It’s something that always surprises me and, on this day, it was the last thing I expected, though that truth is probably another sermon in itself.  It was the end of a long day of Response Team Training, held at a church I served as interim pastor.

I was out in the kitchen cleaning up the last bit of the lunch leftovers.  There was just one other person who remained after the workshop to ask a few questions.  As I turned to leave the kitchen a man was standing there and said, “I’d like to speak with the pastor.”  I replied, “How can I help you?”  He repeated, “I’d like to speak with the pastor.”  I extended my hand to shake his and said, “I’m Pastor Liberty, how can I help you?”  It was clearly one of those “You are not what I was expecting” moments.  All he said was, “Oh.”

I invited him to sit down and I settled in to hear his story.  It was like a hundred other stories in a hundred other settings, except for the fact that it belonged to him, and there is only one of him in this world.  It was a typical story, if there can be such a thing, about hard luck, illness, homelessness and hunger.

He was hungry; I offered him food from the workshop.  He declined.  He was homeless; I offered to arrange a ride to a nearby shelter.  He declined.  His car was almost out of gas; I offered to follow him to the gas station and fill his tank.  He said, “No.”  What he wanted was money, and it’s precisely the one thing I was not willing to give him.  I invited him to church on Sunday; he thought I was nuts.  He left, perhaps thinking the church and its leaders to be insensitive.  I drove home feeling guilty.  It’s often a lose-lose proposition when dealing with the poor.

Of all the things I do in ministry, it is my least favorite.  Truth is, it makes me uncomfortable.  I don’t like sorting through sob stories and con jobs that sometimes sound like the equivalent of “the dog ate my homework”.  It’s a scene played out in every ministry setting and, after almost thirty years, it seems like I have heard it all.  Usually, it is more than one thing. Bad luck teams up with mental illness, abuse and incest are in cahoots with alcohol and drugs.  The wars of the world and the wars of the family collide.  And bad timing is often what finally tips the scales.

Donna Schaper writes, “My so-called ministry with the poor is not tender, or gentle, or even kind.  Most of its softness has been stripped away.  Confronted with a request for assistance, I never yield until at least three nasty questions are asked.  ‘How did you get yourself into this mess?  How are you going to get yourself out of this mess? And who, besides me and God, is going to help you?’  I then invite the stranger to worship and start telling him or her just how much help our congregation needs—that we are desperate for their leadership and participation.  They don’t believe me, but it is true.

What the poor do in our congregations is to keep the arteries in our eyes from hardening.  They allow us to hear the gospel.  Without them and their persistent threatening presence, we would long ago have all lost our common senses.  Fortunately, the gospel only promises that we will be blessed by the poor.  They are walking beatitudes.  It does not promise that we will love them or them us.”

The last, the least, and the lost are a reality check for us good liberal Protestant Christians, and it’s rarely a comfortable one.  Their helplessness talks to ours; we find ourselves exposed.  We wonder how they ended up the way they are and think them so different from us so we don’t imagine that we could end up that way, too. 

Who knows why some are born to privilege and power, some to poverty and pain?  Who knows why some end up in families that tear down and others in families that nurture?  Who can say why some, regardless of their families, make it and some do not?  The chemistry that allows some to cope and others to crumble will always be a mystery.  And, from time to time, those who cope and those who crumble will show up on our doorstep and quietly seek our compassion.  This text from John’s Gospel reminds us that this is a test.  “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice,” Jesus said to Pilate.

We are given countless opportunities to see the stuff of life rolled out before our very eyes in living color and what we do or fail to do is always the essay question.  It’s about belonging to the truth.  That’s different from possessing the truth, or having the corner on the market of truth.  It isn’t something that we have.  It is that to which we are accountable. 

Russell Pregeant, author of a wonderful commentary on Process Hermeneutics notes, “that the criteria for eternal blessing is not, as many Christians would assume, the proclamation of an appropriate Christology or theology, but whether we attended to the needs of others” or, as Jesus says to Pilate, about whether or not we belong to the truth.

