Scripture     Matthew 7:13-29

The Narrow Gate to A Broader Way

Prayer: Gracious God, let any baggage we have carried in here with us – and any fears and anxieties we would imagine before us – lie quiet – fall dormant – be still.

This hour … this scripture … this message. Amen.

Many, many years ago, I walked into a barber shop that was new to me. The kind with the old candy cane-striped, blood-and-bandages pole out front –hearkening to the days of yore when cutters of hair were also cutters of skin.

I needed a haircut – “hair styling” I leave to others – and a trim of the beard I sported then. Greeting me with a broad, toothy smile was a man I’ll call Mike. Mike operated the shop – and was the lone barber that day.

Mike began rummaging my scalp with his scissors. Pleasantries were exchanged, in the course of which I told Mike that I was a pastor.

My mistake. Mike cocked his face to mine. Looking me dead in the eye, he asked me if I as a pastor believed in the necessity of being born again.

Seeking out the high ground, and taking Mike’s question broadly – and realizing he was holding a sharp razor to the base of my beard – I replied, Yes, yes: I believe all need to experience new birth in their lives.

Mike was quite relieved – and so was I. “A lot of preachers don’t believe this,” he said. And I thought to myself: Well, I suppose most of us do believe that when you are holding that razor in your hand.

“And then there’s the matter of hell,” Mike continued. Oh boy, I thought.

A saving grace: his razor had taken cover. But Mike’s teeth never did. He grinned his beatific grin, furrowed his brow and with an incredulous expression asked, “How can you be a Christian and not believe in hell? Jesus spoke often of hell. The Hebrew word is Sheol.”

I didn’t have the heart to share with Mike that Sheol signified the abode for the dead for everyone – long before the dubious concept of hell arrived to us courtesy of the Babylonians. Or that I was more concerned with not living a life in hell today.

Would we have had the time. Lest his proclamations become conversation, Mike proceeded to tell me the story of a customer – a Hindu – who could not understand the importance of this concept of hell for Christians. “I told him,” Mike said, “that you have to believe in Jesus, or else” – he opened his hands and smile even wider – “or else, you go to hell!” He then laughed: “I wish it wasn’t true … but that’s what the Bible says!”

It was then I sensed why I did not have to wait for a haircut that day.

For narrow was Mike’s gate to spiritual entry …

     … or should we say narrow was his spiritual way?

While a pastor for 11 years at Northside Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor, MI, talk sometimes turned to renaming the congregation something more fetching and farsighted – and something less common and mundane.

And besides, several establishments on that side of town were already named Northside – including another church, less than a mile away. Perched as we were on one of the town’s highest elevations – the peak of Broadway Avenue – I ventured that, if we diversity-minded and post-denominational-oriented church folk really wanted to change our name, perhaps we should call it “The Church of the Broad Way”, with Presbyterian in parentheses.

Now, a congregation named “Church of the Broad Way” may not seem copacetic with these words from Jesus today: “Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction.” For if Jesus is advocating a narrow gate here, and a hard road besides: how broad can way be, that he – and we – would have to offer?

A full reading of the Sermon on the Mount verses today suggests that Jesus is speaking with more than a touch of irony here. And that irony is this: Jesus’ narrow gate in this world of ours is the narrow, less-entered gate of relational breadth and depth -- versus the wider, tribal-oriented gate of creedal narrowness.

Which makes more sense when we consider that Matthew’s gospel in particular was addressed to a faith community profoundly Jewish and Gentile both. A scandal in that day, this association – hence, the image of the narrow gate. And so sounding the fugue of inclusion – relational breadth and depth – was central here to this gospel’s harmony. Entering a narrow gate, indeed!

And Matthew’s Jesus expresses that relational breadth and depth today with several vivid metaphors: Sprouting good fruit … gathering grapes and figs … building houses on rock. 

