Making Room for Others: Reflections for Palm Sunday

 

RCL Palm Sunday C [i]

13 April 2025

 

Church of the Epiphany

Surrey BC

 

            In the fall of 1990 our youngest child was born.  Paula and I quickly realized that the car we had at the time could not accommodate all the car seats required for our three children.  So we did what many families do in North America.  We bought our first family van, the first of three vans we would own over the years.

 

            When we first bought the van, we valued the simple fact that it was larger.  We could not only put all the child seats in, but there was plenty of room for groceries and all the other stuff that comes when you have young children such as strollers, diaper bags and toys to keep them occupied.  One other advantage was that each child had extra space around them.  That meant we didn’t have to listen to arguments between our children about crowding and a sibling ‘trespassing’ on the space of another.  Because we often travelled down to the United States to visit family, the extra space brought us more peace over long days of driving.

 

            Making space for other people is not an unimportant aspect of learning to live in community, whether our local community, our national community or our international community.  It is one of the ways that we care for one another, and it is a pathway to peaceful co-existence.  The poet Robert Frost wrote in one of his poems that ‘good fences make good neighbors’ [ii], a line that has generated much discussion but remains nevertheless an accurate observation about human beings.  But if those fences remain so fixed that we make no room for the other, then we risk the conflicts that have plagued our species since we first learned that a stick can become a weapon.  That same poem by Frost includes the verse, ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’. [iii]

 

            There is something about God that doesn’t like walls, something about God that seeks to make room for others.  Paul understands this when he writes to the Christians in the city of Philippi.  He reminds them that Christ Jesus “. . . though he was in the form of God, he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit.  But he emptied himself . . . (and) humbled himself . . . “ to restore our relationship to our Creator. [iv]  In other words, Christ Jesus makes room for us by setting aside his privilege as the Word of God in order that we might draw closer to God.

 

            During last week’s Lenten study I asked the participants to discuss ‘making room for others’:  “Who are the people or communities we need to make room for in the life of our Parish?”  This is a question that we as a Parish and as a Diocese need to ask whenever we consider our role in God’s mission.  Who are the people or communities that are not here among us?  How might we ‘make room’ for them in our outreach, our worship, our sharing of the good news and our pastoral care?  How does our building help or hinder us in ‘making room’?  What in a re-developed building and property invite others to join us in ‘taking care of the neighbourhood’?

 

            These are questions that we began to ask in our feasibility study of this past fall.  These are the questions that will guide our Parish Council in the months ahead as we work with our consultants to discern the next steps towards the re-development of this land and its buildings.

 

            But in all of this we will be guided by the example of Christ Jesus.  Making room for others is what God did in the act of creation.  Making room for others is what Christ Jesus did in redeeming us through his self-giving.  Making room for others is what the Holy Spirit does by awakening our imaginations and renewing our vision for the future.

 

Let us pray.

O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown.  Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us as we make room for others as you have made room for us; through Christ our Lord.  Amen. [v]

 

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[i] Isaiah 50.4-9a; Psalm 31.9-16 (BAS); Philippians 2.5-11 ; Luke 19.28-40.

 

[ii] Robert Frost, ‘Mending Wall’ as published at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall and accessed on 12 April 2025.

 

[iii] Frost, ‘Mending Wall’.

 

[iv] Philippians 2.6, 7a, 8a (Common English Bible).

 

[v] Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), 317 adapted.

 

What Wondrous Love Is This? Reflections for the 5th Sunday in Lent

 

https://stushieart.com/tag/john-121-8-art 

RCL Lent 5C [1]

6 April 2025

 

Church of the Epiphany

Surrey BC

 

            In the summer of 1976 I accompanied a group of high-school students as a chaperone during their travels in Germany.  Germany was a divided country in 1976, the western two-thirds part of NATO, the eastern one-third part of the Soviet bloc.  Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union coloured life in both Germanies and had an impact on any travellers.  These tensions were most keenly felt in the divided city of Berlin, located right in the middle of East Germany, but a city that officially was governed by the United Kingdom, France, the United States and the Soviet Union.

 

            So it was with some anxiety that we travelled to Berlin that summer.  There were only two highways that tour buses from West Germany were allowed to use and no bus could stop until it reached Berlin.  There were military checkpoints all along the route as well as barbed wire and other barriers.  Everywhere we went in the city, we were aware that we were surrounded by the armed forces of four nations – not counting the armed forces of the two Germanies.

 

            While we were in the western zone, one of our students lost his travel wallet with all his money, his ID, his airplane tickets and, most importantly, his US passport.  On the black market a US passport was worth about US $500 those days – more than US $2800 in today’s dollars.  Without his passport this young man was trapped in the city.

