It all started when our pastor read a book entitled, "The Hole in our Gospel" by Richard Stearns, the CEO of World Vision. Basically, the book tells of his personal struggle to accept the job God placed before him as well his suggestion that the American church leaves out a part of the gospel message- that is, we accept God's free gift of salvation by grace and then ignore all the scripture that says we have a responsibility to make God's kingdom come on earth by meeting people's needs. He suggests that our Americanized version of the gospel that is too often preached is one that teaches us to simply pray for the poor or needy without requiring us to get our hands dirty or actually becoming personally involved in people's lives. So for the last several weeks, we as a church have asked some hard questions... of ourselves as believers and ourselves as a church.
One of the passages of scripture that we've read is from Matthew 25. Here, Jesus says basically that when you feed the hungry, look after the sick, visit the prisoner, clothe the poor... when you do these things for the least of society, it's the same as if you're doing those things for Christ himself. Strong words. And a little hard to take. After all, the typical person I see that needs help in those ways... I tend to immediately start making assumptions about how they got into that situation and begin passing judgement over whether or not I feel they 'deserve' to be helped. Without knowing all the facts, that's where I often go in my brain. Unfortunately, Jesus didn't mention that I get to choose who I should help. He simply said, when you help people...
So I had the weirdest thing pop into my head this week! (I've lived with Lou a long time and I think he's rubbing off on me- in a great way!) Back in the 1991 (the year Lou and I got married), a movie came out called, "Hook". It's about Peter Pan and starred Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman and ironically Julia Roberts who is crazy tall played TinkerBell. Anyway, there's a scene in the movie that I immediately thought of when I read this Matthew 25 verse this week- and this scene almost always makes me tear up.
Here's the gist- Robin Williams is Peter Pan, who fell in love with Wendy's grand daughter and so he left Neverland and grew up. One night, Tink shows up and kidnaps him, taking a full-grown Peter Pan back to Neverland because Captain Hook is about to capture the whole place! In this scene, Tink brings Peter to the Lost Boys, who are throwing things at him because they don't recognize him. Then, one Lost Boy steps forward, hushing the crowd. He looks very closely into Peter's eyes, then pushes Peter's 40 year old cheeks and eyes back a bit, squinting as he does. Then, that Lost Boy's eyes light up as you can tell he suddenly recognizes Peter. He whispers, with a great deal of joy, "Oh, there you are!"
I wonder how many times I've acted just like those Lost Boys, running around people, even (figuratively) throwing things at them. They had invaded my space- they weren't like me- I was maybe scared of them- and I stayed away. But... what would happen if I had the courage to take a step forward and look closer... into the eyes of one of those people God placed in my path. What if I was able to push past the heaviness that covered their face. Who would I see underneath? Would I be able to whisper... with joy... "Oh, there you are, Jesus!"
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