In the
first reading this morning, St. Paul makes a critical statement about our
individual predicament. He says emphatically, “you are strangers and aliens no
longer.” Few of us have actually suffered the isolating fate of the foreigner, actually
being for a long time a long way from home and what is culturally familiar,
but, all of us, at some time or another in our lives have felt like a stranger,
an outsider, someone tossed around and left out relationships, conversations,
jobs or opportunities. For some of us that sting of being the stranger is the only
emotional space we have ever known.
We’ve
had those moments when we were deeply lonely,
in need of a good friend, and no one came along. We’ve been through times when
we needed to feel included and useful and, instead, were made to feel as if we
didn’t belong to anything or anyone around us. Each of us has probably suffered
as the butt of someone else’s jokes, the
subject of some group’s ugly gossip, never really part of the in-crowd, emotionally
out of step and religiously out of sync with those around us. We’ve felt
alienated from the present regime of things, feeling somehow neither left nor
right, perhaps progressive in a conservative time or traditional in a liberal
age. We’ve been the round peg in a
square hole, a half beat off the syncopated normal rhythm of things. We
have been the stranger if not to the
world surely to ourselves for longer than we can remember – never quite
knowing why we cry with an un-nameable ache inside when the world around us
seems steeped in joy. When we look back
at things, we were doing penance when we should have been laughing. We were playing when we should have been planning
for the more difficult days to come. In short, we know what St. Paul is talking
about. We have indeed, all of us at some time or another, been strangers and
aliens to life as it is, life as it could and should be, at some point and
maybe at many points in our lives.
The fear
behind all of these moments is the existential
terror that we are profoundly alone in this world and, worse yet, that we
are the cause of our own alienation and the source of our own strange
separation in the world.
But,
then the good news: his Gospel declaration that we are strangers and aliens no longer. Something has happened to us
from beyond us that makes a powerful difference in our situation. It’s not
something from us, but it is powerfully about us. It is something Paul is
convinced that the dying love of Jesus has accomplished for each of us. And it
is this.
That
ache of alienation that we feel, that sting of strangeness that comes over us,
is no longer a sign that we are by design empty and alone in a broken and crass
world. That ache and sting is a signal
and a call that we belong somewhere else
or, in a more Pauline way of saying things, we belong to Someone Else. All
of our lives we thought we belonged to the things around us. We wanted to fit
into the norms, the conditions and the culture that surrounded us. We wanted to
be part of the group that controlled the playground, the team that defined the
region, the council that determined the congregation, and the family that
pulled the heartstrings. We just wanted to fit in. And, in trying to fit in, we
squeezed ourselves into the norms and goals, the aspirations and expectations
of anyone and everyone around us.
But, St.
Paul reminds us that we were made for only One other – Jesus Christ. He is the
One our heart has been waiting for. He is the One that our souls have been
aching for. We cannot fit into the world until we fit into Him, because “all
were created through Him and all were created for Him.”
The
world on its own terms is like a maze in a cornfield with innumerable
dead-ends, obstacles and roadblocks. After generations of sinful thinking,
plotting and planning, roads that look promising and streets that seem lined
with golden hopes end up with walls that divide us. So that, at the end of the
day, on our own and by our own political and ecclesiastical devices, we are
left with culture wars, tribal conflicts, gender fights, racial
discriminations, and divisions over orientation.
But, St.
Paul tells us a deep truth. Christ, by His death, has broken down the walls
that divide us. In Christ, there is neither male nor female, slave nor free,
neither Jew nor Gentile. We construct the dividing lines but, before God, there
are no cultures, tribes, genders, races or orientations.
We have
yet to understand the meaning of our Communion. As St. Paul says, there is One
Lord and one Father of us all. And, before this good and gracious God, we are
one, each of us accepted and acknowledged, received and redeemed, supported and
saved for a life eternal in God’s infinite love, now and forever. Amen.