Border Crossing Jesus
This is the sermon I preached on Sunday, June 23 at St. Timothy Lutheran Church. The text was Luke 8:26-39. In the 1980s, going to live overseas as missionaries with small children, people worried about us, especially those that didn’t understand what it meant to follow God’s call. We were crossing several boundaries, including that of religion. Those Muslim terrorists—aren’t you afraid for your own lives and those of your children? The call to prayer five times a day was something we really had to adjust to since the mosque was close to our apartment. I came to love it. And the boundaries of culture took a while to learn! You do not cross your legs, showing the bottom of a shoe because that means you consider the other person no better than the dust on your shoes. Women’s shoulders are considered sexy, so you can’t wear sleeveless outfits. And if you wore shorts—you were surely a prostitute because only someone of that ilk would dress in such a way.