Raul Ruiz is the son of migrant workers who stole over the border from Mexico almost four decades ago and found work and a life in Riverside County, California – on the edge of the desert.  Along the way, they had children.  For much of their adult, working lives, they were resident aliens...foreigners, paying U.S. taxes but if push came to shove, not accorded the protection of the constitution. 1
Raul, their son, whose first language was Spanish, did well in school although because he had to take all the standardized tests in his second language, his test scores were never high.  As the child of resident aliens in Coachella, California, expectations were not high among his teachers anyway. 
Raul had a dream, however, and he had a winning personality.  His dream was to become a doctor.  When he was accepted to UCLA and had no money to pay the tuition, he did an unusual thing.  He went door to door in Coachella – to his neighbors and the shop keepers and the cafes and grocery stores on the main street of his town with a contract.  He asked for financial support – essential sold stock in himself with the promise to become a doctor and return to practice medicine there in his hometown.  Because of his boldness in asking and the genuineness of his nature people took a chance on Raul. 
It paid off!  He is now a practicing physician, with an MD and two Masters Degrees from Harvard University.  He returned to Coachella and has established a thriving medical practice.
Esther was a nobody in her way too.  She was a Jewish girl living in Ancient Persia and an orphan; she was a resident alien herself and part of a community that survived at the whim of the King and his minions.  The King is looking for a new wife and Esther, being very attractive is chosen to become part of his harem. 
The nice little story does not end there.  It turns out that Haman the king’s minister has a plan to rid the country of some of the aliens that have continued to multiply in their midst – he uses words that are oddly familiar about how they keep to themselves and observe their own cultural ways.  Their very foreignness is a threat, it seems.  He manages to set the king against the Jews and a plan is made for their destruction. 
This is the point where the story becomes heroic – for Esther at any rate.  Esther by now must have gotten used to the comforts of the palace and the ways of the king’s harem.  One never asks to see the king, but waits always to be called into his presence.  Her old uncle Mordecai has been sentenced to be hanged.  A plan has been hatched to destroy the people.  What is Esther, an alien herself, to do?
Communities are always susceptible to their fear of the strangers in their midst.  Aliens easily become the scapegoats – no need really to go over the sordid history of the treatment of the Jews since their dispersal around the world.  Pogroms and “final solutions” are only the hideous extreme of what happens when a society turns on the strangers in their midst.  The last several years have certainly demonstrated what to me is a frightening level of suspicion and hatred toward those who are resident aliens in our own time. 
If I were visiting in Scotland, as I just was, or Germany or any one of many countries in Western Europe and had need of a doctor, I would have full and complete medical attention with the same benefits of the host country….but the idea of extending health care to the people who live among us and pick our apples and clean our motel rooms has caused some people to nearly foam at the mouth. 
It’s a kind of emotional feeling that erupts again and again in all cultures – ubiquitous throughout history as well.  The Hebrews were welcomed in Egypt for a while – then they were too numerous and dangerous.  Christians were a handy scapegoat for the burning of Rome when Nero ruled as one of the most corrupt of Emperors – and the persecutions began.  Judeans would not talk to Samaritans, Pharisees would hardly tolerate a Galilean and in this morning’s passage from Mark, the disciples are incensed with the fact that they witnessed someone casting out demons in the name of Jesus.  He is not one of us! They proclaim.  Religious convictions, one would think, should be the source of a person’s equanimity and hospitality toward the stranger, yet even after walking with Jesus through thick and thin, the disciples are pretty certain that strangers have no right using Jesus name – even for doing good!
