The Church and People With Strange Accents

The text for Sunday is Luke 22: 47-62.  It is the story of Jesus being denied by Peter three times.  Not a typical text for the fall.  And this text comes from a sermon that I preached some years ago, but as one of the few sermons where I remember the conversations afterward.  I guess that says something about me as a preacher, that there are not enough sermons with memorable conversations afterward?

Quick background: Jesus was arrested after coming out of the Garden of Gethsemane, where he was engaged in the seditious behavior of praying to God.  It is the dead of night, away from the crowds, there is nearly a violent confrontation, and Jesus goes quietly-to his eventual death.

Peter follows, and fulfills a prophecy Jesus made about him.  He was brave enough to slip into the High Priest’s compound to witness the trial, but not brave enough to stand up for Jesus.  And his accent betrays him, “for he is a Galilean”.

I am white, an immigrant to this nation from the far shores of … Canada…so except when I’ve tinged my “o” and use “eh” the way a teen from the San Fernando Valley in LA uses “like”, you really can’t tell.   

Peter stood out because of his accent.  We should take pains to be aware of reaching out to those folks the Lord sends along to us who are also standing out in our congregations because of their accent, or because of something different.  We need to be painfully aware that our unconscious habits of long practice may exclude them when we need to be taking steps to include them.

I need to undo the habit of labeling ‘different’ people as “them” when “they” are us.

And the fact of the matter is we should stand out.  Not like Peter hiding in the crowd at the high priest’s home.  No, like Peter on the streets of Jerusalem after the coming of the Holy Spirit!  He made a spectacle of himself.  And it isn’t like things were different in the city.  The disciples were in hiding because they were afraid of their own arrests. 

What made the difference for them was the coming of the Holy Spirit.

The hymn “They shall know we are Christians by our love” jumps to mind for me.  If we are going to make it, we need to stand out.  But not because we look funny or we talk funny or we act funny because of our ethnic, cultural, or racial heritage.

No, we should look funny and talk funny and act funny because we are daring to show our love and our faith.  People should be helped and blessed and aided by who we are and what we do because that is what Jesus would have done.  If it is hard for us, buckle down and look to the Lord for strength to make a spiritual sacrifice in his name (see the sermon in the last post for more on that).

Amen.