3200 years ago, Moses set out from the African continent with a band of exhausted and
overworked laborers on an incredible journey of freedom. It was full of wonders: plagues and
parting seas, pillars of cloud and fire, bread from heaven and water from the rocks. Finally, they
came to the foot of a rumbling mountain and heard the voice of their future, the voice of God.
And then Moses disappeared, leaving them in the middle of a desert, far away from anything. Everything that had ever given their lives shape and security - work and community in Egypt,
their leader into the promised land, even the foods they ate - all that disappeared into the smoke
and fire of Mt. Sinai.
What's a people to do at a time like this? Do you trust in the smoking mountain or in the Egypt you left behind? Do you move forward with a weird god who may or may not swallow people or
do you go back to your old ways, your old ideals, your old way of thinking and being, your old
time religion? Surrounded on all sides by a desert, afraid and with nothing to hold onto, Israel did
what they thought was a sensible and noble thing. They took what they valued most and melted it
down to make a monument. The cow that emerged from the fiery furnace was the creature of life:
as Osiris the bull, he carried souls to the next world; as Hathor the cow, she was the mother of all.
Their home on the range, this sacred cow would be a beacon in their darkness, would guide them
and keep them.
What do you do when a smoking mountain swallows your Moses?
Yesterday marked the third anniversary of 9/11. Like most, but not all, of us, I was in California
three years ago when renegade planes turned the World Trade Center into a cloud of dust,
slammed into the Pentagon and were finally only thwarted by a very brave group of people in
Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, including Lauren Grandcolas of Glenwood. I remember thinking that
nothing would ever be the same again. As time passed and the dust literally settled, I found that
the hardest thing to live with was this new sense of uncertainty, rather like after an earthquake,
that the ground had shifted under my feet and might do so again. Hidden and malevolent forces
were out there, threatening terrible loss. I realized how much I depended upon security, upon
routine, upon things remaining the same.
Three years have passed. There has been no second attack. Life goes on. We should be so grateful that our dead did not die in vain, that life can still be good, and yet the image of terrorists
continues to hold us in its grip. How, I ask myself, can this be? What is it about this particular
incursion that speaks to our fear so clearly that it will not let go? Why do we remember 9/11 more
than other tragedies? We can't blame the politicians. Something has touched a nerve. Is there
anything we could have done? Is an unseen enemy indeed after us? I don't know. I began to pray.
And as I did, I remembered not terrorists, because I have never met those, but something far
closer to home.
Five years ago, one of my closest friends, who had never smoked a day in her life, was diagnosed with lung cancer weeks after her 49th birthday. All of us who knew and loved her were in a state
of shock and disbelief. This couldn't be happening, not here, not to us, not to her. She was good.
She was educated and worked hard. She kept the faith and kept her chin up. She exercised. She
was not like all those smokers and drinkers and TV watchers who abuse their bodies and then
wonder why their bodies fall apart. It all seemed senseless, and because senseless, especially
terrifying. If you know anything about lung cancer, you'll know that it begins microscopically
rather like a nasty little revolutionary cell and that by the time it's visible it's usually fairly
advanced. They caught my friend's cancer at stage 2, which meant 40/60 chance of survival after
five years. The good news was that the growth was small and the growth was local. She was
booked into surgery for what looked like a reasonably routine removal of the upper half of the left
lung.
But it was not. When the surgeons opened her up, they found that the malignancy, though small, was positioned in such a way that instead of being able to remove just the upper lobe as planned,
they had to take out the entire lung, and further, since it was right at the point where the two
lungs joined they couldn't even remove it all.
She awoke in a terrible state, disoriented, frightened and in pain. Even before anyone told her anything, she knew. When I arrived, her husband and children had just stepped out. Her mother
and father were beside themselves. Unable to be positive and cheery as they had been trained to
be since childhood, they did not want to burden her with their pain and disbelief. Or perhaps they
could not face it. I'll never know.
