The World on Charles Street

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

October 4, 2015

World Communion

The World on Charles Street

Selected Texts

It’s an easy building to miss.

It is nondescript,

not like some of the other buildings nearby,

buildings that reflect great, classic architecture.

It is just a simple red-brick building

tucked away on Charles Street,

one of those wonderfully obscure back streets

in London that you can find only

by wandering around on foot. 

The building on Charles houses a small hotel;

a simple, comfortable, local hotel

favored by business travelers.

I stayed there frequently back in the 1990s

when I worked as an editor for

the Economist Group,

the British publications firm.

I was based in New York City,

but traveled to the company’s

London headquarters

every three or four months,

usually for a week at a time.

The hotel on Charles Street

became my home away from home.

Like most travelers,

I was oblivious to others who were also there,

most there for business.

We all tended to rush in and out,

to and from meetings and appointments.

I was oblivious to the fact

that each time I stayed there,

I was living in a microcosm of the world:

the hotel peopled with men and women

from all over the world.

Guests in the rooms,

as well as workers –

receptionists, porters,

waiters, chambermaids, custodians,

people from England, America,

France, Japan, Kenya

Jamaica, Chile…

The company I worked for

was truly a global company,

its flagship publication reporting events

from throughout the world.

I, of all people, should have been attuned to

the world around me in that little hotel.

It took a writer from the 1920s,

a German newspaper columnist

named Joseph Roth

to open my eyes to the world on Charles Street

as he described his own experience

as he traveled from country to country,

hotel to hotel, as a correspondent

in those fraught, frenzied years

between the two world wars.

In one column he wrote of

the world within the hotel

where he happened to be staying:

“The guests come from all over the world.

Continents and seas,

islands, peninsulas and ships;

they come from all over the world;

…freed from the blinkers of nationalism,

slightly on holiday from the

rigidity of love of their own land,

people seem to come together here

and at least appear to be

what they should always be:

children of the world.”

(“The Hotel Years”)

A tiny global village in that writer’s hotel;

a hotel he did not identify by name or place,

a hotel that could have been anywhere.

        

A tiny global village on Charles Street in London

twenty years ago.

How many nationalities were in the dining room

as I had breakfast each morning,

people eating, serving, picking up plates,

frying the eggs in the kitchen?

For all the different nationalities

that were surely in that room,

there were no fights, shouts,

plates tossed, arguments over borders.

We were content to be in one another’s company,

at peace with one another.

As travelers, we were probably even glad

for one another’s company.

We were separated by our different countries,

different cultures,

different languages,

yet none of us was alone.

We are part of a global society.

We do not and cannot live behind walls.

The reality is that we’ve been

part of a global society for centuries,

and we grow more global,

more tied together,

more integrated and intertwined by the day.

Turn back the clock,

back almost 3,000 years

as King Solomon made ready

to construct the Great Temple,

the home of Yahweh, the Lord God,

the God of the children of Israel.

The first thing he did

was contact the King of another country,

the king of Lebanon,

the country to the north

and asked the king for cedar and cyprus wood

for the Temple’s interior.

(1 Kings 5)

The King of Lebanon gladly complied,

asking in return for wheat and olive oil

from Solomon’s nation.

The people of Israel fed the people of Lebanon,

as the people of Lebanon helped the people of Israel

build their Temple.

(1 Kings 7:13)

How many times do we read in the Old Testament

that we are to welcome the alien;

not confine him,

not turn her away,

not send him back,

but welcome her, welcome him:

You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien,

for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

(Exodus 22:21)

You shall not oppress a resident alien;

you know the heart of an alien,

for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

(Exodus 23:9)

The alien who resides with you

shall be to you as the citizen among you;

you shall love the alien as yourself, …

(Leviticus 19.34)

Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien… of justice.

(Deuteronomy 27.19)

Do you hear a pattern here,

of what God wants from us, expects from us?

These are not ancient words we can discard;

they are timeless words

that should instruct and guide us even now.

The gospel of Matthew would have been

a much shorter book

had the people of Egypt sought to keep out aliens,

built a barrier to keep aliens from the north

from traveling into their land.

Where would Joseph, Mary,

and their newborn son have gone to flee from

the murderous Herod and his soldiers

as they slaughtered every young child

under the age of two?

They fled to Egypt

and lived there as aliens

until it was safe for them to return.

(Matthew 2:13ff)

                 

Doesn’t our Lord command us

to love our neighbor as ourselves,

and didn’t our Lord illustrate what he meant,

what he means,

by the word “neighbor”

with a person who was an alien,

an alien from a loathsome people –

that’s what a Samaritan was to an Israelite.

In the first letter of John we read:

Those who say, “I love God,”

and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars;

for those who do not love a brother or sister

whom they have seen,

cannot love God whom they have not seen.

The commandment we have from him is this:

those who love God

must love their brothers and sisters also.

(1 John 4:20ff)

And who is our brother, our sister?

Our Lord Jesus gives us the widest,

broadest definition:

“whoever does the will of my Father in heaven…”

which means anyone

of any country,

of any culture,

any language.

The love we’ve been given by God through Jesus Christ

is a love that frees us,

frees us from prejudice,

frees us from fear,

frees us from ideology,

bigotry,

xenophobia, nativism,

tribalism,

anything and everything

that doesn’t broaden and widen love,

that doesn’t bring peace and reconciliation to the world.

The love we’ve been given by God through Christ

is active love,

love that calls us to build a world of peace

here in Manassas,

in a hotel in London,

anywhere, everywhere…

We, the children of God,

children of peace,

children of the world.

AMEN