Nehemiah 8: 1,9,10; Luke 4. 20-24

Strangers in their land

Dear friends, There is a popular cartoon my kids loved when they were young called “Samurai Jack.”  It is about an honorable Samurai warrior who travels through time and finds that his skills are not necessarily sufficient in a modern time.  He feels strange most of the time and the viewer feels strange along with him.  In a recent interview on the BBC Henry Rollins, former band member of the punk band Black Flag talked about how he became a punk rocker. He said he was always angry. He couldn’t do anything right in high school: couldn’t throw a ball straight, couldn’t talk to girls, couldn’t get good grades.  He was asked whether he was still angry. He responded that he was, but now it was about political anger.  As you may know punk rock is probably the loudest rock, with the most shrieking.  There seems to be a lot of anger these days.  A lot of it is very vocal in this election year.  A lot of the talk is visceral.  There is a lot of shrieking.  So called “Establishment” candidates of both parties are scratching their heads.  Anand Giridaharadas in the International New York Times wrote about that people feel these days that “power is somewhere where you are not.”  That makes people angry.  It makes people feel afraid.  It makes people feel estranged.  It is a reaction to things being out of control:   Congress, the stock market, the Middle East, China’s economy. In reality no one can fix all that by themselves, but nevertheless there are these cries for fundamentalism (Cruz), authoritarianism (Trump) and realignment and restructuring of economic power (Sanders).

In the book of Nehemiah some leaders of the exiled Jewish people get a green light from the King of Persia to go west to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple which lies in ruins.   These people raised in a land where they were strangers go to a land that was theirs but where they are now strange.  They pray and read the old texts and they weep.  We are left to imagine what their tears were about.  We can guess. Maybe they themselves did not know. But here is a question: could it be that the experience of strangeness exactly made them more effective in their task?

Friends, in the Gospel of Luke Jesus goes back to His home region and He reads from the text in the synagogue and He tells people that this text has to do with Him.  You cannot blame the people for thinking Jesus is pretentious.  He gets it too: a prophet is never accepted in the prophet’s own land.   How often do we see that?  Could it be that Jesus’ experience of being rejected by His people made Him a more focused and effective leader?

Friends, how about you?  What makes you feel strange or like a stranger?  How has the experience of strangeness affected you? This leads me to a question: is it possible that sometimes strangeness allows us to push boundaries?  Let me give a personal illustration.  I assume that over nearly twenty years you know more about me than you care too, but try to pay attention with your own experience.  In the movie “The Jane Austen Book Club” two grown women are in the restroom.  One of them is crying and the other asks why? She explains that it is about relationships from high school.  The other says: ”But high school is over: “Says the first through her tears:”high school is never over !” There is some truth to that.  When I was in high school, in a suburb of Amsterdam, there were four things that caused me to feel strange.  First, my father’s health was frail because of severe heart disease and finally he offered to stop smoking if I would never start. I agreed.   Unfortunately almost everyone else in high school smoked which effectively took me out the circle of other teenagers rolling their cigarettes.  Second, I wore a mental and leather brace on my back for almost two years which kept my back straight all the time and when I bent a little, I either looked like a humpback or a purple faced patient with respiratory problems.  Third, I spent the summer of my sixteenth year in Texas with my sister at the time of the biggest revival conference in American history.  The theology was pretty main stream for the south but the religious principles I came home with kind of made me a freak in the Holland of antiwar protests and sit-ins and dwindling main line churches.  Finally, my best friend was of Indonesian descent and his parents indirectly introduced me to an exotic world of otherness and strangeness through their stories.  Now here comes the good part. When I graduated the back brace was off ( I snapped it cleaning office buildings) and I had snapped out of my hyper-religiousness, but because I had been independent and somewhat isolated I was perfectly positioned to leave the familiar.  So because of the experience of strangeness I was not tied to my hometown.  So I spent my professional life working among people who shared nothing with me but my faith tradition.  As a result, stepping into other cultures became a natural move.  I would not have done that if I had been the most popular kid in school.

Friends, oppression and discrimination are never good, but feeling strange can be.  It teaches us to find connections where we otherwise might not find them.  We see much of the bad side of people feeling strange in today’s political campaigns, bringing out the worst instincts in people. But there can be a good side too. Maybe feeling strange isn’t so bad.  So where do you experience the strangeness in your life and how can you use it to be a better human being and a better servant of

Our God?  May God give us wisdom.