I am often nostalgic for the TV shows I grew up with as a teenager. Sonnie and Cher, the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In, and Carol Burnett. On the other hand, I really dislike “reality TV”: Survivor, Last Comic Standing, The Apprentice and the like. What’s the difference between these two genres? In the TV shows from my teenage years, there was an ensemble of comedians working together week after week, assuming new identities working cooperatively to bring laughter to millions, as they say. Reality TV is painful for me to watch; it really makes me uncomfortable and sad to watch a group of people who could seemingly form such a warm community, forging temporary alliances that everyone involved knows will end in betrayal, as they seek to pick each other off one by one, trying to survive to be the last lone “winner” of the show. Is this really any way to live?

Rabbi Michael Lerner, in his book The Left Hand of God, analyses the impact of “winner-take-all” competition on our lives. However much we might want to escape it, it is embedded in our culture—TV, sports, advertisement, business—all of it is focused on winning, greed, and consumption and leads to debt and fear, alienation and servitude. Whoever dies with the most toys wins. This impacts us in our work lives and our families. It’s hard to commit and persevere at anything when we are continually lured by the promise, however delusory, that something better is just down the road; who can we trust when everybody is ultimately out for him or herself? We are always tempted to hold out for better and not embrace the good gifts that surround us and commit to the friends and families who surround us. Our jobs often take us away from our families of origin and the myth of the nuclear family leaves us alienated in strained marriages and unhappy parenting. We are alienated from our roots in the human family, apparently alone in all the world.

In the Gospel today, we are given a sort of snapshot, a day-in-the-life-of view of Jesus and his ministry. Though a series of seemingly unrelated stories, it is really a narrative of how Jesus healed alienation in the people who turned to him. It begins with the call of Matthew the tax collector. Now tax collectors in the Roman Empire were collaborationists, members of the local culture participating in the Roman occupation, tasked with collecting a certain quota of funds to turn over to the Roman Government. To do this they could use any extortionate means at their disposal. They could keep any excess funds they collected for their own enrichment. In our times they might be considered equivalent to enforcers of a protection racket. They were not nice people. The Pharisees, who represented upright middle class Judaism (like most of us are upright middle-class Americans) at the time were not being unreasonable in questioning how Jesus could associate with such people. Wouldn’t we want to ask the same question. The importance of this for us to note that in this story is that inclusion precedes reformation of life—Jesus comes to Matthew’s home without judgment, and then Matthew left everything and followed Jesus.

Later, he is called to the deathbed of the synagogue leader’s daughter. He is stopped on his way there by the sense that healing has gone out from him. When he asks who touched him, the woman with the hemorrhage, the continuous flow of menstrual blood, admits that she touched him. By touching him she has rendered him ritually impure and so she is justified in her timidity. Many other Jewish men of the time would have flown into a rage for being so inconvenienced by a deliberate touch—they would have had to leave for the outskirts of the village and remained there alone and hungry until sunset when they would be required to take a ritual bath, don completely clean clothes and then return to normal society. Jesus disregards all of the regulations and embraces the woman for her faith, and since her hemorrhage is haled, she is able to return to normal society after twelve years of alienation and isolation. And then he enters the house of the dead, again rendering himself unclean and alienated from his culture to bring life again to the daughter of the synagogue leader and by extension to her family as well.

The first reading today tells the story of the man Abram and his wife Sarai. “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.’” So Abram entrusted himself and his family to God, left the familiar urban environment in which he was living and became a wanderer, a pilgrim on the earth. Going long past even unreasonable hope, he believed that God would bless him with offspring, and when he had had a son, was willing to offer him up in sacrifice to God when he asked him to. St. Paul uses Abram or Abraham (the new name god gave him) as the paradigm of inclusion in the Christian assembly—it is in imitating the trust of Abram that we are called into the culture of God, the Christian assembly. It is not so much that Abram and Jesus are above the Law, they are, rather, beyond the Law in the realm of this kingdom, this culture of God.

This radical welcome and inclusion is the grace we are given to heal us from our being mired in the constant anguish of competition, alienation, and fear. It is also what we are called to practice in our life together here in this house of worship and in our lives in the world—it’s simple yet challenging. We are called to extend loving kindness to all creation, to live in compassion for ourselves and others. We are called to leave the familiar routines of life and work in our culture and become pilgrims, as Abram did, pursuing the call of God and abandoning the familiar routines of his culture and undertaking the life of a pilgrim. This was the paradigm for St. Paul of the life of righteousness that comes from faith, entrusting oneself to God and not from abiding by any set of rules.

Diana Butler-Bass, an Episcopal theologian, who has studied the “emerging church” believes that in our post-modern world, live floating between ephemeral communities—the coffee shop, the workplace, the gym, the club, serial relationships—always wanderers never permanently resident. The purpose of the Church in her mind is to transform wanderers into pilgrims, not changing the impermanence of life, per se, but transforming its meaning into one of seeking this new culture of God: inclusive, egalitarian, welcoming, hospitable, kind and compassionate.

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