No
Strangers Here
Sermon preached by the Reverend Patricia Farris
September 11, 2005
Scripture:
John 13:34-35
The
seeds of this sermon were planted months ago as we looked forward
to another great Homecoming Sunday to launch us into this new year
at the church. After all the comings and goings of summer, isn’t
it exciting to gather and see one another’s beautiful faces,
old friends, new friends, a year full of service and possibility?
Over
the summer, I had the luxury of dreaming about this day under the
stars at the Hollywood Bowl one beautiful August evening. David and
I had gone to see the great cellist, Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble.
I’m a great fan of World Music, that is not just music from
exotic parts of the world, but music that brings together traditions
and sounds and styles and creates something that is new and rich,
sometimes surprising and truly inspiring. Yo-Yo Ma, of course, lives
all this. He was born in Paris to Chinese parents and grew up in New
York and is now renowned throughout the world as master cellist. In
1998, he founded the Silk Road Project, bringing together musicians
from all the countries and cultures along the ancient Silk Road, the
trade route that connected the peoples of Asia and Europe. Musicians
from Azerbaijan, Mongolia, China, Uzbekistan, Japan, Korea, Turkey,
and Iran are making amazing music together. And as we listen we hear
what makes us each unique and what binds us together in common humanity
orchestrated by rich and complex harmonies and melodies. In reflecting
on his wonderful musical collaboration, Ma said: “there are
no strangers here.”
No
strangers here. What a beautiful theme not only for our world, but
for us, right here, in this beautiful sanctuary, gathered on Homecoming
Sunday 2005. No strangers here: a place where we are known and loved
for who we are; a place where each is valued and respected; a community
where we bring all the strands of our various heritage and cultures
together to form, in Christ, a new body of love and service.
There
are many things that bring us to worship and we’re going to
be working with all of that this year thanks to our Worship Renewal
Grant. Many are the longings on our hearts as we come. But surely
one of the deepest things that brings us here, and brings us back
week after week, is that simple and very basic desire in our heart
of hearts: to be reminded that God loves us, each and every one. “Jesus
loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” If we are
fortunate,
(continued...)
"No
Strangers Here" by Rev. Patricia Farris, September 11, 2005
we started singing that song when we were very little and it became
planted in our hearts and it has carried us through those many ups and
downs in life when we felt like maybe nobody could really love us if
they knew who we really were or times when we were just so lonely because
somebody we had loved, somebody who had loved us, had died or gone away,
times when we were far from home, times when we didn’t like ourselves
very much—in the dark nights of those times we’d hear the
refrain, like a lullaby: “Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves
me. Yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so.” Every week we
return again and again to be reminded that it’s still true. Singing
our own personal and unique song here blended into beautiful harmony
in the community of faith. No strangers here, in the love of God. This
sermon was to be about all of that on this Homecoming Sunday 2005 as
we welcome and greet one another, as we pull back together in all the
excitement that comes with the beginning of a new year together. No
Strangers Here.
Then,
13 days ago, the fury of Hurricane Katrina ripped across the Gulf coast
and the flood waters burst the levees, and nothing has been the same
since…in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, West Florida where the
full force of the storm hit….in Texas where so many have fled
or been relocated…nothing has been the same. In Wisconsin and
Tennessee and Georgia, in Chicago and Washington D.C., and all the places
where nearly 500,000 evacuated people are now just beginning to make
whole new lives for themselves and their families. Nothing is the same.
The Los Angeles Services Homeless Authority is expecting approximately
20,000 to come here, adding to the 90,000 homeless people already here.
The need will be tremendous.
Communities
all across this great nation people have mobilized to send money and
supplies, to donate their time and their expertise. Did you see the
pictures of the three truckloads of goods that were donated and shipped
out from Franklin School last week? One truckload had miraculously become
three. The last figures I saw showed that Americans had already donated
$500 million dollars in the first week alone, nearly double what we
gave in the first week after the tsunami. Nurses and policemen and firefighters
and animal rescue personnel and Hamm radio operators are donating a
week or ten days of their time to go and assist. I was proud and grateful
to learn that the field staff from the United Methodist Committee on
Relief arrived and started emergency relief work and planning for long-term
recovery on Tuesday of that first week. We were among the first there
to assist and we will be among the last to leave.
