The Hunger

Today we continue talking worry. That hair turning gray then falling out, blood pressure rising, skin wrinkling, head hurting, taking your heart out of chest and stomping on it a few times before placing it back and slumping in a chair in despair worry.

And today we talk about something that goes right to our soul. It gives us identity. It can drive whether we feel bad or good? Fitting in.

We want so badly to fit in. There is little that feels better than having people like you or something about you. It makes us feel valuable.

On the other hand, there is little that hurts worse than being treated like an outcast. To be rejected. It is the sort of thing that makes someone blame themselves and ask, “What’s wrong with me?” It is these feelings of usually mistaken guilt and loneliness that can drive people into a veritable pit.

I can say I know a little about this. For I, like many others, found the transition to middle school to be painful. I went through elementary school with a lot of friends. I was often a teacher’s favorite. Had the lead role in the fifth grade musical. Played quarterback on my pee wee football team.

All of these weren’t all that significant. Besides, I was quarterback. But guess what. My dad was coach. Do the math. So these things weren’t significant, except that, to a kid, they are. And come the next year in middle school, they all started to go away.

The elementary schools came together in middle school and I was suddenly far from the top of that totem pole. I tried to make new friends but it just wasn’t working. Even my friends from elementary school were starting to leave me behind. Some moved. Others decided I was dragging them down socially. I just wasn’t cutting it.

And me. I was just trying too hard. I had my required semester of music class in the fall of my sixth grade year. The choir director had wanted me to join choir. But I wasn’t going to do that. The other boys already laughed at me because I hit higher notes than they did. And I was a boy. In my mind, I was quickly becoming a man. I was tough. And tough didn’t dance and sing. So I left behind a place where I may have actually fit in.

And I kept trying. I quit being myself. I stopped wearing my Mervyn’s wardrobe which was your simple jeans and an OP T-shirt. Instead, I talked my mom into spending gobs of money at a trendy store in Vista Ridge Mall. I had the silk and rayon shirts. Fancy jeans and shoes. I was wearing what the cool kids were wearing. And it looked ridiculous.

I mean, I even had these jeans. They were crazy. They had belt loops with no space between them all the way around your waist. You had to spend like an hour the night before you wore them, just lacing your belt through the endless belt loops so you could get dressed quickly the next morning.

All that and I still wasn’t fitting in.
And then came eighth grade. Garth Brooks was shameless. Bill Ray Cyrus (for you kids, he’s Miley Cyrus’, aka Hannah Montana’s dad)…Billy Ray Cyrus had his achy, breaky heart. And the cool kids were going kicker. So, so was I. And I went big. I didn’t get ropers. I got snake skin boots. I had a different bolo tie for each day of the week. I even had a felt hat and a straw hat. I even had the championship wrestling style belt buckle. I mean it was like a satellite dish. It was imitation gold and silver with a bald eagle draped across an American flag. I don’t what the redneck term for bling it is, but my belt buckle was that.

Nonetheless, kicker me didn’t work either. I was still an outsider, except to one person: my friend Danny. I don’t remember how Danny and I became friends. I think it was from playing football together. But we hung out all the time. We played video games together. We walked The Colony together. We talked about his girlfriends together. We even worked out at his house together. Matter of fact, if you look closely enough, I think you can see some of the residual effects of those middle school workouts.

But all kidding aside, Danny was the one person who remained loyal to me. Despite my uncoolness and his ability to fit in…despite the multiple personalities I went through in a short time frame…he stood by me. And I’m pretty sure his standing by me cost him some friends.

I don’t know what it was, but for Danny, I had value. There were others I would hang out with but
I usually ended up being the butt of jokes. But not with Danny. The respect and value he showed me helped me find myself.

Otherwise, my attempts at fitting in would have become despair and who knows what my path may have been then.

I didn’t know it then and I don’t think Danny thought of it this way, but he showed me the Kingdom of God: a place were an awkward, discouraged outcast can find acceptance. But it was just a partial view. After all, there were those we still made fun of. These were kids I would laugh at trying to fit in with other kids. And I could get away with it for awhile and feel superior until the jokes turned on me and the other kids talked behind my back.

But while it was an incomplete vision of the Kingdom of God, in my experience it brought hope. It gave value to someone like myself who otherwise didn’t see any when he looked in the mirror. It kept me from turning on myself or others and making the hurt in my life even greater.

And really, this paints a picture as to why Jesus can look at hurting struggling people in the midst of his Sermon on the Mount and say “Do not worry!”
He’s not telling individuals to deny reality and pretend nothing’s wrong. He’s calling us to community. To understand this, let’s consider what’s going in the Sermon on the Mount. Here, Jesus is announcing a renewed covenant with the people in the Kingdom of God. Look at the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the peacemakers. Jesus is making the proclamation that the weak and vulnerable are delivered from all that oppresses them. The announcement is not that at some future date they will be delivered. He proclaims it so in the here and now. These were ancient announcements equivalent to modern day sayings like, “I now pronounce you man and wife, “ or “We find the defendant not guilty.” The very words created the reality.

