MUSIC & INSPIRATION: "Teach Us How to Pray"

HOMILY: "On Destabilizing the Church"

Sunday, September 7, 2025

Matthew 25:31-46

1.

There’s an assumption we’ve been living with—in mainline denominations at least—that good religion is stable religion; that true Christianity is balanced and balancing; that stability and balance are the desired outcomes of a steady Christian life.  Christianity is an avenue to respectability.

But returning to Jesus’ parable of the peoples this morning, I’m moved to suggest that his core commitment, his “plumbline” commitment to feeding the hungry sister, and welcoming the immigrant brother, and clothing the naked neighbor—that Jesus is so much less interested in stability and balance than he is in shelter and communion and compassion.  Stability and balance are critical if you’re up high on a ropes course, of if you’re working three dishes in the kitchen before a big crowd comes.  Don’t want to drop anything.  But not so much for Jesus.  To be honest, it’s more likely the case that the Way of Jesus, the Path of Jesus, the Practice he offers us, will more often than not shake us loose from steady habits and de-stabilize the church.  For gospel ministry.  “You shall know the truth,” wrote Flannery O’Connor years ago, “and the truth shall set you free.  But first, it’ll make you flinch.”  It’ll make you flinch.

And maybe, maybe, what the world needs most, what this fragile nation needs most is an unstable church, or maybe better yet, a de-stabilizing church!  “I was starving and you gave me food to eat.  I was thirsty and you gave me a drink.  I was a refugee and you welcomed me.  I was naked and cold and you gave me clothes to wear.  I was locked away in detention and you visited me, you emboldened me, you showed me love.”  To stand in this tradition and take these words to heart is to be shaken by the unsettling intimacy of God’s love: for every human being, for every vulnerable one of us; and for the poor, for the crushed, for the wandering stranger most of all.  And that love, my friends, is going to rock our worlds, and shake our hearts, and de-stabilize the church over and over and over again.

But you know this.

2.

It’s early June.  And I’m sitting at lunch with my dear friends and beloved Palestinian colleagues at the Wi’am Center in Bethlehem, in the West Bank.  And that staff of eight, they do lunch right; every day they prioritize that hour as relational time, as conversational time, even as communion time.  Noone rushes through it.  Rarely does any one of them miss it.  It is sacred and dear to them.  As important as anything else they do.

On occasion one will spend all morning in the kitchen, at the stove, cooking up some traditional Palestinian soup.  Other days, one will dash out for shawarma and hummus and local olives and fresh baked pita.  And then they’ll sit together at a couple of long tables, they’ll eat and talk, and laugh and sometimes one will weep.  And it happens that way every single day.  

It struck me after a couple of weeks that this is one of the ways these dear advocates, teachers, social workers survive apartheid, occupation, daily violence and now (just an hour away) genocide.  Eating together. Risking intimacy together.  Breaking bread for one another.  

On this particular June day, I’m asked about all of you, about the church I’ve left behind for a few months to visit Bethlehem and work by their side.  What makes my home church tick?  And as so often happens, I find myself talking about Antony, and our Immigration Ministry, and the many, many, many of you who step up to advocate for Antony’s freedom; to create a sense of shelter and safety for him in a scary time; to love him and pray for him; and to build an even larger network of compassion and resistance around the seacoast and across the state.  I talk about how Matthew 25 comes alive in this place, through you and your ministries.

And over warm pita and olives that tasted of the Palestinian soil, I weep a little myself as I tell them about you, about your extraordinary (and de-stabilizing) commitment to Antony; and my tears fall freely when Antony’s face flashes in my mind.  You know…that face!  There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him.  There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for him.  And that, my friends, that’s the gospel that rocks our worlds, shakes us down to the bone, and destabilizes the calloused world around us.  Fills you and me with a love that surpasses reason.  And liberates us from anxiety and despair for service, for solidarity, and for faith.  Love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  And that kind of love shakes us down.  To the core.  To what matters most.  

And of course, I know that over the summer it has asked even more of all of you, even more of your hearts, even more of your time, even more of your steadfastness.  And you have risen to the moment.  For Antony.  For faith.  For one another.  And for life.

3.

Well, that June day in Bethlehem, I’m overwhelmed by all of this as I look across the table and see a gentle soul, a gardener there at the center, with tears running down his own Palestinian cheeks.  Big tears.  And he’s feverishly wiping them away.  And when he looks up at last, makes eye contact with me, he waves his hand around the room, at his colleagues there, and he says: “That’s what they do for me.”  He doesn’t know a lot of English: so he says just this and then says it again.  “That’s what they do for me.”

It turns out that Nasser—that’s the gardener’s name—Nasser fled Gaza just a few years ago, slipping out of the besieged Strip just before the conflagration of 2023, and seeking protection, companionship, wherever he could find it.  Separated for years now from his brother, his wife and his children.  Watching from afar as Gaza is razed to the ground and his people starved.  And Nasser was taken in, welcomed, sheltered, kept safe by the eight colleagues right there at the table, noshing on pita and shawarma and watching him cry.  “That’s what they do for me.”  He has no idea when he’ll see his kids again, his wife.  In mid-July, Israel bombed the church in Gaza City where his brother was sleeping, and his brother was killed, assassinated, by unimaginably sophisticated weapons designed to traumatize and demoralize a whole people.  The staff at Wi’am held him close, all summer long, physically, spiritually; they grieved with him.  And they gathered friends for a memorial service in his brother’s memory.  “That’s what they do for me.”

Zoughbi Zoughbi and Nasser at Wi'am in Bethlehem
 

Every night now, before he goes to sleep, Nasser sends me a message—usually on his What’s App account—with some kind of prayer, some kind of blessing, some word of encouragement.  And I can’t explain what this means to me—so tender is his care for me, for some reason I can hardly comprehend.  The way that time zones work, it means I wake up most mornings to that message, to his blessing, to Nasser’s prayer.  It’s the way my days begin now.  A band of prayer connecting us in faith—over thousands and thousands of miles.

But maybe I do have an idea.  Maybe what draws Nasser to me, and that wonderful community in Bethlehem to ours in Durham, is the faith we share in Jesus and our practice of solidarity and de-stabilizing hospitality.  Like that community in Bethlehem, we see Christ’s face in the one who comes to us seeking love and shelter.  Like that community, we risk stability and balance in order to embody in this place and moment compassion and mercy.  Like Nasser’s hosts at Wi’am, we believe that faith is not a possession to be guarded, but a gift to be shared, a feast to be cherished together, a vocation of courage in a season of fear.   It’s not a walk in the park; no doubt about that.  But it is God’s grace.  In every sense.  It is God’s grace.

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