July 21, 2024

“Ally, Ally Outs in Free”

In Ottumwa, Iowa, about sixty-five years ago, on any warm summer night, somewhere in the vicinity of the 200 block of South Ward Street, you would have heard some kid yelling, “Ally, ally outs in free!”  It meant that the person who was “it” had found somebody who was out hiding in the bushes and had beat them back to “home.”  The game was over and everyone who was out hiding behind the garage or under the porch was supposed to come back in so a new game could be started with the loser of the foot race being “it.”  The cry, at least in my neighborhood in the mid-fifties meant that all the “outs” (those who were still out hiding) could come “in” “free” (that is, without getting penalized) since the game was over.  Hence, “Ally, ally outs in free.”  Now, I know that a lot of you learned the phrase as “Olly, olly oxen free,” but let’s be honest; that doesn’t make any sense.  Some people say it’s a corruption of the German phrase “Alle, alle auch sint frei,” or, roughly, “everyone, everyone is free.”  But that’s just bad German.  Anyway, we said it how we said it.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

There was something almost sacred about that phrase.  We never messed with it.  We were, I confess, fond of trying to trick each other into coming out of hiding so we could get them and win the game.  We might yell, “Joey, your mom wants you to come out so you can go home for dinner!” or “Oh, I stubbed my toe, come help me.”  We were shameless.  But there was a sort of unspoken sanctity about “Ally, ally outs in free.”  There was no joking with it.  When you used that phrase, it was real; the game was over; there were no tricks.

I tell you about all of this as a way of asking your indulgence if I take a bit of liberty with the lofty language of scripture this morning.  I’d like to offer a translation of today’s text.  I’m translating into the language of the ’50’s, as heard in the neighborhood of 245 South Ward Street.  In that jargon, these words from the second chapter of Ephesians would sound something like this: “Ally, ally outs in free.”

The Apostle Paul knew who the “outs” were in the early Christian movement.  They were the Gentiles, those who were not pure.  In those days the test of authenticity for “church membership,” if you will, was not how many committees and rummage sales you had worked on, it was whether or not you were a child of Abraham, a faithful Jew, adhering to the law of Moses.  The early Christians, the first followers of Jesus, were Jews; and the non-Jews, the Gentiles in places like Ephesus were not quickly embraced by the faithful in Jerusalem.

So, Paul tells these newbies, these new Gentile followers of Christ, that they should no longer consider themselves “strangers and sojourners” – they are no longer “outs” – but “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”  They are now “in,” and, what’s more, they are “in, free.”  They’re not “in” because they contributed enough dollars, or because they belong to the right social class, or because they’ve put in enough hours on programs and projects, but totally by grace, totally without price or accounting, “free.”  “Ally, ally outs in free.”  It’s a sacred thing.  No playing around; no tricks.  The words can be trusted.

Are you one of the “outs,” or are you “in?”  If the truth be known, most of us feel at times like one, and at times like the other.  In some settings, with our friends, or in places where we spend a lot of time, we are at home, it’s our turf, we feel comfortably “in.”  In other arenas of life, any of us can feel like a stranger, a sojourner.  Attending a friend’s wedding reception, in a room full of complete strangers, moving into a new town, or even attending a church, can seem like being on someone else’s turf.

But, there are folks who have been “outs” for so long, and ousted from so much, that the entire world feels like someone else’s turf.  That’s a particularly painful way to go through life.  It can lead to chronic shuffling of the feet and downcasting of the eyes.  Sometimes I think a person can feel so thoroughly “out” of this world that everyone in it is seen as nothing more than an alien being responsible in some convoluted logic for one’s own misery.

And we are all well aware of the zones where we are “out” or “in,” the boundaries of which are defined by skin color, or socio-economic background, or language, or political views.  Sadly, those who attempt to cross these boundaries are consistently met with looks, and gestures, and comments that remind them they are out of their territory.  Certain sections of any major city, certain communities, clubs (country and otherwise), political organizations, even service organizations, can be such places of clearly identified turf.  I’m led to wonder if a young man takes a rifle to a rooftop to try to assassinate a candidate for the presidency because the divisions between us have become so extreme that it seems in his twisted mind it’s the only solution.

