Meeting Jesus

Last month I talked about meeting Jesus. This week, I met Jesus.

He didn’t come to meet me in any of the places he’s supposed to be: not on the cross, not in a stained glass window, not in the pages of the Bible, not in communion, not in my heart, not in any of the other places I’ve been told to look for him. No, Jesus walked right into the hall outside the church office. And he didn’t look the way he was supposed to either: no halo, no flowing hair, no flowing white robe, no unwrinkled white skin. No, Jesus was a black man with a clean coat and a huge duffel bag, salt-and-pepper hair cut very short, the smell of a few cigarettes, and a few wearied lines in his face.

I kept him waiting when he came in; I was on a very important phone call. When I was finally ready, I walked out of our locked office (we always keep the office locked, because you can’t be too careful). I went into the hall where he was sitting on an old pew and sat down next to him. He said, “can we talk in private?”

I wasn’t sure, but I took a chance, unlocked the door, and walked in with him. Then it occurred to me that I never talked to people in the hall, and I felt a little guilty. “Sit wherever you like,” I said. He sat down. I did too.

Then he told me that he was trying to get home to Kentucky—a little town I’d never heard of. He called me “brother,” talked about how he prayed and how God took care of him. I didn’t pay much attention because I knew that vagrants always try to impress preachers with a lot of talk about God. He told me how the father at the Catholic church had gotten him a room at the motel, how the Lord had moved a stranger had given him enough money, how a friend was coming to pick him up tomorrow. “So,” he said, “I need a ride to the store and then to the motel.” I waited for him to ask for money. He didn’t.

“You mean you just need a ride?”

“That’s right…and if you could, wait for me to run into a grocery store and buy some food.”

I could do that. So he tossed his bag in my van, got in, and we drove to a store. I made small talk and tried to figure out his angle. Would he tell me that he couldn’t pay at the store? Would he ask for me to pay for another night at the hotel? Was he going to just ask for money? I couldn’t see the plan as I waited. I thought about telling him that I had to go. I’d already gone out of my way to give him a ride, done my good deed for the day. I was going to miss my lunch, and it wasn’t that far to the motel...but when he came out with a little bag of food (I noticed ramen noodles, which are just about the cheapest food you can buy), I felt a little more guilty and kept quiet.

Then he said, “can we stop by the gas station too? I just need one thing.” So I took him to get his pack of cigarettes. Of course, even when he was begging he was still smoking—it figured. “I’ve got 10 minutes,” I told him. I stopped by a pump to wait for a car to pull out of a parking space, and he jumped out right away. I was definitely going to miss lunch now, so I dug in the back of my van and found a brownie. I’d bought it in the morning because I’d missed breakfast. I left late because I’d had to search for pants…I couldn’t fit into the ones I’d picked out, the ones that fit just fine before Thanksgiving. After I bought it I thought that maybe I didn’t need a brownie after all, but now I was missing lunch too, and I had to eat something, didn’t I? So I ate the brownie quickly. I had to shove the last bite in my mouth because he was done in four minutes and jogged back to the van. “Sorry that took so long,” he said.

Then we drove through the cold rain to the motel. It was a lot farther than I remembered. I thought about walking all that way in freezing rain. I thought about how long I’d be able to keep my home if I lost my job. I thought about the brownie I’d eaten, even though it was bad for me. I thought about eating it quickly, before the hungry man next to me noticed. And I remembered the words of judgment that Jesus said he would repeat on the last day:

“I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.”

And when the judged would ask Jesus, “Lord, when were you a hungry or thirsty or a stranger stranger and we didn’t help you?” he would say

“Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

Then I knew that I was meeting Jesus, and that I had not welcomed him in. And I felt very, very, guilty.

He didn’t ask for money, but when he wasn’t looking I stuck a bill in his bag. I thought I’d feel better, but I didn’t. Then I remembered something that one of Jesus’ disciples said: “If I give all I possess to the poor but have no love, I gain nothing.” So I pulled out my card.

