P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

HEAVEN’S RAINBOW #2

GIVING JESUS A LIFT

It was on an Alabama highway. Rain pouring down. Wind whipping water into angry little puddles along the road. Eleven-thirty at night. And an African-American woman was standing beside her broken-down car, trying to get a ride. She was an older woman, probably harmless. But this being Alabama, and this being the 1960s, meant that she was probably going to get very, very wet before anybody’d pick her up.

Well, finally she did get a ride. A young man – white, decent, courteous. “Can I help you, ma’am?” He drove her to safety, helped arrange for the car to be towed in, helped get her a taxi. She seemed to be flustered, in a hurry, and this anonymous helper calmly assisted her, got her on her way. She did take about fifteen seconds and jot down his address before the taxi pulled out into the midnight storm.

And . . . he forgot all about it. About a week later, though, a delivery truck pulled up at the young man’s house. To his amazement, workmen hauled out a huge color TV set and walked right in his front door. “This is for you.” And this was a beauty – remember, back in the 1960s, a great big color TV, in a stereo console, was still a rare luxury. Now HE had one. Did this have anything to do with that wind-swept, bedraggled black woman he’d helped a week ago? That didn’t make any sense. So he read the attached note with some curiosity: “Thank you so much for assisting me on the highway the other night. The rain drenched not only my clothes but my spirits. Then you came along. Because of you, I was able to make it to my dying husband’s bedside just before he passed away. God bless you for helping me and unselfishly serving others. Sincerely . . . Mrs. Nat King Cole.”

Well, I guess we file that away under the category of “Good to Be Lucky” and also “Lucky to be good.” You do the right thing, and for once it pays off in silver dollars and a door prize from RCA Victor.

But is it always this way? Does good always triumph and get you a color TV? Last week our series-long theme was how Pee Wee Reese, the great Dodger shortstop, reached out to embrace Jackie Robinson, to help drop the so-called Cotton Wall of segregation in the major leagues. Result? The Brooklyn Dodgers – probably because Robinson was in the lineup – got into the World Series. But we can all recall stories that go the other way: where a civil rights worker, out there doing good, is killed and buried in an anonymous river bank. Where you fight for equality and get shot on the balcony of a Tennessee motel. Where you turn the other cheek and get whacked, not once, but twice.

If you know your Old Testament fairly well, this Nat King Cole story probably takes you back to Genesis 18, where a man named Abraham is sitting by his tent, enjoying his prosperity. Three men come along the road, beaten down – not by a rainstorm, but by the hot sun. So Abraham feeds them, takes care of them. They’re total strangers, but he gives them a helping hand. Lo and behold, it’s the Lord and two angels. And Abraham doesn’t get a color TV out of the encounter – his tent doesn’t have electricity anyway – but he does dialogue with God and manage to get his nephew out of Sodom before it’s destroyed. Interestingly, this Old Testament encounter is referred to many hundreds of years later, in the New Testament, clear down in the book of Hebrews. Here’s chapter 13, verse 2:

“Remember to make strangers feel welcome in your meetings and in your homes; those who have done this in the past have sometimes entertained angels without knowing it.”

You know, if we had to look for a biblical reason why every single one of us should be personal champions of reconciliation, of reaching out to others beyond our comfort zone . . . friend, here is the reason right here. That person you help – might be an angel. There have been people – the Bible tells us this – who helped a stranger. A cup of water. A bed for the night. A warm meal. A new shirt and pair of pants. A five-dollar bill to get them down the road. And the person took the gift, the charity, the helping hand, and was never seen again. Never seen again, because they returned to their angelic position in the eternal kingdom of God. The Bible promises us that this very thing has happened.

And you know, if you want to ratchet up the stakes a bit, Matthew chapter 18 takes us from Mrs. Nat King Cole . . . to angels . . . to Jesus Himself. Remember that sermon by Christ, where He divides up the sheep and the goats? And He says to the lazy, the complacent, to those who speed by on the freeway and leave that woman dripping in the rain: “I was hungry, and you didn’t feed Me. I was thirsty, and You didn’t give Me a drink. I was in prison and you stayed home watching TV. I was divorced and you didn’t help Me with my child-care problems.” And the “goats,” those on the outside of the kingdom, say: “What are You talking about? You hungry? You thirsty? You in jail? We never saw YOU on the side of the freeway. We saw that old lady. We saw that migrant worker. We saw that welfare mom with her two kids, with those food stamps in her hand that our tax dollars pay for. But Jesus, we never saw You. If we’d have seen You, we would have stopped for sure.” And then Christ’s classic, chilling answer:

“Whatever you did NOT do for one of the least of these, you did not do for Me.”

Of course, I much prefer the scenario a few verses earlier, where Jesus says warmly to His friends: “Whatever you DID do for these people, you did for Me.” And they, too, say, “Lord, we didn’t realize. That was You?”

I like the way the Clear Word paraphrase shares Jesus’ answer. Here it is:

“And the Son of God will say, ‘I know you didn’t realize this because a change took place in your life, and kindness and compassion became a part of your nature. What you did by caring for those who are thought to be unimportant was acknowledged by God as if you had done it for Me.’”

Here’s what we have to realize. I know full well that Mrs. Nat King Cole wasn’t an angel. She was Mrs. Nat King Cole. Not an angel. And not Jesus. And we might want to spiritualize this verse away, and say, “That’s very sweet. If you’re nice to someone out there, you’re ‘being nice to Jesus.’ But it’s not REALLY Jesus.” Friend, what this passage points out is this: What’s the difference? There is none. Jesus says there’s NO difference between reaching out to that other person and reaching out to Him. Jesus is the Son of God. So is that other person.

I guess we all have pictures come into our minds of the bad old days we see in TV movies. Freedom riders come into Selma on those buses, and white actors paid by Hollywood to play these stereotypes throw rocks at the buses. They kick the black actors; someone playing a corrupt, racist police chief gets out a water hose and blasts those northern Commie agitators out into a cotton field. And friend, when those scenes were real and not a Hollywood re-creation, that was Jesus on the receiving end of the rocks and the blows and the killing water jets. That was Jesus being hanged. That was Jesus being bulldozed into an unmarked grave. And we feel we would never do THAT.

But here in this new millennium, do we have our own moments where we fail to see the face of Jesus in that person on the other side of our carefully preserved fences? Do all of your friends look pretty much like you? Friend, it’s Jesus out there, being left off your guest list. At church, do you and others with the influence to make changes happen really try to make sure that people from different neighborhoods find their way to your pews . . . and do they feel welcomed by you when they get there? Because that’s Jesus living in that tiny apartment across town. Would you and I really say in our church board meeting, “You know, people like that – meaning Jesus — are really more comfortable having their own service”? Where you work – if you’re in a position to recruit and hire – do you try hard to fill that one vacancy with a person who will help expand the rainbow of your workplace? Or is it easier to let a friend or a cousin or someone from down the street have the job? Remember, that’s Jesus who gets left out, who misses the blessings of full employment because we’ve just done the convenient thing.

And friend, I don’t string my way through these examples to pick on you. I have a church and a workplace and a neighborhood too. And a circle of friends. And people standing on my street corner with a little tin cup in their hands. There are prisons and jails in my county too. And as I think and pray about race, about breaking down walls, I want to start looking for the face of Jesus more myself. A lot of the sermons we share here on The Voice of Prophecy, I generally aim just at myself. If you want to listen in, be my guest. But today, I just want to think about the hidden, rain-streaked face of Christ there in the midnight storm. I really don’t need a new color TV this year; the one I have works fine. But I’d sure hate to miss the chance of giving Jesus a lift.