Belonging to the truth is an invitation to community, a foundation that keeps the humanness of others in clear focus.  Part of what allows the homeless, the needy, the criminal and the sick to be dismissed is that they lose their identity.  They become their problem first, and a person second.  Interdisciplinary case review at the hospital always began the same way.  This is a 58-year old male with stomach cancer, a 48-year old female with breast cancer.   People were known by their disease and not by their name. 

To this day, I can remember the story of the man who came and sat with me at the church but I cannot remember his name.  It’s all part of how we protect ourselves from the reality that it could be us on the other side of the diagnosis, or on the other side of the desk.  Seeing them as real people makes it harder to ignore them.  I guess that’s what Jesus had in mind and he calls us to be part of the community.

Seeing the other as a person and not a problem is the foundation of Christian community and, indeed, the human community.  It is the foundation of the vision of Ghandi and King and every great non-violent, social justice leaders of this century.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”  And no one ought to be homeless, poor, lonely, and cast out. 

If the truth be known, it’s a whole different experience when your life falls apart and someone knows your name than when your life just falls apart.  Trouble in community is a whole different thing than trouble in isolation.  Maybe, that’s a truth you know; maybe it’s one that’s waiting in the wings. 

When jobs evaporate, relationships disintegrate, children fail to live up to our expectations, health crumbles, and the slip of life falls down below the hemline, there’s a lot to be said for having someone bring over a meatloaf, call you up on the phone or say they will pray for you and then actually do it.

It’s no secret that it’s more blessed to give than to receive.  Few of us ever note that it’s also a lot easier.  It’s hard to be needy but we are, all of us, from time to time.  And maybe that’s the one thing the poor remind us of that makes us so uncomfortable—the universality of human need, the fragile nature of this thing called life, and the deep yearning for human community that is part of all of us.  One of the lessons we learn from their yearning for love and for belonging is that there is an extraordinary equality to the urgency of grace. 

The sick, the poor, the needy, the weary, and the broken occasion our glimpse into the truth of human life when all our false strength and all of our garnered resources are swept away and we are exposed for the vulnerable, interdependent human beings we are.  Gazing into their eyes, we see some of our own worst fears reflected

But there is more at stake here than our potential failure at being socially liberal or politically correct.  It is first and finally a matter of which truth we belong to, the truth of the world that measures success in independence and self-sufficiency or the truth of the gospel that measures it in compassion. 

In the coming weeks, we prepare to welcome Jesus as King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Savior and Sovereign.  The royal imagery is a bit of a stretch.  The patriarchal language, the images of opulence and royalty that come to us from our world, it all chafes just a bit.

Mary Anderson writes, “To speak of kings and kingdoms, of subjects and peoples, requires a fair amount of translation for modern ears.  Some, finding the translation too cumbersome, will opt for calling Jesus their CEO or therapist.  But what will then be truly lost is not the title used, but the relationship implied.  To say Christ is king implies that we are subjects.  The heart of this relationship is our dependence on a ruler who holds our lives in his hands.  We do not choose a ruler as we elect a president, hire a CEO, or contract with a therapist.  We are Christ's people—we share the same eucharistic foods, we share the same story of faith, we stake our lives on the same hopes." 

In short, we are people who belong to the truth that Jesus spent his life and his blood to make real.  It’s not a kingdom of this world.  It’s not a place on the map we can point to.  It’s a promise in our midst that makes us different.  It’s not a sentimental feeling that warms our hearts.  It’s invitation to a completely different way of being in the world.  

P. T. Forsyth noted, “Although we contemporary people don’t like to think of our selves as submitting to anyone, our identities are largely a matter of to whom we bow, to whom we submit.  The first duty of the soul is not to find its freedom, but rather to find its master.” 

This day, we acknowledge Jesus as the Master, Christ as King and Sovereign—an invitation to joyfully live in the world in a whole different way.  Amen.