Sunday's Sermon ~ ​01.13.19 
By The Very Rev. Randi Hicks Rowe
John White was a medical missionary, born in England, who later moved to Canada. In his book Excellence in Leadership he tells about a time when he was in medical school and missed a practicum on venereal diseases. To make up the work, he was assigned to work a day in a venereal disease clinic. When he showed up for his assignment, there was a long line of patients who had contracted the disease. He barged up to the front of the line and told the nurse, “I need to see the doctor.”
That's what everybody says," snorted the nurse, "now get in line."
"But I'm a medical student."
"Big deal," said the nurse, "You got it the same way as everybody else; now you can stand in line like everybody else."

John White writes:
In the end I managed to explain to her why I was there, but I can still feel the sense of shame that made me balk at standing in line with the other men who had a venereal disease. Yet Jesus shunned shame as he was baptized. And the moral gulf that separated him from us was far greater than that separating me from the men at the clinic … But he crossed the gulf, joining our ranks, embraced us and still remained pure. He identified with those he came to save. He became like us.[i]

At Jesus’s baptism, the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and proclaimed God’s pleasure with Jesus’s actions of humbling himself to be like us, sinners. Jesus is a model for us, who have followed Him in baptism and serve in His name. He is a model for us to realize that all people belong to the family of God and that all of us are equals with gifts to offer the family. This is true of those we think we serve, such as those who receive food from the Food Bank, or free tickets to fish fry or those who have terrible diseases or who do terrible things. Jesus, who is God, could have kept Himself on a pedestal. He didn’t really need John’s baptism because He never sinned. But, instead, Jesus, at the official beginning of his ministry on earth, joined with all of us – becoming human like us, being willing to line up with all us sinners for baptism. Just like the disciples in Acts realized that the Samaritans, a group of people they’d been taught to think of as less than themselves, were their equals and brothers in ministry, we also are called to realize that those “others” among us are our siblings as well.

When we really do this, it changes everything. It transforms. Here’s an example of what I mean.

About 20 years ago, I belonged to a church that was physically located next to federal subsidized housing. The church had previously ministered to that community, basically by dropping off food and care items at the home of the residents’ association president for distribution and by doing things such as organizing a Christmas party for the children. For a while, the ministry had stopped; someone said the residents’ manager had stolen some of the goods. But then the church decided to rekindle the ministry with a new residents’ president. But this time the ministry looked different. Instead of the church leading that ministry -- a well-intentioned practice that unfortunately ignored the gifts and equality of the residents themselves – we worked the residents leader.

Her name was Leina. She was a large, black woman with five children from four husbands and was living with a man to whom she was not married and collecting welfare by telling the government there was no man in the house. (Some might say she sounds like a Samaritan to a Jew or like a sinner to Jesus). But Leina was and is an equal member of the family of God and Leina has many good gifts. And this time, Leina directed this ministry– the church being willing to humble themselves and to just be a member of the community. That change made all the difference.

For example, Leina asked a round black man who cooked for the residents’ breakfast to be Santa at the Christmas party. Instead of doing what we’d always done with the $25 budgeted for the party (which was to buy punch, chips, dip, etc), she went around to each of the residents and persuaded them to use some of their food stamps to buy the ingredients of their specialty dish, then to prepare it. So when we showed up for the Christmas party, we found a banquet of the best food we’d ever eaten. And when all those children, 95 percent of whom were black, saw black Santa Claus (who was just like them and not the white Santa Claus we usually had) the room became Spirit-filled. It was mesmerizing. The ministry continued with Leina organizing a dental clinic day and helping us with a Bible School there. A few members of that community joined our church. Leina never did, but rather joined a tiny evangelical church where she became a licensed preacher. She married the man she was living with, got off of welfare and bought a home. In her spare time, she led a ministry to another federally subsidized housing community, considered one of the roughest in the city and one that the white community never could have reached because we would never have been accepted there.

For this ministry, we, who were sinners with gifts and a good heart, had accepted Leina, a sinner with gifts and a good heart, as an equal in the family of God. We transformed more lives than we ever would have if we’d done the ministry the old way, and they weren’t just the lives of those in the housing community. It was us – our lives that were transformed the most.  We were in awe of the gifts Leina had and throughout that ministry felt the Holy Spirit in a very real way. I learned a very powerful lesson about coming to those we minister to as one of them—as an equal and with a willingness to be part of their community for a while – rather than putting ourselves in charge and just giving them what we think they should have.

When we follow Jesus’s example and cross that imaginary gulf we think separates us from those we seek to save, we are transformed. When we minister as equals with others we show ourselves to be true children of God in whom God is well pleased.

[i] John White, Excellence in Leadership (InterVarsity Press, 1986), p. 24, found on Preachingtoday.com
 

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