“Is this for members only?”

For the past few weeks, our church has had a sign out front proclaiming “The sanctuary is open for quiet meditation.” On stormy, blustery evenings, people from off the streets slipped into an oasis of welcome: candles glowing, Christmas decorations glistening, musicians softly playing the songs of Christmas on cello, guitars, and mandolin.

A quiet refuge where those who were homeless could sit for a few moments alongside others who were taking a break from bustling between stores.  One mother bundled her energetic sons inside to sit for a moment and then each lit a candle in prayer. Another person asking hesitantly at the door, “Is it ok if I come in, or is this for members only?”  

Inside this sanctuary there are no outsiders. That’s the Gospel.

Eugene Peterson describes it well in his introduction to the Gospel of Luke in The Message:

“Most of us, most of the time, feel left out—misfits. We don’t belong. Others seem to be so confident, so sure of themselves, ‘insiders’… in a club from which we are excluded. 

One of the ways we have of responding to this is to… join  a club  that will have us. Here is at least one place where we are ‘in’ and the others ‘out’…The one thing these clubs have in common is the principle of exclusion. Identity or worth is achieved by excluding all but the chosen. The terrible price we pay for keeping all those other people out so that we can savor the sweetness of being insiders is a reduction of reality, a shrinkage of life.

Nowhere is this price more terrible than when it is paid in the cause of religion. But religion has a long history of doing just that, of reducing the huge mysteries of God to the respectability of club rules, of shrinking the vast human community to a ‘membership.’ But with God there are no outsiders.

Luke is a most vigorous champion of the outsider. An outsider himself, the only Gentile in an all-Jewish cast of New Testament writers, he shows how Jesus includes those who typically were treated as outsiders by the religious establishment of the day: women, common laborers (sheepherders), the racially different (Samaritans), the poor. 

He will not countenance religion as a club. As Luke tells the story, all of us who have found ourselves on the outside looking in on life with no hope of gaining entrance (and who of us hasn’t felt it?) now find the doors wide open, found and welcomed by God in Jesus.”