Ezekiel 18.1-4;25-32; Matthew 21.23-32
+ This past week, of course, the plaque
for the memorial garden we dedicated in
May was finally finished. It will hang on
the wall near the circular window on the stairs leading down to the Undercroft.
I am proud of our memorial garden and what it will, hopefully, one day be. A
resting place.
But I am
especially proud of our memorial garden because of something that we, at St.
Stephen’s, make sure will happen with it. In our policies for the memorial garden,
we make no disctinction about who can be buried there. Some churches state that
only members and their families can be buried in their resting places. Nowhere
does it say that only St. Stephen’s members can be buried in our memorial
garden. And, a clear policy is this one:
Under no circumstance
will anyone be denied burial in the memorial garden due to financial reasons.
This, of
course, ties in perfectly to the ministry we have been doing here at St.
Stephen’s for years. Something as simple as this policy really does hit home for
us. There are not many places in the Fargo-Moorhead
area that allow such an open policy regarding burial.
Now what
few of us know is that, just a few blocks north of this church, there are two
cemeteries. Unless you actually get out
of your car and walk into the actual cemeteries you wouldn’t even know they’re
there. And I do invite you to go and
visit theses cemeteries. If you do, you’ll
see, in each, a large boulder.
In one cemetery the boulder is
inscribed COUNTY CEMETERY #1. This one
is located at the end of Elm Street. Where
the road forks, one to the Country Club and the other to the former Trollwood,
right there, on the left fork toward Trollwood, is the cemetery. You’ve probably driven by it countless times
and never had a clue.
County Cemetery #2 is located on the
other side of the old Trollwood, just within sight of where the old main stage
stood. Back along the bend in the Red
River, there is a stretch of grass and another boulder. This one says COUNTY
CEMETERY #2.
A third County Cemetery was located on
north Broadway. In 1984, those graves
were moved to Springvale Cemetery, over by Holy Cross Cemetery, near the
airport, because they were falling into the Red River through erosion. One of
my great-uncles, who died in 1948, is actually buried in that cemetery.
For the
most part, many of the graves in Springvale are marked. But in the first two cemeteries, there are no
markers at all. No individual
gravestones mark the graves of the people buried in the first two cemeteries.
In fact, if you walked into them, you would have to force your mind to even accept
the fact that it is a cemetery. But
there are hundreds of people buried in those graveyards. Hundreds.
These are the forgotten. These were Fargo’s hidden shame. Beginning 1899 and going through the 1940s,
this where the prostitutes, the gamblers, the robbers were buried. This is also where all the unwanted babies
were buried. There are lots of stories
of unwanted babies being fished out of the Red River in those days. This is where the bodies of those unnamed
babies were buried.
And when one walks in those pauper
cemeteries, one must remind themselves of those words we hear from Jesus this
morning in our Gospel reading.
“Truly I
tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the Kingdom of
God ahead of you.”
There, in those cemeteries, lie the
true inheritors of the Kingdom of God. Last
week in my sermon I quoted the great Reginald Fuller, who said:
“[This] is what God is doing in Jesus’
ministry—giving the tax collectors and prostitutes an equal share with the
righteous in the kingdom.”
That—and those words of Jesus we heard
in this morning’s Gospel reading—are shocking statements for most of us. And they should be. It should shock us and shake us to our core. It’s a huge statement for him to make. Partly
it does because, things haven’t changed all that much: we can grasp the
understanding about prostitutes—after all, prostitutes are still looked down
upon by our society in our day.
After
all, we do still view prostitutes with contempt. They are another segment of our society that
we tend to forget about. But we really
should give them concern. And I don’t
meant from a judgmental point of view. I
mean, we should give them our compassion. We should be praying for them often. Because we often hear the horrible stories of
what people have to deal with on the streets, not to mention what drove them to
the streets.
. But the
stories of what keeps them on the streets are just as bad. And the dangers they face—day and night—are
more mind-boggling than anything we can even imagine in our safe, comfortable
lives.
Truly prostitutes throughout history
have been the real exploited ones. They
are the ones who have lived on the fringes of society. They are the ones who have lived in the
shadows of our respectable societies. They
have lived dangerous, secret lives. And
much of what they’ve had to go through in their lives is known only to God. They need our prayers. They need our compassion. They definitely don’t
need our exploitation. They certainly don’t
need our judgment.
As uncomfortable as it is for us to
confront them and think about them, that is exactly what Jesus is telling us we
must do. Because by going there in our
thoughts, in our prayers, in our ministries, we are going where Jesus went. We are coming alongside people who need our
thoughts, our prayers, our ministries. And rather than using them, rather than
continuing the exploitation they have lived with their lives, we need to see
them as God sees them. We see them as
children of God, as fellow humans on this haphazard, uncertain journey we are
all on together.
And, more
importantly, we see in them ourselves. There, but for the grace of God go us. Had we been born in different circumstances,
had life gone wrong for us in certain areas, who are we to say we wouldn’t have
been there? Or who we are to say we
wouldn’t be the exploiters?
So we can understand why prostitutes (and
tax collectors, who were just as ritually unclean as prostitutes in Jesus’ day)
were viewed with such contempt in Jesus’ day.
The point
of this morning’s Gospel is this: the Kingdom of God is not what we think it
is. It is not made up of just people
like us. It is, in fact, going to be
made up people who maybe never go to church, who may never have gone to church.
It will be made up of those people we might
not even notice. It will be made up of those people who are invisible to us. It
will be made up of the people we don’t give a second thought to. In our society
today we have our own tax collectors. They
are the welfare cases. They are the
homeless. They are alcoholics and the
drug addicts and the drug dealers. They are the lost among us, they are the
ones who are trapped in their own sadness and their own loneliness. They are the gang leaders, they are the
rebels. They are the transgendered. They are the cross dressers. They are the ones we call pagan, or
non-believer or heretic. They are the
ones we, good Christians that we are, have worked all our lives not to be.
This is what the Kingdom of heaven is
going to be like. It will filled with the
people who look up at us from their marginalized place in this society. It is the ones who today are peeking out at us
from the curtains of their isolation and their loneliness. They are the ones who, in their quiet agony,
watch as we drive out of sight from them. They are they inheritors of the
kingdom of God and if we think they are not, then we are not listening to what
Jesus is saying to us.
When we
think about those county cemeteries just a few blocks north of here, we need to
realize that had Jesus lived in Fargo, had he lived 1900 years later and had
died the disgraceful death he died, that is where he would’ve ended up. He would have ended up in an unmarked grave in
a back field, on the very physical fringes of our city. In fact, he is there. And in our policy for the memorial garden, we
are guaranteeing he will be here among us as well in our memorial garden. He is wherever the inheritors of his kingdom
are.
Those
cemeteries and that policy in our memorial garden for me are potent reminders
of who inherits. They are potent reminders
to me of who receives true glory in the end. It is these—the forgotten ones,
the ones whom only God knows—who are in glory at this moment. They
are the ones that, had life turned out just a bit different for us, would be
us.
Of course, we too are the inheritors of
the Kingdom, especially when we love fully and completely. We too are the inheritors when we follow those
words of Jesus and strive to live out and do what he commands. We too are the inheritors when we open our
eyes and our minds and our hearts to those around us, whom no one else sees or
loves.
So, let us also be inheritors of the
Kingdom of God. Let us love fully and
completely as Jesus commands. Let us love our God. Let us love all those people who come into our
lives. Let us look around at those people who share this world with us. And let us never cast a blind eye on anyone. Let
us do as God speaks to us this morning through the prophet Ezekiel: Let us
“turn, then, and live.”
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