Ministry Call
Resumé
Other Materials:
Church Service
Creative Pilgrimage
Book of Luke
An Altar in the World
by Barbara Brown Taylor
Available at HarperCollins
Emergent Strategy
by adrienne maree brown
Available at AK Press
Rank Stranger
Albert E. Brumley, Sr.
sung by the Stanley Brothers
Readings for August 17, 2025
- Isaiah 5:1-7
- Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18
-
Luke 12:49-56
This month’s delayed piece culminated in my giving my first sermon at Christ Church in Short Hills.
Everybody I met seemed to be a Rank Stranger
No mother or dad not a friend could I see
They knew not my name, I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me
I have had that song in my head since I read over the readings for today. It’s called Rank Stranger, and I commend the Ralph Stanley version to you.
What I saw was difficult: in Isaiah, we hear the Song of the Vineyard. God tells of building and tending his vineyard that then only yields wild grapes. It is a metaphor for how the people in His kingdom responded with injustice instead of justice, leading to corruption and bloodshed. God abandons the metaphorical vineyard to be trampled, driving home what happens when love is rejected and injustice takes root. He offered community, belonging, support, and warned how all of that is rent apart when we choose to estrange ourselves from each other.
In the Psalm, the people cry for forgiveness from God. The song remembers the vineyard and the people’s failure, but it centers on longing for reconciliation with God. After all they have gone through, they know where to turn after their folly—back to God, the true source of life and community.
Finally, in Luke, Jesus is not in soft focus; he is shaking us awake. He is bringing a fire of clarity and purification to burn off all of our dross. He tells us to snap to and see the present moment as the choice it is—stay comfortable in our differences and division or do the hard work of restoration. And he tells us to “interpret the present time,” not to sleepwalk through it.
It was that mention of fire that brought me out of my fog. I remember how I first encountered that passage, long ago in a small church. I heard the pause after the reading, and something about that silence signaled to me there was a distinct division between the US in those pews and the THEM outside in the world. I was listening with a child’s ears, but I have a palpable memory of the weight of that edit of the Word building around me—by which I mean hearing the Word with a certain slant, shaped more by our fears than by God’s love. And I also want to be clear: I do not cast aspersions on those who hear or edit the Word another way—we are all of us trying to find our ways to the Lord. We all edit, that is our part of our humanity.
I was trying to find my way to God–I wanted so badly to belong, to be counted as blessed. I prayed, went to church, sang in the choir. As I grew, it became all too apparent that I was a THEM—that pause had solidified into a shared sentiment, then tumbled into a standard, revealing a tradition that supported the law of the land in which I worshiped. I saw firsthand how an edit of the Word could be used to support an ordering of the world that aggregated into the sweep of Empire—this shall go the way WE say it will. You will conform or be damned to THEMNESS.
I myself have been damned, hundreds of times. It hurt, but I cannot deny that within the minute, the hour, the day, I experienced Grace. Someone reached down and picked me up; another scooted over to make a place for me at a crowded table. I could myself be a channel for Grace through my own actions—how could I really be so outcast?
I finally came to believe that we are not the children of a perpetually angry God. We are the children of a loving God with occasionally raging followers—and we all need to be shaken from our complacency from time to time. We need to have the thrall of Empire challenged in our hearts—our habits of exclusion, control, domination—to make us do the hard work of loving each other as Jesus loves us all. There is no toggle switch: black/white, blessed/damned, right/left in the eyes of the Almighty. Our triune God offers us profound love in a complicated, interrelated network of living.
Humanity loves a clean line. We love to flatten things out so the world makes sense to us, to conquer what is in the way of US. Conquest ends in empire, where those on the outside are crushed under blanching, homogenizing powers. Jesus came to destabilize all of that. He proved that we could be loved so much that he would die for us. He proved that “blessed or damned” was never the whole story. But he has never once said it would be easy.
What Jesus gave us was a master class in battling back the edge of empire and opening our wild, complex hearts to both US and THEM in his name. He revealed we are always loved, no matter our state out in the world, and we can always return home.
I finally made sense of the song hammering in my head—the only way to welcome and be welcomed is to stay in the discomfort of US and THEM at the same time, to keep the call of empire off-center by remembering to love and to be loved.
I want to encourage you to find ways to push back the empire in your hearts. That might look like speaking to someone you have found difficult and discovering some small commonality. It might be as silly as finally letting dandelions take over your yard, letting them actually do their work. Do it! Be the scandal of the HOA!
These are joyful refutations of empire: choosing to welcome rather than exclude, to honor life rather than control it, to see the healing power of welcoming the Other, the THEM, the Stranger time and time again.
I am so happy to be here on a day of a double baptism so we can welcome these children together, across all of our differences. And if we keep challenging the edit, if we keep reading beyond the difficult verse to find the redemption, the glory beyond, we can keep turning back to God. We can assure these beautiful families that no matter how long your child may travel, no matter how far they travel form home, they will never return to us as strangers.
God bless you and keep you. Amen.
Next Month:
AUGUST | Season After Pentecost: Ongoing Growth- Book of 1 Samuel
- The Shape of Content
by Ben Shahn
Purchase from Harvard University Press - Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God
by Strahan Coleman
Available at David C. Cook