December 4, 2010

• Outsiders and insiders, rejoice together!

  Hear again what Paul wrote to the church at Rome as paraphrased in the Message Bible: “May our dependably steady and warmly personal God develop maturity in you so that you get along with each other as well as Jesus gets along with us all. Then we’ll be a choir—not our voices only, but our very lives singing in harmony in a stunning anthem to the God and Parent of our Master Jesus! ^7-13So reach out and welcome one another to God’s glory. Jesus did it; now you do it! Jesus, staying true to God’s purposes, reached out in a special way to the Jewish insiders so that the old ancestral promises would come true for them. As a result, the non-Jewish outsiders have been able to experience mercy and to show appreciation to God.”  In his paraphrase, Eugene Peterson has emphasized the focus of Paul’s letter was to bring the insiders and outsiders together to show appreciation to God.  Paul, in the letter quotes a passage from Deuteronomy 32 verse 43 which Peterson paraphrases as “Outsiders and insiders, rejoice together!”  The New International Version translates the passage to read as follows, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with God’s people.”  Peterson has replaced Gentiles and God’s people with the words outsiders and insiders.  If we go to the original verse that Paul quoted it reads in the New International version this way, “Rejoice, you nations, with God’s people.”  Paul appears to have done some paraphrasing by using Gentiles instead of the word nations in the original text.  I think this is more than just a matter of semantics.  I think it reveals the changing way who is in and who is out has been defined.

  Deuteronomy is written to an ancient people trying to find their place in the political world.  They were struggling to assert themselves in a region of competing tribes or nations.  For them, God was a national god, defending them against other nations and their gods.  Outsiders were anyone who was not a part of your tribe.  By the time of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, the challenge for believers was protecting their faith tradition against those who believed otherwise.  The Jews were the insiders and those who worshipped differently were the outsiders.  Peterson has captured the global sense that the challenge for us is to see how our connection with God should lead us to get beyond our petty differences and rejoice together in what God is doing in and through us.  Insiders and outsiders are defined in many different ways in today’s world.  Nationality continues to define others as in or out.  The events of September 11, 2001 caused many in the United States to define insiders and outsiders based on how they responded to the attack.  On September 20^th President Bush issued this challenge to the nations of the world, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”  This same event caused many people to define outsiders as Muslims and insiders as Christians.  The economic crisis in the world has also caused some of us to define insiders and outsiders based on who has adequate income and assets and those who do not.  People are looking for others to blame.  Some blame others because they are struggling or others want to blame those without for their own situation.  It seems very important to us that we can define some as being outsiders and ourselves as insiders.

  The value in defining who are insiders and who are outsiders to us is a feeling of safety, a feeling of being with our own.  We find comfort in being together with others who think as we do, who behave as we do, and who believe as we do.  There are reasons why we have different denominations, different colleges, different restaurants, different kinds of music, and the list goes on and on.  We like different things, we enjoy different experiences, we think differently, and we love differently and we seek to find others who enjoy what we enjoy.  The point of God’s coming into the world was not to get rid of the differences, thank you God!  Jesus said his teachings would bring conflict, the disciples had their differences, and certainly the followers of Jesus have had their differences.  The point isn’t that we eliminate the insiders and the outsiders.  The point is we recognize the value of the difference, we recognize we are all creations of the Creator, and we can come together and worship God with all of our differences.  This Advent season as we consider God coming into this world in human form, we should consider what the presence of Jesus meant for the world and for us.  Jesus did not eliminate differences, he did not end conflict, nor did he insist that everyone who followed him be the same.  What he did was bring together, men and women, rich and poor, healthy and sick, Jews, Samaritans, Syrophoenicians, Greeks, and Romans and taught them God loved them without insisting they change.  The Roman centurion did not have to cease being a soldier for Jesus to heal his companion.  The Samaritan woman at the well did not have to give up her ethnic identity to receive living water from Jesus.  Zacchaeus did not have to become poor to follow Jesus. Paul did not lose the thorn in his flesh to be called by Jesus.  The women were not silenced by Jesus or told they were less than in God’s dominion.  Jesus shows us we can come together with all of our differences to worship God.  In fact it is only when we come together in all of our differences that we truly worship God.  Outsiders and insiders, rejoice together!  Amen.

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