Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

January 3, 1999

We warn our children, don’t we? We say, "Never talk to a stranger. Don’t take candy from a stranger." And we ourselves are wary of strangers. When one comes to the door, we peer through the window. Or we open the door just a crack. "What do you want?" we say.

And it is true, that we have reason to pull back. In the anonymity of a city, where people are unconnected to one another, we don’t want to foolishly misplace our trust. One of the most beautiful objects of art that I saw during my recent trip to New Zealand was a magnificent cape of feathers which was presented to the British explorer Captain Cook by the chief of the Maori people, the indigenous people of New Zealand, when Cook first landed on their shores. They thought he was a god. Instead of blessing them, though, he brought violence and disease and death.

Or in a story a little closer to home, the Oregonian reported the following incident. A charming stranger happened into Jason’s Pub, and the regulars there couldn’t pass up the man’s offer to buy them all a round of drinks. He had a distinguished look about him and a fistful of crisp $100 bills. He even promised to take two of the women on a shopping spree as soon as he finished his beer. He was quick to make jokes. When somebody asked how he made his money, the stranger quipped, "I just robbed a bank." That brought a big laugh. That was just before two men walked up to the stranger and flashed their badges. The next thing the bar patrons knew, the man was led out of the tavern in handcuffs. People could hardly believe it when the detectives returned and told them the stranger was a suspected bank robber. Just ten blocks away a man had walked into the First Interstate Bank and demanded money. The crowd at Jason’s Pub were astonished as they talked about the stranger who had entertained them for two hours. Bartender Bob Riley said, "He wasn’t nervous at all. He was calm, he was cordial, and he was polite." One of the customers remarked, though, "The terrible thing about was that he was spending <my> money. "That’s <my> bank."

So we have to be wary. Wary of who buys us drinks. Wary of who comes to the door. And yet, there’s another side to the story. The stranger often comes bearing gifts. Gifts that we sorely need. Gifts that will move us to the wholeness we long for so desperately. And so we open ourselves, sometimes at great odds, that we might come ever closer to the Unity that is. For you see, that is the promise of the stranger of legend and myth—to bring to new life what is dormant within. The word strange comes from the Old French, estrange, which means extraordinary. So the stranger calls from us the extra-ordinary, the "beyond the ordinary" which lies latent within and must be awakened.

Whether or not we are consciously aware of it, we are all searching for the one who can help us become whole. Therein lies the persistence and popularity of the fictional stranger who comes in time of trouble to a people or to a community. Popular culture is full of such figures. There is the Lone Ranger. "Who was that masked man?" And Zorro. There is Batman, in his secret cave, and of course Superman, who is disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter. And all of us who are mild-mannered reporters or mild-mannered bankers or mild-mannered teachers or carpenters or doctors know that there is a Superman or Wonder Woman lurking inside. One who acts with courage and integrity. One who puts the needs of the community before her own needs. One who defends the weak and speaks boldly to the forces of evil. One who has, if you will, special powers that can be tapped for the good. Each one of us can be extra-ordinary. Beyond the usual, the humdrum, the everyday. And we know that. And, at some deep place, we reach for that.

The stranger in western films rides into town, not just to save the town from the bad guys, but also so show the townspeople the strength and goodness within themselves. Typically, when the stranger rides in, the community is in disorder and confusion. The leaders can no longer lead, and some people are fleeing because they have lost hope. This kind of tale takes us as far back as Beowulf—the dragon, or the dragon’s stand-in, is laying waste to the countryside. Alienation and despair rule. Then the hero rides in.

Let’s take one of my favorite westerns, Shane, for example. It’s typical. The hero’s identity remains anonymous. "Just call me Shane," he says. Not Shane Williams. Or William Shane. Just Shane. If you’re going to be a symbol, you can’t have a name. Shane is not coming in as just one of the guys, but as the prophet figure who opens the eyes of the townspeople. He joins with them to defeat the forces of evil, but he can never be one of them, can never marry the woman, father the little boy. His identity is a thing apart and he protects it by never giving away his name.

So if the silent hero is one of the conventions of our story, so is the community’s willingness to take him in and to trust him, in spite of his silence. This trust is symbolized by the offering of a meal to the stranger and his ritual eating of the meal. This is a kind of test for the host community. "For I was an hungered," Jesus says, "and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in." (Matthew 25:35). Another test calls for a joining together in a feat of courage, which Shane and townsman Starrett do when they win a saloon brawl. There is of course the spectacular shoot-out, in which justice prevails. The adoring woman contents herself with a kiss—well, this movie was made three decades ago—and Shane says to young Joey, who has followed him on foot, "You go home to your mother and father and grow up strong and straight. Take care of your mother and father—both of them." This is a kind of benediction, which invites the coming of new life symbolized through the boy. Who can forget, even after 30 years, Joey’s plaintive cry, "Shane, come back, Shane!" But Shane cannot claim the pleasures of ordinary domestic life. This stranger has opened the townspeople to a new world of hope and unity, and even as they call for his return, he knows he must go and let them develop and refine their new knowledge and strength. They think they need the stranger himself, but it is the message of the extraordinary that gives them life. The message, not the man. That, incidentally, is how Unitarian Universalists see Jesus. It is the message, not the man, that saves.

