This is a wonderful church. What an honor to be here. You guys are a Christian community and you connect with each other. And I know I have been touched by your prayers. A little over two years ago, I was hit with this awful bacterial infection that invaded my heart and I had to go into the hospital and have open heart surgery and it was awful. Uh, but I’m alive. And then the recovery process, you know, it’s not just physical, but it’s also emotional and spiritual. So after that, about two months, three months later, we were coming, I live in New York, and we were coming out here to do the family gathering at Alamitos Bay, as we’ve done ever since I was six years old. And uh we stopped in Colorado on our way and visited a friend. I call him my oldest friend. He said, “No, call me your friend of longest standing.”
Anyway, his wife Ann said to me, she said, “You know, I don’t know much about Jesus. I’d love to learn more.” And I thought that’s something I needed to hear because for spiritual recovery, I needed to reconnect with Jesus. So, what do writers do? They start looking. And I just went back to the Bible and I looked at the stories Jesus tells, the parables, the things that he says, the things that happened to him. And I started seeing how their lessons in living a good, rich life, how we can become whom God meant us to be. So for instance, we get the story, the long story. Diane said, “Oh, it’s so long.” I said, “Yeah, I want you to read that because it’s so long, so my sermon can be shorter.” But isn’t that interesting? Jesus meets with people he should not be meeting. He should not be talking to a woman. It’s appalling. And not a Samaritan. You know, I think we’ve lost a little bit what Samaritans were in that era because we have the good Samaritan. Well, good Samaritan is an oxymoron. They weren’t considered good in that world. And yet Jesus was showing something. He was engaging with the other. And I think we’re all meant to do that. One of the blessings of living in Long Beach, one of the blessings of living in New York is there’s a lot of other there’s a rich diversity out there and we’re given chances to engage with them.
A transformative experience in my life happened when I between my junior and senior year of high school, I was an AF student. AFS student AFS American field service uh exchange student in Tunisia. I lived for two months with a devout Muslim family in Spax, Tunisia. They were middle class which we would have said was poor. We sort of lived on couscous for you know for two months. When I came back here uh I was so skinny my brother Howard was afraid I would blow away. But that was quite an experience because I grew up in all Wasp San Marino and suddenly I’m living in a Muslim community with a Muslim family. Our common language was French. They spoke mostly Arabic to each other. And that summer the youngest kid in the family had his circumcision. It was a a a very important ceremony in the Islamic tradition in the Muslim faith and it was a celebration. It was it was you know rich. We all slept in the floor, the men on one side, the women on the other. And wow, what an experience. When I left that family, got into a cab going away, I I said, “I’ll come back. I’ll come back.” I knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. But in my heart, I’ve returned again and again the experience of the other that I had there. So when I had to do my college applications, I thought, okay, well, I’ll write about Tunisia and my experience. And uh my junior year at Princeton, I met the director of admissions. I said, “Hi, I’m Rick Hamlin.” He said circumcision.
But you know it was important. And I think one of the things when engaging with the other is we have to look at our own prejudices, our own biases. Not long ago, I had this experience of seeing one of mine. Uh, I was I trained to be a spiritual director and the program was based in in North Carolina. And the first Zoom meeting we had, I looked and I thought, Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Florida. Oh my gosh, what has this New Yorker gotten himself into? And then I saw his, her, she, he, him. These were people of all different callings. You know, don’t just label somebody just because of where they live. We can’t do that. Not long ago, I wrote uh an op-ed for the Washington Post about love your enemies. That’s what Jesus told us to do. It’s not easy, but we were meant to do that. And I think it also means looking inside of ourselves. A little family story. My My grandfather was a rabid Republican. He hated Eleanor Roosevelt. She was ugly, he said. Then he ended up sitting on an airplane seated next to Eleanor Roosevelt.
He came away said she was lovely. She just asked him all this about his life. He was a businessman. He didn’t change his political viewpoints, but he saw who she was. That’s for us. So, looking at myself growing up all wasp, when we did Fiddler on the Roof, we discovered maybe there were two kids in the whole high school who were Jewish, you know. But I came to Princeton. It was 20% Jewish then. And I suddenly thought, “Wow, this is interesting.” I later in New York City, I studied with a woman. She’d been one of the original Goldas in Fiddler on the Roof. She’d escaped the Holocaust in Austria. And she was a wonderful woman. And I said to her, you know, I’ve always wanted to be Jewish.
She said, “Darling, it’s highly overrated.”
Well, that’s why I wanted to be Jewish. You know, we Wasp can never get away with a line like that. We don’t know how. But, you know, that rich experience. And I saw this in my mother who grew up in San Marino and struggled with what she didn’t like in herself. This anti-semitic part of her. She didn’t want it. And oh, how I admired [snorts] our beloved mother. One of the last conversations I had with her, she’s out here in Pasadena and I’m there in New York and I’d call every Sunday and she said, “I’m still working hard to get rid of it. I want to get rid of it. It’s in me, this anti-semitic part of me.” And I thought, “Wow, to be 93 years old and still working on it. That’s who we are. That’s why we come together. You know, we can follow God one on one, but remember as Jesus said, wherever two or more are gathered, he’s here. So that’s why we do this together. That’s why I have the privilege of doing this with you.
So, I keep working on it. Uh, a little small story about the other in New York City. I used to see a baker, an old guy on my way to work every morning and sometimes I’d dig in my pocket and give him some change and give him a little bit more the next time. And, okay, you just do it. I actually believe in I have try to keep some ones in my pocket to do that. Not because who knows what they’ll do with it, but I don’t want to ignore them. I don’t want to ignore them. So this guy I hadn’t ignored. Well, one Saturday I was taking our boys up to Yankee Stadium for baseball game. I know nothing about baseball, but they did. So I took them up there to Yankee Stadium and on the subway New York there was some commotion. We’re on our way to the Bronx at the other end of the car and I thought, “Oh geez, what have I done?” And then some guy staggered down and it was the guy I would give money to and he looked at me and he said, “My man.”
And then He turned to my kids and said, “Your dad’s a good man.”
So we engage with the other and there are gifts that we receive.
So one last thing I see also in this lesson, this very long lesson is the living water. That’s that mystical Jesus. So, we know the rabbi, the teacher, but he’s also the mystical Jesus. Remember the transfiguration? He’s up there. And he only shares that with three disciples, not everybody. And then he also tells them, “Don’t tell anyone.” But they saw the mystical Jesus. That’s the other that we also all have, that mystical side. and we engage with it. I think God bless this wonderful choir. Music helps us do that. Prayer and just sitting in silence connecting with the divine. So thank you my friends and God bless you in your good work. Amen.