 

            We called the US consulate and the local police station.  We retraced our steps from that day’s ramblings through the city.  We even made arrangements for me to stay with the boy in the event the consulate could not provide him with the right documents before the rest of the group needed to leave Berlin.  To say that we were worried would be an understatement.

 

            But then, in the early evening, came a telephone call from the local police station.  A local resident had found the wallet and had brought it to the police station.  When we went to pick it up, everything was there – money, ID, plane tickets and passport – and a note.  “If you find that there anything missing,” the note read, “please call me at this number and I shall replace it.”

 

            It was late evening and we were leaving early in the morning, so we left a quickly scribbled note of thanks with the police who agreed to pass it along to the gentleman.  We never met him, but fifty years later I remember the effect of his kindness and his trusting generosity.  We were, I admit, scared of being in Berlin.  The day before we had been followed by an obvious East German security agent while we were visiting the eastern sector of the city.  The presence of so many soldiers and barriers had spooked the kids and the chaperones.  But this man, whose name I cannot know remember, changed everything for us.

 

            What he had done was what any honest, law-abiding citizen would do.  But he went the further mile by offering to recompense our young student should anything be missing.  An ordinary act of decency became so much more.  I remember it.  I hope that the young man – who would now be in his sixties – remembers it as well.

 

            Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem where he will face opposition, betrayal, trial and torture, then execution.  How much of this he knows has been debated by theologians for two thousand years, but he knew that he was, as the police sometimes say, ‘a person of interest’ to the authorities.  So what does he do?  He stops outside the city to spend an evening with his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus.  In their midst he knows that he can expect the hospitality friends share with friends, the respect disciples show their teacher.  Despite the tensions and the risks he is facing, what Jesus expects of this household is not extraordinary.

 

            Then out of the blue Mary does something that is extraordinary.  Mary takes a jar of expensive perfumed ointment and anoints Jesus’ feet.

 

            Everyone who was present at this dinner knew that trouble was about to erupt.  The religious and the political authorities were fully aware of Jesus’ activities and the threat that he was posing to the status quo.  Here he was, for example, in the home of a man whom he had recently raised from the dead.  But even in a moment such as this, there is room for unexpected generosity.  There is a place for the aroma of fine perfume to penetrate and to sweeten the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.

 

            What Mary does is what every disciple of Jesus will have the opportunity to do.  We all will have opportunities to do what Mother Teresa called ‘something beautiful for God’.  These opportunities will present themselves when we least expect them.  They will call us to take a risk rather than keep our heads low and out of trouble.  These opportunities may come in full view of a crowd such as Mary’s or they may come in the privacy of a note slipped into the lost but now found wallet of a young man in a besieged city.  But these opportunities will and do come.

 

            In a week’s time we will enter in our yearly journey with Jesus from the palms of Palm Sunday through the cross of Good Friday to the empty tomb of Easter.  I have been known to call Holy Week as ‘the week that makes the whole year holy’.  Over the course of the week we remember God’s extravagant generosity to us and to all of humanity past, present and future.  We remember that God gives God’s very self for us, so that we might know the height, the depth and the breadth of God’s love for us and for all whom God has made and cherishes.

 

            God has made us for a life of eucharistia, the free and unconditional offering of our selves, our souls and our beings through our time, our talents and our treasures.  We respond in gratitude for all that God has bestowed freely upon us.  We are called to go beyond the ordinary into the extraordinary.

 

            That German gentleman need only to have dropped off the wallet, but he went one step further in his offer to make all things right for a young stranger he did not know.  Mary would have surprised the dinner guests by washing Jesus’ feet with water, the job of the lowest household servant, but she goes even further using the expensive jar of ointment.  What opportunities will God present to us to go beyond the expected by doing something beautiful and unexpected?

 

            There is an old hymn from the religious revival that came upon the southern United States in the decades between 1790 and 1820.  It’s a hymn that I love that reminds of God’s almost unimaginable generosity.  Sometimes I sing it to myself to stir up my will to do what Mary did and what so many saints, known and unknown, have done and are doing now by freely doing more than is expected.  Why?  Because this is what God has done for us.

 

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!

What wondrous love is this, O my soul!

What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss

to bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,

to bear the dreadful curse for my soul! [2]

 

What wondrous love indeed!

 

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[1]  Isaiah 43.16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3.4b-14; John 12.1-8.

 

[2] Verse 1 of ‘What Wondrous Love Is This’, Common Praise 1998, #400.