A few weeks ago, I drove the van to pick up a group of guests from the Room in the Inn campus down on Drexel Street. When I got there, the line was short, so I pulled right up and got out of the van. I saw a man who looked very familiar, despite the mask covering much of his face.
“Charlie, is it you? I haven’t seen you in what feels like ages! I’m Thomas from Vine Street. It’s so good to see you! How are you?” Even in the dark, I could see Charlie Strobel’s eyes light up with a smile. He told me how he was, mentioned his health problems, but that wasn’t what he wanted to chat about. He couldn’t stand staying at home, he told me, he needed to be where he was, at the campus, with the people who didn’t have housing, people he knew as siblings and friends. “The real problem,” he said, and I’m paraphrasing, “the real problem is private property. There’s nothing wrong with owning things, but the way I understand Jesus, he tells us, ‘This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.’”
I laughed and said, “That’ll preach, Charlie!” In the van, on the way back to the church, I kept thinking, who but this man would skip the chit-chat about the weather or the Titans and go right to the heart of the matter? A lifetime of prayer and loving service condensed into a simple, incredibly challenging statement, offered with humility and the warmest smile: The way I understand Jesus, he tells us, “This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.”
“Love your neighbor” is not a religious way to spell charity; it’s the most challenging way to spell justice. It is the challenge to take the needs of our neighbor as seriously as we take our own. In the fourth century, Bishop Basil of Caesarea, said in a homily, “When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not?” And the bishop continued,
The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.
In the Gospel of Luke, John the Baptist is presented as a preacher of repentance. “You brood of vipers” he addresses the crowds—not a way to capture your audience’s friendly attention, not in any compendium of rhetoric, not in any culture. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” He sounds like one of the prophets of old: fiery, single-minded, borderline obsessive. The people are there to receive his baptism, but he won’t let them get away with thinking that the water ritual would make them presentable on judgment day, or that some other symbolic action like donning sackcloth and ashes would do, or that they could always fall back on having Abraham as their ancestor, Abraham with whom God had made the covenant that included all his descendants. John slams all those exit doors shut until it is just the people and the urgent demand to repent. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance.”
And the crowds don’t get mad and they don’t leave to find a more accommodating prophet—they get it. “What then are we to do?” they ask.
Repentance is about more than feeling sorry with an added layer of religious overtones. The Hebrew term literally means return, as in returning to the ways of God. And the Greek term means change of mind, indicating a revolution in one’s thinking that effects a change of direction in one’s life. I don’t know if there’s a term in Greek for a revolution in one’s acting that effects a change of direction in one’s thinking. But you and I know there’s a need for such a term, because some of us think our way into new ways of acting, while others act our way into new ways of thinking. What all this is to say is that repentance is more than a mindset or an intention; it is a fundamental reorientation of one’s life, a reorientation that becomes visible, observable, tangible.
“What then are we to do?” they ask.
“Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none,” says John; “and whoever has food must do likewise.” It doesn’t get any more everyday than the clothes on your back and the food on your plate. Bearing good fruit, it turns out, is neither spectacular nor heroic, but rather ordinary and mundane. John counsels that if I have more than I need to sustain my life, the neighbor who does not have such abundance has a claim on it. Or as Charlie paraphrased Jesus’ teaching, “This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.” Or as Basil put it, “The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it.” Or the book of James, If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.[1] And the First Letter of John, How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?[2] Love of neighbor is a golden thread woven into text after text. It doesn’t get any more everyday than the clothes on your back and the food on your plate. And it doesn’t get any more challenging than what you do with the clothes in your closet and the food in your pantry.
We collect a special offering of socks today, and like so much we do in worship it is a way of practicing new life habits. Little we do in this gathering is designed with global, systemic change in mind, but we trust that practicing new habits like confession and forgiveness, gratitude and giving, serving and praising changes us, and that through these habits we are indeed becoming, by the grace of God, the change we wish to see in the world. In giving a pair of socks, we get a little closer to becoming a people who care as much about our neighbors’ needs as we do about our own.
The tax-collectors in the crowd ask John, “What are we to do?” and he doesn’t tell them to sever relations with the occupying power, because the system of taxation is corrupt and unjust. He does tell them, though, not to take more than they are authorized to take. And John doesn’t tell the soldiers in the crowd to abandon their jobs, because they are collaborating with an unjust and corrupt system. He does tell them, though, not to extort money from anyone through threats or false accusations. Again, nothing heroic, nothing spectacular, just a commitment to act with justice within the social structure, to let love of neighbor become visible and tangible in everyday situations.
John tells the people of the coming one who is more powerful than he, who will baptize them with the Holy Spirit and with fire. “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” John has just talked about trees that don’t bear good fruit getting cut down and thrown into the fire, so it’s quite understandable when some folks wonder if wheat and chaff represent groups of people—perhaps those who bear the fruit God expects to find and those who don’t?
No. The point is rather that until harvest time, every grain of wheat is wrapped in a husk. Only after threshing are there wheat berries and a dusty mess of husk parts called chaff. And to this day, farmers around the world make use of the wind to separate the chaff from the grain—a small portion of the messy mix is tossed up into the air, the chaff is blown away some distance, and the wheat berries fall back onto the ground. And the point, of course, is to save every grain, not merely some. The image suggests a view of judgment that is liberating rather than punishing: We experience life as a mix of good and evil impulses and actions; they aren’t always neatly separable, often frustratingly intermingled; combinations of good intentions and bad outcomes; poor judgments we can’t forget and compromises that haunt us; too many choices where the best option seems to be the lesser of two evils—and the judgment John announces as the work of the coming one is a judgment, but not one of division, but of cleansing and gathering. What is carried away by the wind and burned in the fire are all the bits that keep us from being who we were made to be, the bits that embody apathy and selfishness, rather than love and communion.
I want to end with a story I’ve told before, but good stories get retold again and again for a reason. This story tells us about being generous with what is ours, and about the Spirit who brings such generosity to life.
It was Christmas Eve and the pews at New York City’s Riverside Church were packed. The Christmas pageant was underway and had come to the point at which the innkeeper was to turn away Mary and Joseph with the resounding line, “There’s no room at the inn!”
The innkeeper was played by Tim, an earnest youth of the congregation with Down syndrome. Only one line to remember: “There’s no room at the inn!” He had practiced it again and again with his parents and the pageant director and seemed to have mastered it.
So Tim stood at the altar, bathrobe costume firmly belted over his stomach, as Mary and Joseph made their way down the center aisle. They approached him, said their lines as rehearsed, and waited for his reply. Tim’s parents, the pageant director, and the whole congregation almost leaned forward in the pews as if willing him to remember his line.
“There’s no room at the inn!” Tim boomed out, just as rehearsed. But then, as Mary and Joseph turned on cue to travel further, Tim suddenly yelled “Wait!”
They turned back, startled, and looked at him in surprise.
“You can stay at my house!”
And Bill Coffin, the preacher, stood up in the pulpit and said, “Amen”—and that was the sermon.
[1] James 2:15-17
[2] 1 John 3:17