Sermon preached by the Reverend Nicholas Lang, Rector

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

13^th Sunday after Pentecost, August 26, 2007

May our lives be endowed with God’s creativity, enhanced with Holy Spirit wisdom, and visited by Christ’s peace. Amen.

An arrogant, smug Highways department employee stopped at a farm to talk with an old farmer. “I need to inspect your farm for a possible new road,” he told the farmer. “OK,” the old man said, “but don’t go in that field.” The Highways employee snapped “I have the government authority behind me and I can go wherever I want. See this card? It opens all kinds of doors for me and gives me the right to go anywhere on your land.” So the old farmer went about his farm chores.

A little later, he heard loud screams and saw the Highways employee running for the fence – following close behind the farmer’s prize bull, madder than a hornet’s nest and gaining on the man at every step. The farmer called out, “Show him your card!!”

I wonder if the person who asked Jesus the “Will only a few be saved?” question was not like that Highways employee – smug in his own security and assuredness that he was entitled, on the “A” list, guaranteed to be saved. And Jesus may have been thinking “Well, when you arrive at God’s door, show him your card. See where it gets you!”

In other words, in God’s realm it is not who you know but how you live and love that matters. Renowned preacher James Forbes once said “No one gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.”

It may seem a huge paradox that in the midst of his going from town to village one after another to heal and comfort and bring a message of God’s love and faithfulness to all kinds of people that Jesus would suggest that it will be really hard to get a reserved seat at the banquet table in God’s Kingdom.

Picture yourself sitting in the crowd hanging on his every word, observing the miracle cures of the sick, feeling an overwhelming sense of acceptance and compassion and then, out of the blue, someone pops the “Will only a few be saved?” question and Jesus goes into this brief discourse about the narrow door. How would you feel? How do you feel hearing it told again two thousand years later? It doesn’t make sense, does it? And, as Judge Judy Sheindlin says on her TV court show, “If it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not true.”

The person who asked the “Will only a few be saved?” question should have known enough about the covenant God made with the Hebrew community not to set himself apart and exclude others but to be a blessing to them, to bring them into God’s banquet, to spread God’s love – not limit it.

Could the “narrow door” have been a metaphor for this person’s narrow-mindedness? Could Jesus be telling him that he needed to lead a more expansive life, trusting in and claiming God’s abundance, and offering radical welcome to all those on the margins of religion and society – rather than to worry about whether or not his hide was safe?

And it may be an old question but there are still people around – some of them in prominent positions – who are convinced that they are among the chosen, sure that they know how God thinks about things and certain that God is on their side rather than the other way around. The “Will only a few be saved?” question proposes a wall of separation between who is in and who is out. It reeks with judgment about who is worthy to enter and who is not, who is a sinner and who is righteous.

Humankind has from time immemorial been a master of division and exclusion and what more coveted “in” group could there be than those who are guaranteed of getting to heaven – and able to flaunt it over the “less desirables” (or at least those they deem to be thus.) And how narrow-minded a perspective, how out of touch with who God is.

Over the next few weeks, we will be getting brand new doors on the front entrance of the church. The ones they will replace have served St. Paul’s well for more than 75 years. Their replacements will look much the same and they must do the same: offer an unconditional, unassuming, authentic invitation and welcome to everyone. I don’t think Jesus wants us – the church – to have a narrow door. And I don’t think Jesus wants us to have narrow minds and become people who live narrow lives.

So I think the safest bet is not to be worried about who will be saved but about what we are doing to name everyone we can as our own, heaping blessing upon blessing on them, reaching out and drawing in, setting a place for everyone at the table God spreads for us.

Author and humorist Garrison Keillor once wrote: “Our clear picture of Episcopalians was of wealthy people, Yale graduates, worshipping God in extremely good taste. The Episcopal Church was the one in wingtips, the church of Scotch and soda. So, when I moved to New York and walked into Holy Apostles, I was surprised to see no one in suits. Nobody was well dressed. A congregation of a hundred souls on lower Ninth Avenue, a church with no parking lot, which was in need of paint, and the sanctuary ceiling showed water damage but which managed I learned to support and operate a soup kitchen that fed a thousand New Yorkers every day, more than a million to date.

“Black faces in the sanctuary, old people, exiles from the Midwest, the lame and the halt, divorced ladies, gay couples – a real good anthology of the faith, I felt glad to be there. When we stood for the prayers, bringing slowly to mind the goodness and the poverty of our lives, the lives of others, the life to come, it brought tears to my eyes, the simple way Episcopalians pray.”

I’d call that the kingdom of God on earth and I’d wager anything that God in no way wants us to think that there is a narrow door at the entrance – nor that anyone would need to shown him their card to get in.