In New York City, a bar has become a not-so-well-kept secret. You go into a hot dog joint, Crif Dogs, which looks like an eccentric hole-in-the-wall joint. As you walk toward the back of the place, you see a vintage wooden telephone booth. If you step into the booth, pick up the rotary-dial phone, and dial 1, a voice on the other end asks if you have a reservation. If you do, a back panel on the phone booth magically opens up to let you into a speakeasy named Please Don’t Tell—or PDT to the regulars.

It’s a tough reservation unless you call when the reservation line opens at 3 p.m. sharp on the day you want to go. Because it’s so hip and trendy, Please Don’t Tell was featured in a book on word-of-mouth marketing. According to the author, the secret to this bar’s success is that it confers social capital. In non-nerd terms, if you get lucky enough to get in, it makes other people jealous of you when you tell them about it—which is its chief marketing strategy: This place is so exclusive that only important people can even get in.

It’s the same strategy used to get people into frequent flyer programs. Fly with us, and you too could be a Diamond-Platinum-Executive-Premier-Cooler-than-everybody-else Reward member. Now you can show your friends and family just how important you are: You’ll get to board your flight precious seconds before everybody else after having relaxed in the exclusive member lounge, where you can look out the one-way windows on the poor saps who have to eat their $15 tuna on rye out in the concourse like animals.

According to the marketing author, these things are a way of separating ourselves from the herd—setting up exclusive enclaves where some are welcome, while others are not, where you get to feel like a somebody, and not just a hapless stranger in a sea of strangers.

And let’s be honest, feeling like a stranger is the worst.

But as lonely as it is to feel like a stranger among strangers, there are even more profound ways of feeling like a stranger. It’s possible, for example, to go home after punching the time clock at work, walk into the house, and sit around the supper table with a group of strangers.

It’s possible to get up, put on your Sunday best, sneak in the back at 10:59, and sit around the Lord's table with a group of strangers you’ve known your whole life.

Sad, isn't it?

As hard as it is to feel alone and alienated among people you don't know, it’s way harder to feel like a stranger to those you love.

We read about it all the time. Open any newspaper, and it isn’t long before you get to an article where people who’ve vowed their love are doing grave damage to one another.

He beat her. She burnt down the house. They left their kids alone in a dirty apartment for a week while they took a vacation.

And if it goes on long enough and somebody leaves, the paper will refer to the parties as “So and So, the defendant’s estranged spouse.”

Estranged. Interesting word. It comes to us from the Medieval Latin extraneare, meaning—“to treat as a stranger."

Humans have an incredible capacity to make strangers instead of making friends.

Oh, we do it all the time. Most of the time, we don't mean to do it. Most of the time, it's not something we're looking to do on purpose. It just happens: terrorists start killing people in some part of the world, and all of a sudden, anybody who looks like the terrorists or who shares the same religion—even refugees trying to escape the same terrorist violence that we don’t want any part of—people just seeking a little shelter from the storm are introduced to our amazing capacity to treat others as strangers. Humans are nothing if not wall-builders.

And as common as our penchant for estrangement is in the world we inhabit, it can happen just as easily between us and God.

For whatever reason, people often live their lives as though God is hiding behind a great impenetrable wall. Try as they might, the obstruction blocks off contact with God.

And so God seems like a stranger. And it shouldn’t surprise you to know that our estrangement from one another has a great deal to do with our estrangement from God. “How can we say love God, whom we have not seen, if we do not love our sister or brother, whom we have seen?” is how the author of 1 John puts it.

Paul takes up this topic in our text for today. He deals once again with the problem of alienation in the church between Jews and Gentiles.