Sermon Tone Analysis

! Introduction

            The other morning there was a news item about a Bed and Breakfast that was to open in Morden.

The town council approved the licence, but there was opposition from some of the neighbours to this venture.

Their objection was that they didn’t like the idea of strangers being in their neighbourhood.

Xenophobia is the fear of strangers and is much more common than we might think.

Many of us have at least some level of fear of people who are different than we are.

We don’t know if we can trust them.

We are afraid that they may change the way things are, the way we like them.

As a result, strangers are often treated with suspicion.

When new people move into a community, they may find it difficult to belong.

I once heard that it takes 17 years to be fully accepted in a rural community.

Until you have grown up in the community, you are often looked at as a newcomer.

This fear of strangers is compounded if the person is of a different colour or if their religious beliefs are different than ours.

Last week, Dave Thiessen had a powerful message on loving one another.

He also spoke about how we treat Christians of other backgrounds.

He told us that if we love one another as Christians, people will know about Jesus.

But there is another matter that is also important.

How we treat those who are strangers also communicates an important message about the Christian faith.

How did Jesus treat strangers?

How would He have us treat strangers?

!

I.

The Strangers In Our Life

            For a few years there was a doctor who worked in Manitou.

His name was Dr. Bim and he was from Mauritius.

He was dark skinned because he was of East Indian origin.

He was a fine doctor, at least he treated me well the few times I went to him.

After he had been there for a few years, some things happened that were of a political nature and he left.

Some of his close friends in the community told me that the reason he had to leave was because of his skin colour.

They said that as the only “brown skinned” person in the area, he faced racist opposition and was forced to move away.

How welcoming are we of people who move into our community who are different.

We are pretty good at welcoming people who are of the same religious and social group as we are, but what about poor people, or people who are visible minorities or even people whose religion is different than ours.

Would such people be welcome in Rosenort?

Would we be glad to see them and let them know that or would we ignore them?

Up to this point there have not been a lot of people who do not have some kind of a Mennonite background in our community, but there are some.

Do they belong in this community?

I spoke with someone who recently began attending this church and they told me that they had been made to feel very welcome.

I was glad to hear that, but it isn’t always like that.

I read a story about two men who didn’t know each other, but happened to begin attending a church about the same time.

The first week they attended no one from the church spoke to either of them.

A week later, they came again and again no one spoke to them.

The third week, one of them decided that if no one talked to him, he would leave and never come back but the other one decided that if no one would talk to him, he would talk to someone else.

The next Sunday, it just so happened that these two men sat close together.

When no one spoke to them, the one was about to leave in disgust and never come back, but the other one, who had decided to speak to someone, spoke to him and they both stayed in the church and became good friends.

The story turned out well, but it was not a very good reflection on that church.

Welcoming people on Sunday morning is important and as I said, from several reports I have learned that we do that in this church, but true welcome into a church does not only have to do with being friendly on Sunday morning.

Someone once told me that they knew they belonged in a church when they were invited to one of the weddings.

Some of the strangers may be people who have been around for a long time, but have never truly become part of the church.

So many of us have a lot of close friends and relatives that we really don’t need any more relationships.

What does that do to our ability to welcome strangers?

Do we have room for new people in our circle of relationships?

Many of you who are young people may eventually move into the city.

As you establish lives in the city, it is possible, even there, to build your life around friends from home or Bible school.

But in the city, you are surrounded by strangers.

Some of the people you work with will start out as strangers.

Your next door neighbours will be strangers.

Some of these neighbours will be very different.

How will you relate to them?

When we were studying in Vancouver for a month one summer, we stayed at the home of some friends who were gone for several weeks.

They lived in an area of Vancouver where the dominant language on the signs in the stores and the dominant language spoken on the street was Chinese.

One exception was the people who lived in the other half of the duplex in which we lived.

They were a woman and a man who were both homosexual, but who had had a child together.

You can bet we thought a lot about how we were going to treat our neighbours.

These are some of the strangers we will encounter.

How will we treat them?

!

II.

Why We Might Avoid Strangers

In the past, our forefathers were very suspicious of people outside of the community or outside of the faith.

They deliberately moved into colonies so that they could live close together and protect the beliefs and lifestyle they had.

They had reasons for what they did.

As we enter more and more into the world around us, are we flirting with danger?

Are we leaving a Biblical principle that calls us to separate ourselves from strangers?

The Bible talks about strangers and helps us to understand what God’s will is on this issue.

!! A. Avoiding Strangers

There are Scriptures which talk about avoiding strangers.

When we look at the Old Testament we find a number of passages of scripture which taught Israel to avoid strangers.

For example, in Deuteronomy 7:3,4 we read, “Do not intermarry with them.

Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.”

Israel failed to obey God in this.

Solomon married many foreign women and at the end of his life they turned his heart away from God, just as the prophecy had warned.

This continued and the evil in Israel did not stop until God punished them by sending them into exile in Babylon.

After the exile, the land was restored once again, but when Ezra and Nehemiah came to rebuild the temple and the walls of Jerusalem it was discovered that this evil had occurred again.

In Ezra 10:2 we read, “Then Shecaniah son of Jehiel, one of the descendants of Elam, said to Ezra, “We have been unfaithful to our God by marrying foreign women from the peoples around us.”

The concern was about much more than marriage.

In Ezekiel 44:9 we read, “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: No foreigner uncircumcised in heart and flesh is to enter my sanctuary, not even the foreigners who live among the Israelites.”

This warning about avoiding close contact with strangers continues into the New Testament.

One very specific warning is found in II Corinthians 6:14-17 where we read(in part), “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.

For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common?

Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?

…For we are the temple of the living God… “Therefore come out from them and be separate,  says the Lord.

Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.”

From these verses, it seems to be pretty clear that we should avoid strangers, especially those who are not believers.

But before we come to that conclusion, we need to recognize that there is a whole other set of verses which teach us a completely different lesson.

!! B. BUT…

The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians in I Corinthians 5:9, 10, “I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters.

In that case you would have to leave this world.”

In other words, totally separating ourselves from the world is not possible.

In fact, according to Jesus, not only is it not possible, he has actually sent us into the world.

Jesus prayed to God about his disciples in John 17:15 & 18, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one…As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”

Jesus not only taught this principle, but also lived it.

One good example is the encounter he had with Zacchaeus as described in Luke 19:1-10.