And, as with Jesus, some people are fearful of the prophet, the stranger who introduces them to an alien way of being. The Hebrew word for "stranger" is zar, which is also the root of the word "border," for strangers are always across the border from our consciousness, bringing us a perspective we cannot see from where we are. And because the revelation of the stranger contradicts what we have always known to be true, contradicts our version of reality, he is a frightening and dangerous figure. Our own fragile identities are grounded in our world view, after all, and to threaten that identity is to court danger. Society may define the stranger as not quite human, may avoid him, or attack him. He is gypsy, Jew, immigrant, Black man, gay, transgendered, homeless.

We pray for the virtues: "O Lord, teach me about courage, about persistence in the face of failure, teach me patience and endurance, give me hope. Send me a wise teacher," we pray, "one who can lead me out of this prison of self. But what—am I hearing you correctly, O God—you’re sending me a teacher, but it’s, it’s a transgendered person. That’s really not the kind of teacher I was looking for, if you know what I mean. I mean, they are so weird! Do you really expect me to learn from someone like that? To learn about hope in the face of hopelessness? To learn how to face rejection and loss? To learn how to love in ways I’ve never loved before? Oh, I see what you mean, Lord. I see what you mean."

Spiritual growth comes from being willing to venture beyond the borders, beyond the boundaries, into the unknown. In the contradiction of what is known—whether it come in the form of art or travel or people whose values and ideas are very different from our own—in the contradiction, in the difference, comes the stretching of the spirit that characterizes the birthing process. In order to engage in this transformation, we must drop our categories, our labels, our objectifying of others. We must be willing to engage without naming, to stop protecting ourselves by our naming, by our relentless categorizing. We must agree to just be with, the I and Thou of Buber. He tells us, "Between you and <this other> is mutual giving: You say Thou to it and give yourself to it, it says Thou to you and gives itself to you. . . . . It does not help to sustain you in life, it only helps you to glimpse eternity."

My sister has two boys, and they are set, the one against the other. The younger boy came out recently as gay, and the older, a super-macho kind of guy, broke down in tears when he learned about his brother. He has not spoken to his brother since. Thanksgiving, he stayed away from the family gathering. Same thing on Christmas. He will not visit the home when his brother is there. Though hurt by the rejection of his older brother, the younger guy is doing OK. He has accepted his sexual orientation, has loads of friends, is a talented and personable young man. It’s the older boy who is suffering—suffering in his self-imposed isolation from his beloved brother, suffering I expect from not being able to accept the feminine side of himself, thrown against the wall of his own silence and pretense of male strength. And yet I have hope that one day, pushed by his loss, pushed by his need for his brother’s love, he will open to the otherness he fears and move into a new place.

Sometimes that’s the way we have to do it. We have to be desperate, we have to be pushed. Nobody wants to be--uncomfortable, after all. What was that that Jesus said? "I have come that ye may be comfortable"? No, "I have come that ye may have life." Anyway, for me, I have to be pushed. I’m not exactly your spiritual athlete. Enough pain, though, and I’ll take a step. And somehow God usually manages to supply the push. I remember how I found Unitarian Universalism. And my life. And my ministry.

It all started like this. The place was Lexington, Kentucky. The time was 20 years ago, and I was a newly separated woman. Much to my surprise, I found I was no longer welcome as a teacher at the Baptist Church, where I had been a faithful member for years. As is common in divorce, I lost not only my husband but my whole social structure. One day as I was bemoaning my losses to a therapist, she said to me, "Why don’t you go over to the Unitarian Universalist church—there are a lot of divorced people over there."

And I did go. I went to Friday night volleyball, the big social event of the week at the church. But since I didn’t know anyone at all, I found myself sitting there on the sidelines. As each group of players finished their game, others would get up and go rushing in to take their places—and I was too shy to move. After about three games, I was feeling pretty sad and discouraged, when suddenly a hand reached down, and a friendly voice said, "Don’t you want to play?" I looked up into the face of Titus, a Black man, a native of Nigeria, and I said, "Oh, yes!" With one hand he pulled me up, welcoming me into the group. And as they say, the rest is history. Pretty soon I was on a committee. Then leading some of the Sunday services. Then on my way to seminary. You might say, Titus is the reason I’m here with you today. I could just as easily have walked away from the church that night and never gone back, sure that I was not wanted. But a hand reached out to me. The irony was not lost on me. You see, I was a Southern woman who had never been in a church where Black people were accepted. But this Black man, this man from Africa, this stranger made all the difference in my life.

