MOVING TO THE MARGINS
Hebrews 13:7-16

A sermon given by the Rev. Richard H. Taylor
October 30, 2005 / 24th Sunday of Pentecost

I think you will remember today. I hope you will remember this sermon. We’ll see.

Over the years the letter to the Hebrews has grown on me. When I was young – frankly – I didn’t understand it. The writer of it was immersed in the Jewish culture and worship of the first centuries. The book seeks to explain Christianity in terms that people of that time and culture would understand. It takes on the symbols of that time.

But in thirty-seven and a half years of pastoring I have had to immerse myself in Old Testament texts. I’ve picked up some of that culture. Now I find that the letter to the Hebrews speaks to me with great depth. I’d like to share some of that with you.

In the times of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, we know that Mary and Joseph came and offered a small bird in sacrifice after Jesus was born. We have learned about all the trading and money dealing in the court of the Temple, as people came to buy animals for the sacrifice. Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers.

But the fate of the animals was indeed sad. For all that would be taken to the center of the Temple, to the holy of holies, where God was supposed to be most present, all that would be taken there was some blood for splattering.

The body of the animal itself was considered worthless. They were burned outside the holy of holies. In the days of the old traveling tent tabernacle, the bodies were burned outside the camp, like so much refuse. The animal had sacrificed its life, but its very being was burned, discarded, thrown off to the margins.

Our letter writer notes that this is what happened to Jesus.

Jesus was treated as a criminal. And “like all criminals, they took him outside the city to be executed, lest he contaminate the temple, their homes, themselves.”1
The writer finds great significance in this.

Jerusalem was a great walled city with arched gates, gates that camels found it hard to get through. And around the gates, on the edges, on the margins, were all kinds of riff raff. Time and time again we hear about the beggars at the gates. The Jews had a law against capital punishment. So when the Romans wanted to execute someone it had to be outside the city. The crosses of the executed, the stocks for the thieves, the relatives of the criminals bewailing their fate, all these were outside the city, outside the gates, out at the margins. It was outside the nice neighborhoods, outside the areas with the fancy homes, away from the places of power, that thieves hid along the Jericho Road.

A year and a half ago I attended a wonderful workshop led by Bishop Yvette Flunder of San Francisco. It was entitled “The Village on the Edge: Creating, Sustaining, and Celebrating Christian Community on the Margins.” I understand that she has recently turned her ideas into a book about ministry on the margins.

Bishop Flunder believes that Jesus died, Jesus made his sacrifice in the place where he ministered, indeed the place where he most often lived, on the margins of society. If you look at any culture, any society, you will find it has a central core of power and influence. In Jerusalem King Solomon’s palace sat right next to the Temple. It became the home of Pontius Pilate. And Pilate’s home and the homes of the High Priests were in the center of things. The big institutions, the school of the rabbis, were in the center of things. But the shacks of the poor, the corners where the beggars stood, the places where criminals were executed, all these things stood on the edges, the margins. The same is true of our society. The State House, the City Hall, the Judicial complex, the Ivy League schools all have about them a central mentality. In Providence the poor are being moved to the edges of the downtown, to the margins. In our day and age it is business and commerce which are really at the center. The biggest buildings belong to the banks, the gleaming towers are no longer steeples, but instead the bastions of finance.

When Jesus was twelve we see him in Jerusalem talking to the rabbis. But by the time he is thirty, we seldom see him in the center. He is not seeking donations from Herod Antipas, nor trying to convert Pontius Pilate. We don’t see him advocating to be admitted to the Levitical priesthood, nor joining the party of the Pharisees.

Instead we see him eating with tax collectors, sinners, prostitutes. We find him befriending fishermen from small towns, talking to foreigners on the Samaritan roads, taking refuge in Egypt. We see Jesus talking with the mentally ill, touching lepers, associating with the lowly.

Bishop Flunder believes that the role of the Church is to build villages on the margins, to find the excluded people and welcome them into community. True communities, those of the future, will not reflect the power structures of the center. They will not be modeled on the politics of empire. The new communities of the marginalized on the margins will be something new, something outside the ordinary.

Our text says “Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured.” The call to the Christian is to leave the center and go to the margins. You see, to our Bible writer Jesus was the very presence of God. In Jesus God was incarnate. And in the World of power structures and political machinations, God – the very true essence of God – is thrown outside the center, outside the gate, out to the margins. If you want to find God, leave the center, go out to the margins, that is where God is. “Let us then go to him outside the camp.”

In our society there are many groups on the margins: women, the poor, Mexican, Liberian, Haitian immigrants, people of color, the undereducated. Follow Jesus to meet them outside the camp, outside the center of power. Build villages with them on the margins: villages with a new order of being.

Now, let me tell you, moving to the margins is difficult. Trying to shed the politics of empire and oppression, and learn the language of a new village community does not come easily. When we try it ours sins become visible, we are forced to be humble. Most of you know that I spent twelve years living in one of the poorest communities in America. It was not heroic. I thought I went there to try to be helpful to people in that poor Black community. But I brought my prejudices and stupidity with me. I became the only white member of the Black Ministerial Alliance, and they had to bear with me. I said things that put people down, that insulted their culture, that refused to see the equality of humanity. Sometimes they told me right off. Other times it was only years later when they told me how some stupid thing I said had hurt them. I think I often made life miserable for them.

I did learn that most racial stereotypes are stupid. Black people are as varied as White people. But I still kept thinking in racial terms. If there was something where I was the only one who disagreed with all of them, I would wonder “is this a Black and White thing?” I did not think that it might have just been chance, or that their opinion may be some common reaction for a culture that has endured slavery, and have more to do with white oppression, than anything to do with skin color. Yet my old American racist assumptions often came to the surface.

Now if I had stayed in the nearly all white power center I would never had said stupid or insulting things to them. If I had stayed in the center I would have never begun to realize the depth of my racist assumptions. Going to the margins may not have helped them all that much. Maybe the primary thing it did was to make me humble and more eager to confess my sin.

And going to the margins may be the same for you. Going to where God is may be the same for you. The primary thing it might do is make you more humble and cause you to confess your sin. But that’s okay. Confession is good for the soul.

So the apostle says, “Let us then go to Jesus outside the camp.”

But I think this is the only way we will create one world. Sitting in the center and negotiating with the power brokers leaves you a shallow and incomplete person. You learn nothing of the height, the depth, the breath, the total reality of the human experience.

Jesus chooses to go out to the margins. Jesus chooses to leave the center, to leave the camp. Can we follow Jesus to the margins and there create a new world?

Amen.

1 – Cotton, J. Harry, Exposition to the Letter to the Hebrews, The Interpreter’s Bible, Volume XI, (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1955), p.757.