I found her alone in a darkened room with a dinner tray. "I don't want this to go to waste," she said, ever the frugal housewife, clinging to the familiar, gesturing toward the tray, "but I can't eat. And everyone went away and no one would help me keep this from going to waste. They think
I'm contagious and if they eat this food, they'll get cancer too." I looked at my friend and I looked
at the tray and in that moment, all my fears for her and for me and for the future were focused on
that meal. We looked at one another. I knew there was only one thing to do. I said, "I'm not
going to eat this for you, because I can't do that, but we can share it." And so we divided the
meal into two portions and we prayed and we ate the quiche and we ate the salad and the bread
and the little dessert and when it was done she smiled. I felt a great calm as if I had literally
swallowed all my fear, as if the mere fact of eating together were some great and defiant
celebration of life in the face of cancer's invasion. And then she said in a voice barely above a
whisper, "I think that we may just have celebrated holy communion."
And so we come to Jesus in today's Gospel. All the tax collectors and sinners and unsavory folk were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them." All throughout the Gospels, Jesus eats with
people he shouldn't be eating with. Odd women invade his dinner parties. He tells stories about
banquets and dragging guests in off the streets. He even calls a tax collector out of a tree and
goes to his house for dinner. Two weeks ago, we heard Jesus teach "When you give a luncheon or
a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case
they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the
poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay
you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous." Is Jesus suggesting that the way
to deal with our fears is to sit down at the table and share a meal with them? Is food the way to
the future? It may seem a stretch between giving a dinner party for the poor, or the tax collector,
or the lame and the heart stopping fear of the unknown, but think about it. What is a very
common first reaction to the word "the poor?" Isn't it to feel overwhelmed? We can barely take
care of ourselves and then there are all these helpless people as well. It is like opening a
bottomless pit. I can never help them all. Or dealing with any social problem, "It is so big and
there are so many special interests. I'll drown in a black pit. Or the possibility of terrorists, or
disease. Danger on a large scale is so pervasive and so hidden that it is tempting to feel helpless
and hide behind a golden calf. But then Jesus just sits down at the table and says, don't think
about the big, abstract thing. Eat with me. Come to my barbecue. I'm always open. Jesus came
eating and drinking.
To share food is to share life. We can avoid whining friends and bad neighborhoods, wretched television shows and Aunt Minnie, but we can't avoid food. During times of peace and war,
plenty and scarcity, happiness and sadness, we break bread. Sometimes it is much, sometimes it is
little, but if we are to live, we must eat. During the crisis of 9/11 while a world grieved and a
nation went into shock, we still had to eat. And one of the most moving things that happened in
the wreckage of New York were the street kitchens that turned up spontaneously, the restaurant
owners, the neighbors, so many people setting up tables to feed the rescue workers, the
frightened, all who came to help. All were fed. They were fed by Christians and Jews and Muslims
(they even took shifts for one another during each other's holy days). They were fed by atheists,
young people, old people, dark people, native Americans and new immigrants. They were fed by
motorcyclists, hippies, housewives who flew in from Dubuque. And as long as people were
feeding one another, what was broken was being repaired, trust was being built, people who had
never spoken to one another were reaching out and discovering that they could be friends. And
for all we know, one of the people in the food lines might even have been a terrorist. But we'll
never know because no terror can stand up to so much love. No terror can stand up to such a
bounty of food. No terror can stand up to so much depth of understanding. No terror is stronger
than God who even now is looking for us, just like the shepherd who left the 99 sheep, just like
Moses who left his people in the desert and discovered, as he was talking to God, just how much
he loved those stiff necked old fools. There is nothing that God cannot turn to the good if we only
trust in God, and that is all the courage we need. The only way out is forward, day by day,
through the changes and chances of this life, knowing that God is always the careful housewife,
sweeping the very floor of heaven to find us.
228 years ago, a motley band of folk came to a new land and said, "We are the light of the world." And now the choice is up to us. Will we shine in hope or fear, in courage or despair?
Jesus said, even when there is nothing you can do, you can still love. Even when there is nothing
you can do, you can still break bread. In 2001, Redeemer stretched out arms of love and
embraced a neighborhood. Like Jesus who sat at table, and showed that a very small gesture
could change a large and mostly hostile world, we know that to embrace even this small corner of
San Rafael is, with God's help to embrace us all.
AMEN.