Sprouting. Gathering. Building. Metaphors based not on belief – the wide gate leading to the narrow way of the ideologue – but (metaphors based) on action – the narrow gate leading to the expansive way of the disciple.

I believe the Presbyterian poet Kathleen Norris captures the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount well when she writes that God’s judgment is made – if we must go there – not on what we have believed but on how we have loved.¹

Not on how we believe our way into loving action. But how we lovingly act our way into understanding how we are to believe.

In today’s 16 verses of Jesus’ teaching, the biblical Greek word for “do” or “make” appears nine times. For example, Jesus says whoever does the will of God enters the gate – not all who confess him as “Lord, Lord”: it’s not about belief. Not primarily.

And his concluding words for Matthew’s entire three-chapter teaching collection leave us no doubt: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise (one) who built (a) house on rock … And everyone who does not act on them will be like a foolish (one) who built (a) house on sand.”

I felt that my barber Mike boasted many relational gifts. In fact, I was fond of the haircuts I received from him – and I returned to him several times.

What a shame he felt compelled to express those gifts not through the narrow gate of curiosity, but through the narrow prism of exclusivity.

And so what will be for us, as a church? Curious ears, for the concerns of the world … or exclusive eyes, overlooking the same sins in one another?

I feel that our Social Action meeting following Worship two Sundays hence is so vital – so essential – for our witness as a church.

Don’t know if you have noticed: We have not made a concerted presence known beyond these grounds for many moons.

In our budget this year, we have $10,000 in undesignated funds invested in making that presence known. More importantly, of course: We have you.

And we have our Worship Charge. The Charge we say as one at the conclusion of Worship each and every Sunday. We are good at reading it. We are good at thinking it. We are even good at rewording it.

And many of us are good at acting upon it as individuals ... by casting our bread on certain community waters of our own personal choosing – and personal control. Ways each of us can go about improving our world: one person at a time.

And yet the narrow gate I believe Jesus is calling us to pass through is this: letting go of our need for recognition as individual benefactors enough to trust and invest in our calling as church. To enter the narrow gate of exploring as one body a ministry of relational breadth and depth far more impactful than any personal witness any of us can make.

Our regional Manna Food offerings and letters on food policy to Bread for the World: those we will continue; those are Sunday starts. But what does it mean to be in living, active partnership with Bethesda Cares – especially as they prepare to move clients into our Church House next door? Commitment to relational depth and breadth: it’s a narrow gate to enter. And what does it mean that we are a church of sanctuary witness for immigrants? What does it look like – as a congregation – to be a model of Earth Care?

The cover of our 2018 Year in Pictures puts it well: We are a church about Love In Action. As many of you know: That’s our simple calling. And, I trust, that means more to us than Johanna In Action … or, Donna in Action … or, Chuck In Action.

Jesus knew – and Matthew’s first century church knew: Narrow is the gate through which we must pass for relational breadth and depth in this world.

It means being open. It means being vulnerable. It means being intimate.

It means trusting in a God more expansive than we have known.

Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.

¹Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (NYC: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 315.

Intro to The Prayers of the People …

O God, O Christ, O Holy Spirit,

     our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.

And so we rest them today, O God, in gratitude. In gratitude to you, and the challenge of the narrow gate through which Jesus calls us to pass.

The narrow gate that leads to diversity – living as we do near four of the 10 most diverse cities in our country, all in Montgomery County.*

The narrow gate that leads to destruction of walls and the building of bridges – not the construction of walls and the burning of bridges.

The narrow gate that leads us not to "issues", but to very human concerns.

The narrow gate that leads us to reconciliation with one another by taking different stands alongside different peoples — and then to sit down from our stands to work concerns out.

The narrow gate that leads us to where you call us to stand, as followers of Jesus: with the most vulnerable in body and spirit among us. That we might discover your profoundest riches and intimacies of relational breadth and depth …

  *Silver Spring, Rockville, Gaithersburg, Germantown