When you think about it, what drives the stranger to leave the security of family and home, to set out in a new land? One African writer says, "The stranger is the spirit of the world in motion." This is what gives the stranger special value: it is nothing less than "the breath of God" that brings the stranger to us. Because he is strange, the ground upon which we stand will be shaken, and we will be afraid. But tribal myths show that unless the stranger arrives, there is no possibility of any significant change in the village. And so with fear and trembling, the villagers welcome him.

"Do not belittle any person," says the Talmud, "nor despise anything; for every person has his hour, and everything has its place. We see creation as finite, things as objects to be manipulated, people as beings set apart from one another. But God is infinite, bringing all things into Oneness and Wholeness. As we come to recognize the intrinsic worth of the other, we begin to cross over from the creation to the Creator. "And Moses stepped into the darkness, where God was." (Exodus 20:18) Faith does not depend on light but on darkness. We step into the unknown, the unfamiliar, in this world and paradoxically God ceases to be so much of a stranger.

Nora Gallagher took such a step when she helped her friend Ben, who had AIDS, through his dying. She had been pretty immature and self-indulgent for most of her life, she said, and then Ben realized he was dying and asked her to be his "alternate health care agent." "I ran up against my own nature everywhere I went," she writes: "For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face."

"In the midst of this," she continues, "I learned something about faith, its mucky nature, how it lies down in the mud with the pigs and the rabble. As I signed . . . his living will, I imagined standing in the hallway of a hospital with perhaps a few doctors in white coats, making compassionate and elegant decisions, gracefully. I did not imagine what came to pass. I sat in Ben’s living room, jet-lagged, shoveling Chinese take-out food into my mouth, my own house strewn with dirty laundry and cat litter boxes. I was deciding whether to ask a doctor for a drug that would help end Ben’s life. I had not imagined being so tired that I wanted Ben to hurry up and die. In short, I had imagined a better version of myself. Instead I was the same old fucked-up woman.

"In that time I learned that everything is God’s: my fucked-up self, my dirty laundry, my harrowing inability to be perfect for Ben. . . . . Because God is inside everything, findable in everything, because—I became convinced—I would not have made it through Ben’s death without God. God is not too good to hang out with jet-lagged women with litter boxes in their dining rooms or men dying of AIDS, . . . God is not too good for anything."

"Even the long-beloved/ was once/ an unrecognized stranger," writes Jane Hirshfield in the poem I read earlier. "What fools we were, not to have seen." We have to be ready, else we will talk with the prophet on the road to Emmaeus and not know to whom we speak. The stranger could be—could be, well, anyone.

Myself, I’ve decided in this New Year to speak to the dragon, to the one who is different, to the stranger. I’ll start just on the street--literally, I mean--when I take my daily walk. I will speak to the woman with the bleached blonde hair and the cigarette, expelled from her place of work for the moment; to the dapper young man who thinks he’s got the world by the tail; to the old man with the two days’ growth of beard and the red eyes and bent shoulders; to the teen from Outside In who has rings through his flesh in terribly tender places and spiked and colored hair. All these people are the same, I know. They are not different from me. They wake up each day wanting the same things I want: meaning in their lives; self-respect; a bit of comfort along the way; and love, love, love, always love. They will live and they will die, just as I will, in their own due time. And they are infused with the Holy, they are part of the body of God, just as I am. We are not separate, we are one. No strangers, really, just part of our lost selves reclaimed. The anger and the lust and the longing, reclaimed.

Do you want to welcome the stranger in this New Year? Then do what you would do for any guest. Set a place at the table. The table of your life, I mean. Make a space, watch, don’t be in such a hurry. And don’t be fooled by the form of your guest—the age, the size, the shape, the color. You could expect a lover and you get a friend. Or vice-versa. Or you might be reading a book of great wisdom, but that night at bedtime your 5-year-old tells you what you need to know. "The found world surprises—that is its nature." Be ready to recognize the surprises in this New Year.

Remember that when you allow yourself to open to another, when you dare to hear that other’s fear and longing, you will come to understand that what you thought was your lonely secret is not just yours at all, but common to us all. You will glimpse the unity that is beyond each of us and yet held by all of us in common. You will touch for at least a moment the Wholeness which is both your source and destiny.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Holy One, you come to us in so many guises. May we recognize you when you arrive and not turn away in fear or ignorance. Give us courage to accept ourselves with all our frailties and failures, lest in rejecting ourselves, we reject the holiness in others. Make us ever open to your Spirit, that we might grow towards the wholeness that is our true heart’s desire.

Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now, and watch carefully for the coming of the stranger.

OPENING WORDS

Even the long-beloved

was once

an unrecognized stranger.

Just so,

the chipped lip

of a blue-glazed cup,

blown field

of a yellow curtain,

might also,

flooding and falling,

ruin your heart.

A table painted with roses.

An empty clothesline.

Each time,

the found world surprises—

that is its nature.

And then

what is said by all lovers:

What fools we were, not to have seen."

--Jane Hirshfield

Copyright 1999, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.