Just today I wrote my newsletter article for our congregational newsletter. I want to share it with you here:

I read a story recently about a man’s encounter with himself. Sounds odd, huh? I’ll retell the story so you can understand what I mean.

As a man sat in a mall, drinking his coffee, minding his own business, a homeless man walked up to him and asked for some money. At first glance at this unkempt homeless person standing before him, the idea popped into the man’s head to dismiss the man as a “bum”. The man didn’t, however; he, instead, was drawn to notice the man more closely. Lean face, dirty clothes and body, and a smell that could not go unnoticed from a few feet away seemed to be crying out, “I need help!” Though the homeless man only said, “Could you spare some change?” the man began to wonder, “I wonder if it’s ok to give money to this guy? If I do, I don’t get anything out of it but the fact that I have helped some poor guy.”

Against his better judgment, the man searched in his pocket and found a dollar coin. He gave the coin to this nameless man as he watched him run off with his treasure. He returned to his newspaper and began to think, “I wonder what he will do with the money?”

All night the man had wondered about the homeless one. He pondered his own feelings and actions; he pondered the actions of the other, to whom he had given; “What if I had done the wrong thing? What if he spends the money on drugs or alcohol? What if…what if…” The next day, this man could not get the homeless man out of his mind, when he realized: “It’s not about me and my feelings. It’s not about helping someone else and feeling good about doing that; it’s not even about whether I did the right thing! This whole encounter was God calling out to me, ‘How invested are you to the outsider?’”

In these past few weeks, as summer has wound down and fall has broken into our mornings with cooler, damper weather, I have wanted a little rest from responsibility to God’s call, haven’t you? When the air gets a little crisper and the days grow shorter, don’t you want to hibernate with the rest of nature? Well, God doesn’t seem to want to let go of us and let us just fall asleep to the rest of the world.

On Saturday nights, we have started the Narrative Lectionary and we have heard through scripture that God intends to participate in every aspect of life. If God is there in life, why shouldn’t we have the same desire?

On Sunday mornings, with the Revised Common Lectionary, Jesus has spoken through the parabolic gospel of Mark, pointing us in the direction of reaching out to the “other” – without regard of reward, without regard of self-aggrandizing, without regard to how the “other” may react to the reaching out.

No matter how we slice the good news from God, God always intends to respond faithfully to us with grace and compassion. Thanks be to God that God didn’t think, “I wonder what she will do if I give her grace? I wonder how he is going to react to my compassion? Should I really do this?” No, God reached out to the world without regard to economic status or ethnicity, or any other barrier that you or I want to place on one another. God reached out to you and me and gave the fullness of divine compassion and grace – Jesus. Just imagine what the world would look like if we didn’t have to second guess how we share that good news with one another.

What do you think?