“Would you do me a favor?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“When you get where you’re going, call me so I know you’re safe. Oh, and if your friend doesn’t come and you’re stuck here longer, let me know.” Then I looked him in the eye, and shook his hand. He smiled. He picked up his bag, his food, and his smokes, and went into the motel.

It’s a good thing for me that Jesus doesn’t hold a grudge. But the next time he shows up, I won’t leave him waiting in the hall.

Pastor's Column, December 2008

If you come to church, you’ll notice that we’re ready for “Christmas.” The garland is hanging, the tree is up, the lights and ornaments are on. And, just like every year, the green cloths have been replaced by purple ones. In churches all around the world, these changes are part of “Christmas.” But even though most people call this “Christmas time,” a church calendar will show you that “Christmastime” is the time after Christmas—like in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” What we call Christmas was only Day 1; the Christmas season went from December 25 to January 6. In church, we celebrate that by switching from purple to white for that time of year. But this time—the time before Christmas, is called Advent, which you could translate to mean “Coming In.” Advent is meant to be a time to prepare for the day when Jesus will come, to prepare ourselves to meet Jesus.

Since we make such a big deal about Christmas, it’s easy to think about “meeting Jesus” as waiting for the baby to come—and if you’ve ever known an expecting mother, that’s an amazing time. It is a time to marvel at what God did for us. There are many descriptions of encounters with God before Jesus was born, and most of them describe totally awe-inspiring and overwhelming events. When people encountered God, they usually fell on their faces and begged for their lives. But God wanted to meet us where we were, and so God came into this world as a little baby, tiny and defenseless. That strange idea, that God came into the world and lived a human life with us, is at the heart of everything else that Christians do and say. This is a time to celebrate it, lift it up, and deepen our relationship with that person.
But “meeting Jesus” doesn’t stop with that baby. That baby grew up, died, rose again, and ascended into heaven, and none of us can know him now. But Jesus told us that someone else was coming—the Holy Spirit, God who is with us each and every day. Today, our closest and deepest knowledge of God comes through the Holy Spirit who lives in each and every one of us. You might have heard people talk about being “filled with the Spirit.” The truth is that you’re already filled with the Spirit, but you may not know it! God, the Spirit, is with you all the time, even though most of us barely notice…but the Holy Spirit is there, waiting for us, waiting to introduce us to Jesus. And so, through the Spirit, we can use this time to look into our own hearts and meet Jesus there.

And even beyond that, the Scriptures talk about a time when everyone will meet Jesus. I don’t put any stock at all in the various schemes of “end time prophecy” that are floating around, but Jesus and his followers didn’t leave any doubt that the day would come when the whole world would meet Jesus. So when we think about meeting Jesus, we should take some time to remember that when everything else is gone—when everything we know, everything we’ve done, everything we’ve worked for has passed into dust—we will meet Jesus.

The Scriptures don’t say too much about what things will be like on that last day, but they do talk about one more way to meet Jesus. Jesus told his followers that he would remind them of all the times when they met homeless people, hungry and thirsty people, people in jail, sick people. And he said that every time we did, we were meeting him. He told us that we didn’t have to go back to Bethlehem to meet him, or wait until the last day. He told us that we meet him all the time, and that he wouldn’t forget how we treated him.

So, when you take some time to prepare for meeting Jesus this Advent season, by all means celebrate Jesus’ birth, and take some time to think about what you’ll have to say when you meet Jesus on the last day. But Jesus himself told us that we really need to think about meeting Jesus here and now, in the suffering, neglected, and abused people who are all around us. So, this Advent, don’t wait for Jesus to come to you. Go out and meet Jesus. We have food pantries for hungry and thirsty people, free clinics for sick people, shelters for homeless people, prison ministries for people in jail. Don’t wait, and don’t think that Jesus wanted you to write a check…go out and meet him where he is.