18 Pentecost

 

October 1, 2023

 

Ezekiel 18.1-4;25-32; Matthew 21.23-32

 

+ Anyone who knows me for any time knows how I LOVE cemeteries.

 

I know.

 

It’s weird.

 

It’s morbid.

 

But they sort of obsess me to some extent.

 

I love to think about all the stories contained in a cemetery—all the stories that are untold, all the stories that are just mysteries.

 

I love also how each cemetery is unique in its own way.

 

Each has its own characters, its own “feel.”

 

Of course, we now have our own memorial garden here at St. Stephen’s, which also is unique in its way.

 

But, 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.

 

Some of us will go up there and explore those cemeteries this afternoon.

 

If you do, you’ll see, in each, a large boulder.

 

In one cemetery the boulder is inscribed COUNTY CEMETERY #1.

 

The 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.

 

105 years ago, in the Fall of 1918, the Spanish Flu hit the world hard, and Fargo was definitely not spared.

 

Many of the unclaimed victims who died in the epidemic were buried in the County Cemetery #1.

 

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.

 

He tells us, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the Kingdom of God ahead of you.”

 

What?!? That’s not what we want to hear!

 

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.

 

I think that is exactly what Jesus intended when he said it.

 

It’s a huge statement for Jesus to make.

 

Partly it is because, things haven’t changed all that much.

 

OK. Yes, maybe we don’t view tax collectors and prostitutes in the same way people in Jesus’ day did.

 

Jesus uses these two examples as prime examples of the “unclean” in our midst—those who are ritually unclean according the Judaic law.

 

We, of course, have our own versions of “unclean” in our own society.

 

They are the ones in our society that we tend to forget about and purposely ignore.

 

But we really should give them concern.

 

And I don’t meant from a judgmental point of view.

 

I mean, we should actually look and see all those marginalized people we ourselves may consider “unclean” by our own standards our compassion.

 

We should be praying for them often.

 

And we should DO something for them.

 

Because to be viewed as “unclean” in any society—even now— is a death knell.

 

It is a life of isolation and rebuke.

 

It is a life of being ostracized.

 

The unclean 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.

 

The “unclean” of our own society often live desperate, secret lives.

 

And much of what they’ve have to go through in their lives is known only to God.

 

And they need us and our prayers.

 

They need our help.

 

They need our compassion.

 

They definitely don’t need our judgment.

 

As uncomfortable as it is for us to confront them and think about them—or to BE 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 presence, our prayers, our ministries.

 

 And rather than shunning them, we need to see them as God sees them.

 

We see them as truly loved children of God, as fellow humans on this haphazard, uncertain journey we are all on together.

 

And, more importantly, we see in them ourselves.

 

Because some of them ARE us.

 

Some of us here have been shunned and excluded and turned away.

 

By us. By our Church. By our government. By our society.

 

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 not some exclusive country club in the sky.

 

(Give thanks to God that it is NOT some exclusive country club in the sky!)

 

And it is certainly not made up of a bunch of  Christians who have done all the right things and condemned all the “correct” sins and sinners.

 

It is, in fact, going to be made up people who maybe never go 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.

 

As I said, in our society today we have our own tax collectors, our own “unclean.”.

 

They are the welfare cases.

 

They are the homeless.

 

They are alcoholics and the drug or opioid addicts and the drug dealers.

 

Theya re the sex workers.

 

They are the ones who have been exploited and trafficked and used.

 

They are the lost among us, they are the ones who are trapped in their own sadness and their own loneliness.

 

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 the ones who are on the outside looking in.

 

They are the 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.

 

He is wherever the inheritors of his God’s kingdom are.

 

Those cemeteries 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. 

 

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 truly 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.”

 

Let us pray.

 

Holy God, help us to not with the eyes of the world, but with the eyes of those who are destined for your Kingdom. In looking, may we truly see those whom you love and cherish. And let us reach out and save them as your Son, Jesus, has commanded us to do; it is in his Name that we pray. Amen.