Journey or Stranger?

JOURNEY OR STRANGER?
TEXT: Matthew 20:1-16

The novelist John Gardner has said that there are really only two stories. When you boil down all of human experience, the stories can be recognized as just variations on two simple themes: you go on a journey, or the stranger comes to town.

"You go on a journey." That's the story of day in and day out, of being born, growing up, going to school, getting married, raising a family. It's the story of the usual daily wages, according to scripture: the things that we expect will happen if we just stay on the path. Within religious circles in recent years, we've learned to talk about our "spiritual journeys;" that is, to recognize that there is at the heart of life a deep current that carries us along on our journey, many aspects of which are common, some of which are distinctive to our own human experience.

Those are the journey stories. The others are quite different: "the stranger comes to town." When the stranger comes to town, we find that we are no longer in the realm of what is familiar. Something new, something different, something foreign has entered into our experience. When the stranger comes to town, things get upset; things begin to be seen differently. We may become suspicious, disturbed, or distressed. When the stranger comes to town, the usual moorings by which we understand our life and our experience have become threatened. The world is turned upside down.

In the context of our faith experience, stories about Jesus and the stories that Jesus himself told are stranger-comes-to-town stories. The story of Jesus is the story of one who enters into our experience, not to confront us on the day to day, but rather to bring something that radically overturns the way we see the world. This is the impact that Jesus had on those of his own day. And so did his stories, like the one of the laborers in the vineyard. The story sounds strange to us; it doesn't quite fit with the way we think things should be structured. The laborers who came into the vineyard early in the day got paid exactly the same (according to the story, which Jesus said is somehow representative of the kingdom of heaven) as those who came in at the last minute. Everybody got paid the usual daily wages, but everybody didn't work the same for those wages. In fact, as if to rub it in a little more deeply, Matthew quotes Jesus as saying, "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first." That's stranger-coming-to-town language, that says when the stranger comes we're in unfamiliar territory, because this is not the way we believe a just world operates. But this is what Jesus, in his person, represents in the grand scheme of scripture.

What is that grand scheme? There is a prevailing current throughout scripture, especially in the witness of the Pharisees, called the Deuteronomic Tradition, beginning with the book of Deuteronomy and working its way through the next several books of the Bible. That Deuteronomic Tradition is the Bible's version of you-go-on-a-journey. It's the story of how we stay on the path. It's very simple -- it says that to stay on the path, to walk the journey of God, simply obey the will and the law of God and God will reward you. If you fall off the path, if you depart from the will and the way and the rule of God, God will punish you, and that punishment will be enough to nudge you back on the path again. It was the tradition that prevailed into Jesus' time. It was the tradition out of which Paul himself, even after he had become converted, said in Galatians, "As you sow, so shall you reap." This is the whole Deuteronomic tradition, the whole we-go-on-a-journey story in a few simple words.

There is another tradition, and this is the tradition that Jesus himself represents. It's called the Wisdom Tradition, and refers to books of the Bible such as Proverbs, Song of Solomon, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Job. This arose in response to the Deuteronomic Tradition, and for good reason. For even though we all like to think that if we stay on the road it will lead smoothly from one step to another, interrupted only by little bumps and detours, we know that's just not the way life works. Jesus stood in this tradition as the one who came to town as the stranger, and who told the stories of the stranger, and who reminded us that the work of God and the work of life is a work that can upset us and distress us to our very core, and change our perception of what life itself is like. You go on a journey, but then the stranger comes to town.

We're not living in Deuteronomic times, in the you-go-on-a-journey era. Each of us is on a journey, but the times we live in are the times when a stranger seems to be coming to town. The signs of this are plain in the headlines we read every day. I'm going to make you a little nervous about this, because I think these are signs of the times, for better or worse. For one thing, they make a deep assault on the market values we have taken for granted all our lives. The headlines of corruption day after day have broken with what we believe to be the integrity of who we are as a capitalist society. We have come loose from the anchor of that which we thought we were. We called it "transparency" -- we could see an honest system at work in America, and we trusted it. "As you sow, so shall you reap." Try telling that to former employees of Enron who have lost their pensions, to investors in Tyco who have lost their life savings, to somebody who has worked a lifetime only to be laid off and knowing that they will probably never be employed again, or certainly not at the wages they were making before. "As you sow so shall you reap?" These are not Deuteronomic times.

They are not Deuteronomic times when we propose to alter a 2,000-year tradition of Just War in western culture, when we begin to play with the idea that pre-emption as a national policy for dealing with evil. That 2,000-year tradition means that war is used only as a last resort, when you have exhausted every means of removing the evil before you resort to warfare. We live in times when the stranger is coming to town, the stranger who is upsetting our core values that have served civilization for 2,000 years, especially in the west.

The last and easiest example is terrorism, the experience of 9/11. We have experienced a break with our sense of invincibility, an unspoken contract that God would protect us no matter what else was going on in the world. Now we know what the rest of the world has been living through for decades. This is not new to anyone else but us. But suddenly with the coming of the stranger, of that which is unfamiliar and strikes at the very core of our economic, political, and military symbols, we now know that something different is going on in our national consciousness and experience. These are not Deuteronomic times, of the usual daily wages.

The stranger comes to town. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that there is a crack in everything that God made. If you follow the curvature of the vase of our lives, sooner or later you will come to the crack, that point in life itself that breaks the journey, the other side of which will never be the same. In our individual lives it can be something like catastrophic illness, divorce, being laid off from our lifetime jobs, or some loss that goes to the heart of our existence and we never see life the same afterward. In our collective experience, that crack in life comes through those events which begin to transform our collective sense of who we are and what we are called to be as a people.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a short story called "The Left Hand of God." He tells of a stranger who showed up at the household of an ordinary man seeking hospitality. The man let him in, curious as to who he was, and he asked the stranger, "Do you still believe in the rumor of God?" The stranger said, "Yes, I do." The householder said that in the beginning, God wanted to know more about his creation, so he sent down his right hand to learn whatever he could about humans. But the right hand couldn't do it all by itself, so it was time to send the left hand of God to intrude into human experience. Unsettling as the left hand may be, it was the only way to complete God's understanding of creation. Rilke wondered if we were living through the times of the left hand of God, for we see through the prophets and events of the time the incoming presence of God to disrupt and transform us.

I propose to you this morning that in a healthy faith, a mature spirituality, a serious grounding in our own tradition as people of faith, we take into account not just the Deuteronomic journey that we're on, but that we know that there are moments in our lives when the stranger comes to town, when we are bidden to act in ways that are different than we've ever done before. If that is so, if the stranger is come, if the left hand of God is in our midst, we can celebrate that behind life and death, in all that is good and all that is difficult, on the journey as well as with the stranger, we can know that the goodness and the love and the justice of God lies behind it all.

We go on a journey, and the stranger comes to town.

Amen.

© 2002, Steven Swecker

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