Something
has been stirred up within us in these last 13 days. We are not the
same nation we were 13 days ago. Or maybe we are--and what has been
awakened in us is the best and the strongest and the most generous and
compassionate of who we are as a people.
The
heartbreaking pictures and stories coming out of this disaster have
awakened our hearts and our conscience. What the hurricane laid bare
is a reality we too often choose to ignore—the poverty in which
far too many of our brothers and sisters live day in and day out, the
elderly, the children. A retired
(continued...)
"No
Strangers Here" by Rev. Patricia Farris, September 11, 2005
minister
in our Annual Conference, born in New Orleans, who served for many
years as Chaplain at Tulane University, told me last week that before
the Hurricane, New Orleans had the highest level of substandard housing
of any city in the United States. Most of the people who didn’t
evacuate had no car, or no gas money, or no savings or resources or
cash, no job mobility, nothing.
The
immediate response to need has been tremendous. Our own United Methodist
Women generously agreed to take their own long-planned 136th anniversary
celebration and reshape it into a Benefit Concert that is going to
fill this sanctuary and raise a lot of money for UMCOR and give important
visibility to this whole community about this church and what we stand
for.
Across
the nation, we have opened homes and schools and social service centers.
As the first evacuees arrived in Houston, how beautiful it was to
see the photos of people holding hand-printed signs saying “Welcome,”
giving big hugs to folks as they came out of the buses, the Superintendent
of Schools saying: “We will open our classrooms to these kids
right away.”
We
are providing shelter and food and medical care. Let me just note
here that this really is the work we do day in and day out through
Family Place across the street, not only sheltering families fleeing
homelessness, but equipping them to live full and successful lives.
We know how to do this work and now we will be called to share that
knowledge with more communities than we had ever imagined.
Throughout
all the stories we’ve heard in this last thirteen life-changing
days, there has been one constant theme. Countless people have said
that although they lost property and possessions, the only thing that
really matters is the safety of those they love. Many have set everything
aside to focus on the only important thing: finding their loved ones.
But
it’s not just about those families. This furious storm woke
us all up to the fact that all these hurting people now strewn across
our land are our loved ones. What’s become so critical now to
us all, as a people, as a church, as a nation is this work of finding
our loved ones. Remember that our loved ones are not just our kin,
our own flesh and blood, but all God’s children. Looking at
the faces in the pictures out of the storm, the faces of worn and
fearful and hungry and desperate people, the faces of babies and elderly
and children and mothers and fathers and remembering that they are
our loved ones.
Remembering
that in Christ Jesus we are part of a family that makes everyone our
neighbor, everyone our loved one. Our work of Christ-like self-giving
love is now to find our loved ones whoever they are, wherever they
are, and care for them, to make sure that they are safe and make sure
that their lives are whole.
(continued...)
"No
Strangers Here" by Rev. Patricia Farris, September 11, 2005
The American novelist Richard Ford, born in Jackson, Mississippi,
in a message this week to the hurting people of the whole Gulf region,
said: “You should know our hearts go to you and we will try
to make our efforts and not just our words meet your great need. It
may not feel like it to you today when your life is so altered, but
you are us and we are you. That part of the human condition hasn’t
changed, though it is for us now, those of us who are safe, to prove
ourselves to you and we will try our very best.”
There
are no strangers here, in the sweep of God’s amazing grace.
No strangers here. No strangers, now, as we go forth to serve God,
loving our neighbor as ourselves. No strangers - only our loved ones,
our brothers and sisters. “Through many dangers, toils and snares…”
we have already come. “Tis grace hath brought us safe thus far,
and now grace will lead us all home.” Grace and a lot of hard
work will rebuild the Gulf coast. Grace and a lot of hard work will
rebuild the whole nation from the inside out. Grace and a lot of hard
work will shape us into the loving, self-giving disciples of Jesus
Christ God has created us to be.
If
we were blind, now we see. If any was lost, now all must be found.
How sweet the sound of that grace, that saves us, that loves us, that
sustains us, that transforms us, that sets us free, that grace that
sends us forth to serve.
Amen.
Notes:
Rev. J. Delton Pickering in a phone conversation, August 30, 2005.
Richard Ford on NPR, Weekend Saturday Edition, September 10, 2005
©Patricia
Farris , 2005. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
All other rights reserved. |