Jesus makes these announcements about a renewed covenant of God with humanity and then gives numerous examples about how to be different. How to live in covenant. How to live in a way that, rather than tearing human relationships apart, unites them together.

And the deliverance announced here hadn’t come because the Romans were suddenly treating them as equals or the Pharisees were welcoming them, though Christ certainly challenged these institutions. It came as a call to learn to lean on and support one another instead of mimicking the forces of empire by building little Romes in their own oppressed villages.

Consider how this works. A few verses before our passage on not worrying Jesus tells the people not to parade their religiosity. Don’t announce when you give alms for the poor. Don’t pray in public and with great bombast or with many words like the Gentiles so you will be seen and heard. And keep your fasting between you and God.

What he’s telling us not to be like the Pharisees who celebrate how religious they are while participating in injustice and making sure people don’t fit in. The Pharisees cared about individual status and being accepted by the Romans. While they claimed God, their faith was in something much smaller: themselves and the power of the empire. They may have fit in where they were, but they turned their back, like all of humanity, on where they belonged: in the arms of the Creator made visible in our love for one another.

This is the call to the church. This is the call to offer acceptance and love to all. We live in a world that wants to divide us by economics, divide us by skin color, divide us by religion, divide us by nationality, and even divide us by political party.

And the church has to say no way. We have to stand up and be the ones who unite. To be the ones that blur the lines. Because what Jesus said to the oppressed and downtrodden is you are being excluded in this world. But if you join together, become less focused on your own suffering and seek to support those around you, you’ll find when we all lean on one another we will not fall. I won’t make us do this today but it’s like that exercise where a group stands real close front to back in a circle. Then, they all squat but nobody falls. Because they’re committed to supporting one another. This is how we’ll thrive.

Now the problem is the church has its problems. For example, the church will readily quote the Apostle Paul’s in Galatians, “There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female.” But our practice is much different.

You see we start drawing lines in the sand. These are based on doctrine. Cultural experience. Our values. These lines are often based on what we’re comfortable with and often lack a lot of critical thought. Because of this, church is often a place of conditional acceptance. It’s as if we’re saying something like, “We love you, now change.”

This happened in my life. My friend Danny wasn’t very religious. When I became so and had some close friends who were, I left Danny behind. Love was conditional.

Part of the difficulty is the church in America hasn’t understood for a long time what real persecution is. We feel our faith should be accompanied by some form of suffering like Jesus and his disciples so we’ve had a habit of creating culture wars to make us stick out. We boycott amusement parks for treating all people as equals. We protest chain stores for recognizing there are more than Christians in our neighborhoods during the holidays. We act special as though our faith is something we’ve earned.

We’ve forgotten that God loves us because God is love. We’ve forgotten God loves us despite who we continue to be. So we’ve become the judges. We become the persecutors in many ways. We’ve decided we’ll offer love to anyone but only if they’re willing to conform.

This needs to be a place of “Come as you are.” This needs to be a launching pad where we not wait for people to come through our doors but we go out and love people where they are. There are of people who don’t belong. At least where they are. But when we show up, and we’re full of love, suddenly they fit in. Suddenly they experience the kingdom of God where the weak and vulnerable, the awkward and ridiculed, the outsiders fit in.

And we know we may face difficulty wherever. At work. At school. At home. We may not fit in culturally where we are. Maybe we stand up because of our jargon or dress or customs. Maybe people just won’t accept us, but we belong in Christ. So there’s no need worry about where you’ll fit in tomorrow, but follow Christ today because we belong at his side. We belong together.

Because truthfully Christians are often concerned about fitting in with the world. We have visions of power, influence, and prosperity. We have visions of the world telling us we’re great. So we compromise our values. We compromise love. We compromise faith and place our trust in something other than God so we can fulfill these dreams.

And while we may fit in to that world tomorrow, there are too many that don’t fit in today. So that’s what we can worry about. We remember the greatest act is love. To the child bullied in school we offer love. To the person devalued at home, we offer love. To the person looked down on because of their jargon or lack of English we offer love. To the person whose lifestyle others around us despise, we offer love.

So identify the people around you who don’t fit. Who are likely alone. Then, get to know them. And love them, don’t judge them. Then, you will both find the Kingdom of God as your love frees them from their isolation and frees you from the presuppositions that keep you from the greatest life.

Because when we offer love, we will receive love. We will reside fully in the love of God and one another and experience the greatest life we can find.

So come on man. Come on woman. Come on boys and girls. We can be better than a great person. We can be a great people. We can gather in the wounded, the hated, the vulnerable and become one in God’s love. While the world seeks to divide, we can unite. So don’t worry about tomorrow. You fit in with us today.