A sermon preached on June 5th, 2022 – Pentecost Sunday – a week before my final sermon at the Parsippany UMC. Just before I began to preach, Charlie Wilken and I accompanied Mary Mihalko as she sang a beautiful version of the song, “Wayfaring Stranger.” The sermon is based upon Acts 2:1-21 and Romans 8:14-17 and is entitled, “The Poor Wayfaring Strangers Come Home.”
To appreciate the words of the apostle Paul we’re about to hear, it’s important to be familiar with his personal story. Paul grew up into young adulthood with an identity that defined his life as a member of a group with a clearly defined enemy. Paul was a highly respected member of the party of the Pharisees who believed that God would not send the Messiah to save the people of Israel from the Romans until all Jews got on board with what they believed God required – which was to obsessively keep all of the 500 plus laws contained in the Torah. In their eyes, any Jew that didn’t agree with them was the enemy, forestalling the deliverance the messiah would bring.
When he heard about a group of Jews who were claiming that God’s messiah had already come, and that he was a poor wayfaring rabbi named Jesus who ended up nailed to a cross, Paul was enraged and began committing violence against those who were promoting such blasphemy, undermining the morals of the country.
Paul was absolutely stunned therefore when on the road to Damascus to persecute more Christians, none other than Jesus himself appeared to him in a blaze of glory, revealing to Paul that the hatred he felt and the violence he committed wasn’t the least bit godly – it was sin pure and simple. He discovered in that moment that the heart of God is full of grace and mercy extended to all — even himself in spite of all the sins he had committed in his twisted desire to belong.
Paul was amazed to find himself “adopted” into Christ’s family, a child of God who for the rest of his life would make his way home to the beauteous fields of God’s kingdom, no more to roam.
Paul began preaching the Gospel of the circle of love in which in Christ all are welcome. He lost the sense of belonging he had once known in the party of the Pharisees. The people who had once considered him one of their own, now rejected him, and he became the target of their hostility and violence.
Now knowing a far deeper kind of belonging, Paul accepted their rejection, mindful that Christ been rejected as well. The suffering Paul now endured put him in solidarity with Jesus and his suffering.
All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ– if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. (Romans 8:14-17)
The song “Wayfaring stranger” might seem like an odd choice for a song for Pentecost Sunday. And yet it was a crowd of “poor wayfaring strangers” who had gathered from all over the world in Jerusalem on that day long ago. These poor wayfaring strangers arrived for the festival of Pentecost with no expectation of hearing the welcoming sound of their own native language spoken, but to their great surprise that is what they heard coming out of the mouths of the Apostles, poor wayfaring strangers themselves from the backwoods town of Nazareth. And it wasn’t just any words they heard them speak. They heard them speak of the extraordinary love God has for all people — the good news revealed in Jesus.
It was miracle really – a miracle through which they experienced what the Apostle Paul called a “spirit of adoption” – transforming them from strangers – outsiders – into full members of God’s beloved family.
The story suggests that in order to fully appreciate the miracle that took place that day, you need to know something of what it feels like to be a poor, wayfaring stranger. There were some present who missed the miracle, who only heard noisy babel coming from the mouths of the Apostles and mocked it all as early morning drunkenness. They missed the miracle because they were insiders who lived in Jerusalem year-round, and as such they expected to hear their own language spoken.
So, they missed the extraordinary grace.
Some people may not like the mournful tone of “Wayfaring Stranger”, but I’ve always loved it, and I think that’s because there were times in my life when I knew what it felt like to be a wayfaring stranger who didn’t feel like they belonged. My life didn’t start out that way. I lived my first five years with my mother, father and older brother and sister on a sleepy little road in Jackson, Mississippi. There were lots of kids who lived on the street and I knew them all as playmates. We even had cousins who lived on the street. There are things I didn’t understand back then – for instance, I didn’t know the hatred of segregation that meant that only white people were allowed to live on the street. Nonetheless, I felt at home.
Just as I was about to enter first grade my father accepted a job offer in New York City, and our family abruptly left the familiarity of our neighbors and cousins and moved up north to Long Island. Suddenly I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I didn’t have any friends and my classmates teased me for my southern accent till I learned how to speak “northern.”
Then just a few years after that my parents got divorced, and my family began to drift apart. Overtime, I rarely saw my siblings and pretty much never saw any cousins.
The result of this was I spent a good deal of time feeling like a wayfaring stranger and so there is something comforting in the song – the feeling of connection to everybody else who heard their experience captured in the song. The song expresses that experience, and it also expresses the convictions that there is an eternal realm where one day we will truly find ourselves at home, no more to roam.
