Luke 13:22-30                Susan J. Barnes

August 22, 2004              St. Matthew’s, Austin

We like to preach about the love of God, the unconditional, all-embracing love of God. And when we preach about the love of God, we are being faithful to the Gospel texts. For it was Jesus who brought to humankind that blessed new image of God as a loving parent, using the word Abba, Daddy, for God.

  We like that loving image. It brings us comfort and joy, and strength to know that we are loved and accepted—in spite of ourselves—that we are forgiven, and that we have an eternal home in God. And I believe with all my heart that it is true.

But God is not one or two or even three dimensional. No one image, no series of images, no encyclopedia can or ever will begin to contain, to express the nature of God. All we ever get in any age is the tiniest sliver of light on that infinitely complex, awesome reality. That is why we must read and struggle with the diverse images of God that are contained in that great library, the 66 books of the Bible. Each image may well have some truth, but none is completely true.

In texts like today’s, Jesus shows us another face of God. As Jesus gets closer and closer to the cross, to his own death and judgment, he presents an image of God as Judge—a fearsome image indeed. We are used to hearing about wailing and gnashing of teeth from Matthew, but not from Luke. And so we take special notice when we hear it in this gospel, and when Jesus tells us here about a God who can and will cast children into outer darkness, saying "I do not know where you come from; go away from me all you evildoers!"

These are the texts that bedevil a preacher like me, the ones that make you want to switch Sundays with the Rector or take refuge and preach from the OT, Epistle or Psalm. But there’s no hiding place from this image. Today’s lectionary gives no shelter. Nor should it.

The truth is it would be irresponsible not to engage seriously with this image and to preach—with fear and trembling--about this face of God, about judgment and eternal damnation. Because following God in Jesus Christ is not just about getting together to sing and pray, it is not just about eating and drinking together at this altar table week after week. Following God in Jesus Christ is about being transformed by those rituals and empowered to transform the lives of others. It’s about learning to share the wealth we have from God—the love, the gifts and the money--with those who have less. It’s about working, about doing something every day—in word or deed--to bring in the Kingdom of God’s love. It’s not about receiving, it’s about giving—about giving it all away. . That, too, is God’s Grace.

It’s about dying more and more to self to live more and more for others.

I think that’s what Jesus is talking about when he says "Strive to enter through the narrow door." Let me share some thoughts about that image, if you will.

"Strive to enter through the narrow door." I remember the entrance to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, as some of you will, too. Thirty years ago, it was less a door than an opening in the wall, both narrow and small. To enter you had to bow your head and step high at the same time. That opening was made small in the Middle Ages, I was told, to keep the Crusaders from coming into the church on horseback.

Let’s just stop and think about that for a moment. The Christian men who had come from Europe supposedly to liberate the sanctuaries of the Holy Land from the "Infidel" had so little respect for the sanctuary over Jesus’ birthplace that they would ride their horses inside. Imagine a mob of armed, rowdy soldiers riding into this church. Imagine the noise, the stench, the mess; imagine the violation—the desacration! So the clergy in Bethlehem, in their respectful stewardship of the church, redesigned the entrance to the Church of the Nativity. They made, instead, a very small, narrow door. The narrow door had a practical purpose inside the church: to protect the building, to preserve its sanctity. At the same time, the narrow door transformed the attitude of the men who came through it; it imposed on them a new posture of humility.

You know what a powerful physical impression a mounted police officer makes today! It was the same then, of course—but much more so. In the Middle Ages, the horse was a rich man’s attribute, a symbol of the worldly wealth and power of a feudal lord. If he dismounted, the horseman became more equal to others, more a man among men. Perhaps, to enter through that narrow door, he also had to take off his sword, perhaps even some of his armor. Maybe, to enter the Church of the Nativity, a Crusader had to leave behind all of those trappings that made him stand out from the others, the attributes that made him seem different, more powerful.

Faced with the choice to enter under those terms, we may suppose that some men chose not to visit the site of Jesus’ birth. Many, perhaps, chose not to enter that sanctuary if it meant leaving those attributes and symbols behind. They had that choice. So do we. That’s why Jesus says, "Strive to enter through the narrow door." It’s a suggestion to people who are blessed and cursed to have free will.

Thinking about those Crusaders has made me think about the things with which I cloak myself, and particularly some of the attributes of my past life as a middle-aged, American art historian. By the way, I’m not saying that I’m free of this stuff today. But things are easier to see—and to confess--in retrospect, aren’t they? The full list would take many hours. I’ll spare you. And I won’t talk about the material things—except to mention the clothes (you can always identify a museum person by her clothes!) No, I’d rather talk about something immaterial, yet visible. I’d rather talk a bit about attitude as attribute.

Some of you may remember my first talk here three years ago in Adult Ed—at least the title, which is all that I remember: Confessions of a Recovering Art Snob. That suggests the attitude.

I was blessed in my life as an art historian to meet remarkable people (some of them famous), and to see remarkable things under remarkable circumstances (insiders get to see exhibitions when they are closed, you know). Mostly, those experiences were benefits of my position. But instead of recognizing them as blessings, I took them as my due. One exception was climbing the scaffold to get nose-to-nose with Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling: I knew that was pure Grace, bestowed by the most gracious and modest of men, the curator Fabrizio Mancinelli. Otherwise, I was stunningly free of humility about my privileges. Mine was the sin of pride. But as Thomas Keating has taught me, the sin was rooted in my deep need to have the respect and admiration of other people. I’m ashamed to see and to admit, that I expressed that need in an attitude, in a posture of entitlement.

The narrow door may lie at the end of this journey. But Jesus reminds us that we don’t know when that will come. We have to prepare for that moment now. To do so, we have to shed everything we can in advance. I’m not suggesting that we go naked and homeless in the meanwhile. But we all know the difference—or we should--between sufficiency and surplus, between needs and luxury.

We also know the difference between being attached and being detached. Following Jesus Christ means being detached from possessions, from accomplishments, from roles, from privileges—and, at the same time, being grateful and responsible for them. Friends, this is about the stewardship of the soul.

Jesus calls us to choose to detach ourselves emotionally, spiritually from everything that accrues to us on earth, not to place our identity there. Jesus reminds us that whatever else we may have or may be, we all are one and the same when we stand before God. Only with that posture of humility can we hope to enter through the narrow door. And we can only get there with God’s grace.