I’ve often wondered what a visitor from another planet would make of all this.  I imagine such a newcomer to earth standing with mouth agape, and head cocked trying to understand as we explain all the intricacies of social stratification.  I wonder if the alien would say, “But, you all look alike, and you’re all on this same little planet together.  The purpose of all these divisions among yourselves eludes me.”  I don’t know what we’d say to that alien to explain it all.  I’m not sure that I could make sense out of it.  For whatever reason, we seem to be enamored of drawing circles around ourselves, whether we draw them to identify ourselves as “ins” or to identify ourselves as “outs,” we can be equally comforted by them.

Well, check your magic marker at the door when you enter this place, because we draw no circles here.  As soon as you cross the threshold of the church, you enter a place where there are no “ins” and no “outs” – at least that’s the ideal we try to hold ourselves to here.  It’s not easy, because it goes against the grain of everything else in our lives and seems almost contrary to our very natures.  We might be more comfortable in some ways if there were different levels of membership, each with a different status.  In fact, we sometimes subconsciously try to create them.  We could have hierarchies like the rest of the world does, based on seniority or talent.  That way you could work your way up the ladder over the course of a few years and become a “senior, chief muckity-muck,” but then we wouldn’t learn anything, would we?

And, once every month we come to the table, to eat the same bread and drink the same cup. Every Sunday we sit and stand and sing together, with no honored places, or positions of privilege, to declare a oneness in Christ that flies in the face of society’s proclivity for naming the “ins” and the “outs.”

Martha Sterne tells a wonderful story about a sermon that went way out of control.  “A friend was delivering the sermon to his parish in downtown Macon, Georgia,” she writes, “on a Sunday in the late sixties. As you know, the whole country was in an uproar with Vietnam and civil rights marches and women were waking up and young people finding spectacular ways to be outrageous.

“All of this was swirling around his congregation, which included city fathers, who made it clear to their young rector that on Sundays they wanted to rest from the unrest. . . .

“Newcomers were showing up in church, some in jeans and long hair, even rock musicians. The newcomers got involved in outreach ministries serving the poor, which was sort of okay with the church leaders. But the newcomers also wanted the poor and anybody else to come to church which was not okay. They even put an advertisement in the paper with the Sunday service schedule and a picture of a black sheep and the words ‘Come As You Are.’

“Inviting even more strange people to flock to the church through the newspaper, with the connotation that some of the sheep might be black, was the last straw for the traditionalists. One woman mailed a letter to the entire parish in which she stated that the reach of the outreach people had exceeded the grasp of any sensible person by a long shot.

“Thus, lack of appreciation pervaded the atmosphere on that Sunday. . . . The priest . . . launched, subtly of course, into repenting the traditionalists’ sins. He spoke with assurance, deftly weaving the stories of Isaiah’s community and Jesus’ crowd and the world of Macon, Georgia. He described the parallels in a gently ironic tone, and he looked out over the congregation who seemed transfixed. If the truth were to be told he was pleased with himself. Then as he paused for breath, the unthinkable happened.  A lady stood up. . . . she said, ‘do you mean to say we are wrong? Do you mean to say that for all these years we have been wrong?’

“Then the young rector opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came out. And he stood in the pulpit. For a moment, all was silence. And then another voice in the congregation spoke up and then another and then another. And people talked of trying to become part of church and being frozen out. And others mourned the loss of respect for traditions held dear. And some yelled in anger and some said they were afraid of what the church and the whole world were coming to. And many people cried.  The congregation argued with itself for about twenty minutes. And the young rector stood in the pulpit. And listened. Then for a moment all was silence again. And he said, ‘I don’t know what to do. What do we do now?’ And someone said, ‘well, we might as well do [communion].’

“And they [celebrated the Lord’s Supper] . . .And of course you know the rest of the story. Like Paul and the Gentiles or Nixon and the Chinese, the enraged traditional woman became the instrument of reconciliation between the old-timers and the new people. She was the first woman ever on the vestry, and largely through her sponsorship, the first female priest in Georgia came to that congregation. And through the grace of God in her and some others, the doors of the church opened wider to invite strangers in and to send people out to love and serve.”¹

And, like that church in Macon, Georgia, Sunday after Sunday here, together, we continue to lift up to those around us a model of community without barriers and divisions, and we continue to invite others to do the same.

My message today is not complicated; in fact, it’s rather brief.  It boils down to this: In the course of my ministry, I’ve thought of three or four things that are so important I’ve wished they could be written on a big sign over the front door to the church.  One of them is this:

“Ally, ally outs in free.”

¹ Martha Sterne, All Saints’ Church, Atlanta, GA, “Can Pentecost Be Private?,” Journal For Preachers, Pentecost, 1997, pp. 40-41.