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What's in Your Backpack?
By This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (please email questions or responses)
August 28, 2010
Hebrews 13: 1-8, 15-16; Luke 14: 1, 7-14

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen.

Judith Peabody might well have been at the Sabbath dinner Jesus was having with the Pharisees in our Gospel story from Luke today.

Well, she might well have been, except for a couple of details. She was a woman, and it is unlikely there were any women gathered around the table for that power lunch with the Pharisees. And she lived in our era, not in the first century. At least she did until she died last month at the age of 80.

Nevertheless, imagine, if you will, that Judith Peabody was there that day and that she heard what Jesus was saying.

She was among the elite in our society. She married into wealth, was a patron of the arts, was no shrinking violet when it came to giving fancy parties or wearing clothes custom made by Aldofo or Oscar de la Renta or Bill Blass.

Remember Jesus’ words at the end of the reading today? “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or rich neighbors.  Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind.”

Judith Peabody had plenty of parties for friends and rich neighbors. But she walked in another world as well.  In 1967, she and her husband founded Reality House in New York City, a drug rehabilitation center. She worked as a discussion leader with former heroin addicts who were confronting their addiction.

Sometime in the late 60s or early 70s, Peabody was working with a group called the Renegades Housing Movement. That was a Hispanic youth gang moving away from law-breaking and into rehabbing an old building in East Harlem.

Her husband, Samuel Peabody, recalled this moment in a recent interview with the New York Times: “One night she invited them all for dinner to our apartment. The doormen were, well, a little surprised. It was a great night.”

You can almost see Jesus smiling.

Her husband recalled that when he met her, she was 20 years old and working at a youth center for delinquents. He picked her up there on one of their first dates. She begged him: “Please don’t tell my mother. She thinks I’m having French lessons.”

It was less funny in the mid-1980s when she began to devote herself to caring for AIDS patients. This was an era when, as one person recalled, “Gay men with AIDS were the scourge of the earth.” Even people who could see past the disease to the humanity were afraid to come into contact with them, for fear of contracting the disease.

Yet Judith Peabody would became part of what was called a “Care Partners” program, working one-on-one with these men. Marjorie Hill, the director of the Gay Men's Health Crisis center where Peabody helped out, said, "There was this constant with her of consoling and holding people's hands."

William Norwich, a writer for Town and Country magazine, recalled that Peabody’s friends would tell her, “I can’t believe you’re doing that. We don’t know people like that.”

Well, Judith Peabody got to know them. And she also knew that her power and status meant she could go beyond the basic care and compassion she offered.

She raised money – lots of money – and when she would find an undelivered meal tray outside a hospital room of an AIDS patient, she would remind the staff that she was best friends with the chairman of the hospital board and that they had better take that tray into that room.

I’m spending time on Judith Peabody this morning not because there are many of us here who have the wealth, power and prestige she had to make things happen. I am focusing on her because we all have the capacity to look at folks not like us and find a way to bring them around society’s great banquet table – and to open our church’s great banquet table to them.

If the glamorous and transformative life of Judith Peabody is one image for this morning, the other one is much more mundane. It’s the backpack.

Our students are getting their backpacks filled up with the things they need for the months ahead – books for some, notebooks of the paper variety and notebooks of the computer variety, pens, pencils. They are getting ready for an education organized heavily around books.

Books weren’t so common in Jesus’ day. So when Jesus taught his followers, there were no assignments to read from pages 55 to 110.

There were things like the conversation at that Sabbath meal, stories told, examples given.

Jesus invited his followers to study the world around them – the lilies of the field that remind us of God’s care, the poor widow who gives generously out of her scarcity, the Samaritan who unexpectedly cares for one who is injured,
the despised tax collector who prays quietly but sincerely.

What things, then, might we have in our backpacks that connect with these two readings we heard today?

One thing Jesus was talking about was forming a welcoming community grounded in God’s ways, a place where people could come together without the distinctions society makes. It like gathering together around a kitchen table with a mug of coffee.

And then look around to see who is missing at this table. Sometimes they are not easy to see, so having binoculars in the backpack is a good reminder to look out beyond our normal sight lines.

The letter to the Hebrews reminds us to “show hospitality to strangers.” Maybe we ought to have an extra set of table wear like we take on a picnic so we can always set a place for the unexpected person we encounter.

Finding things for the backpack were a bit harder for some of the other messages in that letter to the Hebrews that drew on the Jewish traditions of these new Christians.

“Remember those who are in prison … those who are being tortured.” There is no shortage of people like that we read about in the news, so the first step is to be attentive to those whom society rejects. And then having a Bible along would help us to remember Jesus’ call to us.

It’s a call to identify with people we often would rather reject ourselves, to find the humanity in places where it is not always easy to discover.

Sometimes that means putting ourselves in a position where others may think we are acting a bit odd … like Judith Peabody, whose friends didn’t know any of those people. And oh, how we don’t want to risk our social status.

And it gets harder still. The letter reminds people in committed relationships that those commitments take work to sustain.

“Let the marriage bed be kept undefiled” can sound awfully moralistic, but in fact, working to protect the fidelity of our relationships is vital. It’s more that gritting your teeth and saying “I must be faithful.” It’s finding ways to continually nurture those relationships that are our core commitment to another. And so a traditional reminder of love and commitment – a ring.

One last image from the letter to the Hebrews – “keep your lives free from the love of money.” This is not a call to live in poverty. It’s a call to not let an obsession with money – protecting what we have, wanting more and more of it – to rule our lives. And so, bread that can be broken and shared.

We each may well have a different mix of items in our backpacks as we travel the way of Jesus. And this journey is not a solitary hike in the wilderness. It’s something we do together.

We deepen the relationships we have here, form new relationships with one another, explore the maps and the guidebooks of our traditions together.

This fall, we’ll be launching a couple of new ways of doing that.

In a few weeks, we’ll be starting an adult education time on Sunday mornings between our services (and there’ll be an enrichment time for kids).

There will be a whole new way of exploring life that we are calling The Way on Wednesdays. There’s more in your bulletin, in the next newsletter and on our web site about that.

We’ll continue other ways of learning together – our Wednesday morning Scripture conversations, a lively book group that meets early one Friday morning a month, and more. Anyone can join in those as well.

As the year goes on, you may find things to put in your backpacks that will be useful along the way. We’ll surely be sharing what we have in our backpacks, because it’s pretty clear that we are all bound together.

As the letter to the Hebrews said at the beginning today, “Let mutual love continue.”

It’s a love that happens in small ways as people around here look out for one another.

It’s love that happens in dramatic ways when a society matron like Judith Peabody sat at the bedside of a man dying from AIDS and simply held his hand.

It’s a love we recall when we gather around this table and break bread and share a cup, when we sense God’s presence in our midst and when we extend the sense of mutual love we nurture here to all those who need it. Around this table, all are welcome – women and men, young and old, gay and straight, poor and rich, high status or low status, whatever race, whatever ethnicity, whatever football team you root for.