Sermon Title: Jesus and the Outsider

Sermon Text: Matthew 8:5-15

Sermon Date: June 24, 2007

Scripture Reading Matthew 8:5-15

5 When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. 6 "Lord," he said, "my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly."

7 Jesus said to him, "Shall I come and heal him?"

8 The centurion replied, "Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9 For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, 'Go,' and he goes; and that one, 'Come,' and he comes. I say to my servant, 'Do this,' and he does it."

10 When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, "Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. 11 I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. 12 But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

13 Then Jesus said to the centurion, "Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would." And his servant was healed at that very hour.

An outsider -- three definitions: 1) a person who is excluded from a community; 2) a competitor who has little chance of winning (ie, long shot) or 3) an apprentice upholsterer.

Who is an outsider in your world?

Back in the 80s I worked at the March of Dimes in Indianapolis. Organizations like not for profits and churches rely on volunteers to help out and our office was no different. There was an older woman who volunteered for us and you knew from listening that she had lived an affluent life in the south and now in Indy. She spoke of her family, her husband and her son, even telling a story about when her son went to a private school in Indianapolis.

The reason for the story was that she wanted us to know that she was strong. And that she “had no problem” standing up to the principal at her son’s school. You see, outsiders had been allowed to come into the school and she wanted to be sure that her son was kept away from them. These outsiders were African Americans and she was appalled that “they” were being allowed to come to this affluent school. She went to the principal to stand her ground and told him that he was to ensure her that her son would never have to sit near one in class or on a bus. “Assure me of that or I’ll pull my son from your school,” she said.

The principal said that the chances were very good that her son would sit near an African American as was his hope and she did indeed take her son out of that school. She told this story as another employee, an African American woman, sat at the end of the table and listened. Diane had great composure. The others of us did not. We stood against the racism she spoke of but the woman never “got it.” She didn’t hear us as we defended the rights of everyone to attend that private school or anything else they pleased to do. And I don’t remember her coming back to volunteer again.

Later in the afternoon I said to my boss that this woman was going to be very surprised when she got to heaven and discovered people of other colors were there too. But Karen wisely said that by then the woman would have gotten it and all would be well.

Our scripture today is about accepting outsiders. Rod spoke of the centurion in the Gospel of Matthew, but according to the Gospel of Luke, this centurion was an outsider who loved the Jewish people and even built the synagogue. So he might be an outsider but he was a good guy. And he obviously believed that Jesus could do something for his dilemma – he had a sick servant. Perhaps the servant was his friend. I think that because he has not said that he needs his servant to get well. He asks for healing because his servant is paralyzed and “suffering terribly.” He cared about his servant’s pain which leads me to believe that the servant was more than a servant; he was valued more than just someone who performed duties. He was most likely a friend at some level….but even at that, he was probably still an outsider.

One of the beauties of this story is that Jesus learned something here as well. Father John Haughey, in his article “There’s No Them There,” says that “Jesus is described as being “amazed” that the centurion thought that Jesus’ relationship with God was such that if God gave the word Jesus could pronounce that word and the paralysis would leave the loved servant. The centurion expressed his belief in an unusual way. He saw his own relationship to his commander-in-chief (the emperor?) as similar to Jesus’ relationship to God and believed this would produce the snap-the-fingers obedience that would have one of his soldiers do what the centurion ordered him to do.

“The centurion was an outsider; he was outside the ambit of the covenantal care that God had for God’s people. Or so Jesus had thought! But as a result of the faith he found in the man—it could not be explained if it were not for God’s direct action in him— he realized that there was a blurring of the lines between “us” and “them” that Jesus had been brought up to believe. “I assure you I have never found this much faith in Israel” (10). The “us” is wider than I thought, he is saying here.

“Matthew uses this moment in Jesus’ ministry and experience of God as operating even outside of Israel to explain to his hearers what he had learned. “Many will come from the east and the west and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the kingdom of heaven, but the children of the kingdom will be driven out into outer darkness, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth” (11-12). The insiders are turned out and the outsiders will be brought in. This is one of the central theses of Matthew’s Gospel. It explains the experience of Jewish Christians about how the Messiah could be sent to Israel but be accepted more readily by the Gentiles than by God’s own people. The uninstructed see; the supposedly knowledgeable are blind.”

Don’t you wish that Father Haughey was wrong? Don’t you wish that we could all see like Jesus could? Into people’s hearts and not their skin color or tattoos or socio economic situation. If Jesus were telling this story to us today, what would he mean?

Remember he is talking about the Jews and the Gentiles there. What does it mean for us today? Who are the outsiders in our world today?

As Rod and I discussed this subject, he defined “an outsider” as “anyone who would be better off if they were like us.”

So where does that leave us? Who is an outsider in Lafayette? At First Baptist? In your neighborhood?

Is an outsider someone who has a Mohawk haircut and tattoos?

Is an outsider someone who was born in a different country or culture?

Is an outsider someone who doesn’t live like we do?

Then the question comes, to whom are we outsiders?

Surely there is someone out there who thinks “we” are a bit weird and if we only lived like they did, our lives would be just fine. This may surprise you that a dear, now deceased member once told me that she felt like an outsider here for over 20 years.

We are all most likely outsiders somewhere….to someone. Does it matter if we can define an outsider? You know, in the end, I would urge you not to spend a lot of time defining the outsiders in our lives. Instead spend more time being aware of the people around you. Spend more time trying to understand how another lives. Spend more time with people who are “different” from you. I know I learn a lot as an advocate at Lafayette Urban Ministry each week.

So how about spending out time learning and loving, instead of being critical? Our time would be better spent, not trying to make the outsiders into insiders, but to simply treat all people the same.

Let me leave you with this: The centurion and his servant weren’t the only outsiders in the story. To some, Jesus was an outsider himself. He strayed outside the lines of the Jewish religious life of the day so to those who wanted him gone, he was an outsider too.

In Matthew 7:12 (The Sermon on the Mount), Jesus says to us – one outsider to another: 12So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

Let’s take this a step farther – do to others as you would do to Jesus. If we do that with a loving and gracious heart, there will be no more outsiders at all.