and it is not unfair. We might ask ourselves when we have heard the Bible quoted—or misquoted—to justify injustice. “Blessed are the poor . . .” for starters. Or how about, “The poor will always be with you”? Or, “Do not resist the evil doer”?

The lyrics to the Sending Song this morning were written by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Archbishop Tutu was chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created in 1995, in the wake of apartheid in South Africa, as a path toward democracy. No doubt there were those in the Church, especially the white Church in South Africa, who used Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and other passages of Scripture to justify and perpetuate apartheid. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a kind of restorative justice. Victims of human rights violations could testify before a jury; the accused perpetrators of crimes could also testify and could seek amnesty. Reconciliation was possible only within the context of truth-telling and accountability.

I believe that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to hold in creative tension Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and, at the same time, insist on the biblical mandate of justice and compassion for the poor and the powerless.

Archbishop Tutu’s lyrics sing:

Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate;

light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death;

vict’ry is ours, vict’ry is ours, through God who loves us.

Vict’ry is ours, vict’ry is ours, through God who loves us.

I’d like to go back to our return from Oronoco yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t until after we had freed the old woman from the snow bank that I realized that our 200 feet of sidewalk had been snow blown by an anonymous neighbor. Not only that; our driveway was completely cleared, my little blue Ford Focus, which I had left in the driveway while we were away, was sitting there, without a trace of snow, as if on the lot of the dealership. Again, an anonymous neighbor.

It seems as if some folks in our neighborhood know something that the man in the restaurant in Rochester also knows, and that Terry who plowed our son’s driveway twice during a storm also knows, and the woman at the convenience store who offered all the water we needed when our power was out also knows: something about going the second mile.

Thanks be to God!