Echoing the sentiments of many other writers, Steven Weinburg, a Harvard Physicist and Nobel Prize winner, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly2, "It's hard to see why anyone would think that religion is a cure for the world's problems.  People have been at each other's throats over differences in religion throughout history, a sad story that continues today in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East, Sudan and India."    Weinburgh is the person who also famously said, "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.  But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." 3
Our travel group, recently returned from Scotland, had the opportunity to hear about and see some of the great historical sites that figured in the several hundred years of bloody struggle between Protestants and Anglicans and Presbyterians.  Mary Queen of Scotts lost her Catholic head as a result of one struggle, a few decades later, her grandson Charles I of Scotland and England rounded up hundreds of Presbyterian clergy and their supporters and cut off their heads because they resisted the imposition of the Church of England in Scotland. The Scots were pretty rigid about hanging people who were in any way creative about the ways in which they interpreted the faith – in front of a Presbyterian Church called the Tron; right on the High Street of Edinburgh stood the gallows where countless people lost their lives over questions of doctrine.  All over Europe, crowns and thrones and clerics, Popes and princes, won and lost and waged war as a product of their determination that theirs was the one true way to observe the Christian Religion.  And still we struggle to figure out who we are – struggle in our relationships with those who are different than we. 
In truth, Kenneth H. Carter, Jr. a Methodist preacher from North Carolina, challenges North American Christians to "consider our own bewildering ways of making sense of who and where we are: patriotic observances, sporting championships, musical festivals, celebrity obsessions, and economic forecasts.  These events shape the rhythms of our lives, and the liturgical year is at best an alternative to the dominant ethos that surrounds us." 4 
If we are defensive about who we are, is our discomfort reflecting our own degree of assimilation into a secular culture and how much we have forgotten that we follow a Teacher who taught us to love our enemies, turn the other cheek, and lay down our lives?  A Teacher who observed how difficult it is for a rich person to enter heaven, and encouraged the earnestly religious to "sell everything and give it to the poor"? We've somehow managed to make ourselves feel quite at home with very different values, even as we claim to follow Jesus.  How many of us Christians find a way to justify any number of contradictions to the teachings of Jesus?  Suddenly this colorful little story of Esther, with its vengeance and intrigue becomes much more about us than we might like.
Back to Esther, and I think, to the Gospel.  Esther who did not have a special call from God to do anything… a women without pedigree but with the luck of her position in the court of a conquering King, comes to understand with the help of her uncle that, "maybe she has been put in this place for a moment such as this." It is not that she did not wrestle with the challenge, in the Biblical story it says that she lay awake in torment for three days...but finally decided...if I perish, I perish.  With that resolution, she saved her people.  
Esther was not a prophet – she was merely God’s person by virtue of who she was.  The disciples were just folks who found their calling by following Jesus.  None of us have a corner on doing religion the right way or the wrong way.  Each of us is called simply to be salt.  Simply, as people of faith to bring the flavor of what we believe into all of our everyday interactions.  No pedigree needed, no special position of power or authority necessary, interacting in a way undergirded by our own values born of faith. 
Raul Ruiz came back to Coachella, California – he became a doctor, but that is not all.  He has developed a mentoring program for young men and women of the community – the young who are part of the current wave of immigrants, the first requirement is only that they show up, everyday, to shadow him in his work…for he is salt.  He does not aspire to be more than he is – one of God’s children who in his place and time flavors his community with love in the best way he can.
Missionaries have learned that the strongest witness to Christ is the everyday kindness...the extension of a cup of water, using Jesus metaphor in the form of training, education, healthcare. We are learning to be resident aliens in our world acting out of the compassion born of the love we have experienced in Christ...and extending ourselves as Esther did: even as the unknown healer mentioned by the disciples in the Mark reading, not to convert but to feed and to heal.  Sometimes the name of God need never be mentioned...for we know why we do what we do in God's name.  Surely we don't need to venture to the Congo basin or the Amazon to understand that often when we struggle to be faithful we do so as strangers in a world culture which no longer truly values what we value about our faith.
This world communion Sunday...today...is a tradition which was born out of the enthusiasm and the hope of the missionary movement...that the entire world might be one. Theirs was a laudable vision, a world which had been uniformly touched by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  As we share this meal together today in the presence of the Spirit of Christ...let us amend the vision a bit….let us pray for the flavor of our faith to be tasted in every corner of the world – let us pray to be salt as we share these elements of bread and wine, with a focus on all the communities of the world which gather in the name of hope and in the name of peace.   Amen.