But we shouldn’t have to wait to get to heaven to feel like we belong. And so we pray in the Lord’s prayer, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
I’ve stayed here at the Parsippany United Methodist Church for 33 years in large part because I haven’t felt like a wayfaring stranger here. You welcomed me, and made me feel like I belong. And that’s a wonderful thing. I’ve glimpsed a bit of heaven here.
I’ve always felt that my familiarity with the experience of being a wayfaring stranger has been an essential part of what I draw upon in my ministry. It allows me to tune into people who don’t feel like they belong, moving me to do what I can to help them feel acknowledged and welcomed here.
Early on in my time here, the Holy Spirit inspired me to say, “There’s always room in the circle,” and the words stuck as our slogan for what we were about together.
We human beings have a profound need to belong – to feel connected, welcomed, safe among a group of other people. That’s the point being expressed in Genesis when God says of Adam, “It’s not good for the man to be alone.”
To understand why our society in various ways seems to be falling apart, a good place to look would be with this deep need we have for belonging.
The deep feeling of belonging is hard to come by these days. We’ve been inundated by propaganda intent on making our primary identity that of a “consumer” – encouraging us to focus our attention on acquiring things rather than on building relationships. Families – especially extended families – don’t tend to be as strong as they once were. And that feeling of belonging to a neighborhood that I had when I was a little child – it’s much harder to come by these days. These days neighborhoods tend to be a sea of strangers.
And when we don’t feel connected – like we belong – we will most likely feel hostility, suspicion, even rage. I’ve known some of that myself.
The common denominator of the two young men who committed the recent violent atrocities – as well as other mass murderers – is that they didn’t feel like they belonged. They weren’t connected. They didn’t know the blessed ties that bind.
When a deep feeling of belonging is hard to come by, we will search for some semblance of it wherever we can find it. The appeal of the internet for many of us is that it can provide us with a bit of belonging. If it’s not possible to people with people in person, connecting on the internet is better than nothing.
One of the places we turn in search of belonging is political ideology — whether on the left or the right — but this kind of belonging has serious problems. The connection it provides doesn’t run very deep because it’s highly conditional. It requires a soul-killing conformity. In order to belong you’re required to tow the party line in regard to holding the acceptable political beliefs. Stray from the acceptable beliefs and like the Apostle Paul, you’ll quickly find yourself an outcaste.
And if the feeling of belonging political beliefs provide is going to have any emotional intensity, well, you’ve got to have enemies. You need to see your political allegiance as a moral crusade in which the people who disagree with you are seen as enemies – the people who are trying to destroy our country.
Desperate for a sense of belonging, the young man who killed ten people in Buffalo searched on the internet and landed on the evil ideology of White Supremacy — the perverse bond of shared hatred.
One way to measure the depth of our sense of belonging is to ask ourselves, “On whose behalf would I be willing to make serious sacrifices in order to help them?” When you feel a deep connection to others, you will be willing to lay down your life for them.
The lost young man wanted to believe he was deeply connected to people he’d never actually met – the online community of White Supremacists and their shared hatred – and so he cast himself in the role of hero willing to sacrifice himself for what he wanted to believe was a noble cause, when in fact he was succumbing to the lies of the devil.
On that first Pentecost, poor wayfaring strangers with their distinctive languages and cultures suddenly found through the power of the Holy Spirit that the circle of God’s welcome had been drawn very large, that they were in fact part of God’s family without having to conform on anything other than to assent to the truth that Jesus is Lord, and love is the thing. They were so moved by the profound sense of belonging that they found that their willingness to sacrifice on behalf of their fellow church members led them to share all that they had so no one would be in want.
“Faith, hope and love abide,” said the Apostle Paul. “But the greatest of these is love.” (1Corinthians 13:13)
“Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bars all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1Corinthians 13:4-8a)
Paul devoted his life to starting little congregations of new Christians throughout the world, knowing that congregations – consisting of ordinary, imperfect people seeking to live out the Gospel – live out the love of Christ – well, that’s where the rubber meets the road – that’s where people experience the “spirit of adoption.”
Two thousand years later, we are the legacy of Paul’s church planting and the day of Pentecost. This is where the rubber meets the road. This where there is always room in the circle. Whatever poor wayfaring stranger that passes through the doors of our church building, we know that God has sent them here for us love them as they are. To embrace them as the distinctive, exquisite human being God made them to be – God’s beloved child.
Thank you for making this wayfaring stranger feel at home throughout these thirty-three years.