A reading from the Letter to the Hebrews, chapter thirteen.
"Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate. Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach. For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come."
Without the gate. That is old English for outside the gate. Outside the wall. Outside the place where the respectable people lived and worshipped and kept their accounts.
Hear that plainly today. The one we follow did not die in the temple. He did not die in a sanctuary with good light and a polished floor. He was taken out of the city, to the place where the city put what it did not want. And the writer of Hebrews does not say, so let us bring him back in. The writer says, let us go forth unto him. He is out there. If you want him, that is where you go.
Some of you did not have to go. You were sent.
Someone told you that you could not stay. Perhaps they said it in a meeting. Perhaps they said it in a letter. Perhaps nobody said anything at all, and the room simply went cold, and people stopped saving you a seat, until one Sunday you understood. That silence is its own kind of door closing.
I will not tell you it did not hurt. It did. A church is not only a building. It is the people who knew your name, the songs you knew by heart, the place your mother sat. When you lose that, you lose a country.
So let me tell you about a man who lost his.
In the Gospel according to John, chapter nine, there is a man who was born blind. Jesus makes clay, and puts it on his eyes, and sends him to wash, and he comes back seeing. You would think the whole town would rejoice. Instead, he is questioned. His parents are questioned, and the text tells us they were afraid, because anyone who confessed Jesus would be put out of the synagogue. So they step back from their own son. Ask him, they say. He is of age.
And the man will not lie. He does not have a theology. He has one fact. "One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see."
That was too much for them. The text says, "Thou wast altogether born in sins, and dost thou teach us? And they cast him out."
Notice what they did. They could not answer him, so they named him. Born in sins. They reached for a name that would make it unnecessary to listen. That is how it is usually done. First the name, then the door.
Now hear the next verse, because it is the one I want you to carry home.
"Jesus heard that they had cast him out; and when he had found him, he said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God?"
Jesus heard. And Jesus went looking. And Jesus found him.
Where? Not inside. The man was not allowed inside. He was found wherever a person goes on the day they have been thrown out. A street. A wall to lean against. And think of this. The man had never seen the face of Jesus. When he was healed, he was still blind until he washed, and by then Jesus was gone. The first time he sees the one who healed him is after the door has shut behind him.
"Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee. And he said, Lord, I believe. And he worshipped him."
He worshipped him. Out there. With no roof, no choir, no permission. The first true worship in that whole chapter happens outside the synagogue, offered by a man who had just been expelled from it.
I do not say that to shame anyone's building. There are good people in buildings. I say it so that you will stop believing the lie that was told to you on your way out. The lie was that God stayed behind when you left. The gospel says the opposite. He heard. He came looking.
Now, in this church we read something further into this, and I will say plainly that it is our reading, not the common one. Revelation speaks of a woman in scarlet and of a scarlet beast, and most readers through the ages have taken them as figures of evil. We read them differently. We read them as Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, each handed a wrong name by a frightened age. You do not have to hold that reading to sit with us. But you can see why we hold it. We have watched what frightened people do. They did it to a man born blind. Born in sins, they said. We know how a wrong name is given, and we know how long it can stick.
And we remember that the gospels place the cross outside the city, and the garden tomb near to it, and that it was there, outside, in the early dark, that Mary Magdalene stood weeping, and was called by her name. The meeting happened outside the camp. In our reading, it is still happening there.
That brings me to the day itself. Why Saturday. Why twenty-four hours.
In the Gospel according to Mark, chapter two, Jesus and his disciples walk through the corn fields on the sabbath, and the disciples are hungry, and they pluck the ears of corn as they go. The Pharisees object. It is not lawful, they say. And Jesus answers with a sentence that turns the whole matter over.
"The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath."
The sabbath is a gift. It was not made as a test to catch you failing. It was made because you get tired. It was made because a person who never stops working forgets that they are a person. Genesis tells us that God rested on the seventh day, and the commandment says, "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy." The seventh day. So we keep the seventh day, Saturday. Many churches gather on the first day of the week, in honour of the resurrection, and we have no quarrel with them. We simply keep the day the commandment names, and we keep it as a gift.
And we keep it for the whole day, all twenty-four hours, by Eastern Time. Here is why. A service lasts one hour, and if you miss the hour, you have missed it. But the people who come to us work night shifts. They are awake at three in the morning with a grief that will not let them sleep. They live in other countries, under other clocks. They are caring for a sick parent and get ten minutes free at some odd time. If the sabbath was made for them, then the door ought to be open when they can come. So it stays open from the beginning of Saturday to the end of it. Come at dawn. Come at midnight. You are not late.
And we meet outside every building, because a building has a door, and a door has someone standing at it, deciding. We have no door. Nobody here can put you out, because there is no inside to be put out of. "Here have we no continuing city." We do not own the ground. We are a camp of people outside the camp, and the only thing we share is that somebody looked for us.
One word about bearing his reproach. It does not mean you must enjoy being despised. It does not mean the people who hurt you were right. It means that the shame they put on you is a shame he has already worn, and you do not carry it alone.
So rest today. Truly rest. Eat something. Sleep if you can. Keep the appointments that keep you well, and take the care that others have rightly given you. Rest is not laziness. It is obedience to a kindness.
And if you were put out, look up from where you are sitting. He heard, and he is on his way.
Let us pray.
Lord, you suffered outside the gate, and you found the man they cast out. Find us where we are. Take from us the wrong names we were given, and call us by the true one. Give rest to the weary on this seventh day, and keep us close to you outside the camp, until we come to the city that is to come. Amen.