|
Our Essential Homelessness Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 1, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 40:34-38 Hebrews 11:32-12:2
The parentheses on the near and far end of the story we have been given to tell ourselves about ourselves in Scripture are the parentheses of wilderness and exile. If each of us were to trace the plot of Scripture over the days of our lives--beginning with Abraham and Sarah through the Book of Revelation or beginning with Moses through the Babylonian captivity—the story would go something like this: because we were born into a particular tribe or nation, a specific time and space, our identity very well could have been cobbled together from the fact that our ancestors were pilgrims or pirates, slaves or citizens, landed gentry or wanderlusts; our character may have been shaped by the privilege that made us soft or the poverty that made us tough; our personality might have been twisted by some congenital need for approval or security or fame. But for reasons that remain a mystery, somewhere along the way we were claimed, chosen, called out, addressed by a God whose purposes in human history and whose unsolicited love for us found us confessing that we were strangers and sojourners who desire a country better than the country into which we were first born, a kingdom where God will reign in justice and in love. This is the same God who called Abraham to set out not knowing where he was going…the God whose pillar of fire by day and cloud by night led the people of Israel through the desert. It is the God whose only begotten Son was sent first into the Judean wilderness to do battle with the powers and principalities that still rival God for control of the plot of our lives--the Son of God who had nowhere to lay his head nor did his followers because they were strangers and exiles on this earth. If we read the recurring beginning of the story into the beginning of our lives as would-be followers of Jesus, we might say that God has called us out of our family of origin, our cultural identity, our nationalistic fervor, our economic and social class by way of the waters of baptism. No longer willing citizens of the world as it is and freed from the clutches of a thoroughly secular and self-serving age, we have been sent into what feels like a wilderness with God alone as our refuge and help. All we have to go on is the promise of a destination and the presence of God whose tabernacle, whose dwelling place in the meantime, is with us. Like any good story, the plot at this point portends many twists and turns. Most of us have spent ourselves kicking against our baptism. Intellectually we dismiss Scripture as a tale told by fools; we deride the community telling us the story as hypocrites and liars; we have run into a far country with our inheritance because we know better and then complain bitterly when the bread gives out or the well of cultural wisdom runs dry. Unwilling to wait on the God who comes to us, we demand alternative gods to worship that are less likely to disturb present power arrangements and are amenable to our control. Still we cannot finally get away from the fact that we were marked from the day we were baptized as God’s own and set on this pilgrimage by the One who alone is our refuge and help. Sometimes it takes forty years of wandering and wondering to trust that you belong in life and in death not to blood relatives or the state or the company or the bank but to God. Sometimes it dawns on you in Confirmation Class and you begin, then and there, to run the race that is worth your life! Now if and when you find yourself, by God’s grace or dumb luck, in that place where God alone is your refuge and help (unemployed and broke, sick and on your own, judged and rejected--or simply awash in gratitude for this life you did not earn), if and when you dare for a season to live by faith—by the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen—then you likely will taste the freedom known to those who get that they finally have nothing to lose and, as Paul once put it, Christ to gain. But more, for as God alone is your refuge and help, you also begin to sense that you do not belong nor are you beholden to a world divided into haves and have-nots; rather you are an exile from this sort of world and a sojourner on the way to the city where God reigns in love. You speak in such a way that it becomes clear to friends and colleagues in the fast lane or climbing the ladder to success or obsessed with the good life that something is fundamentally wrong with you: you have lost your mind, you are being irresponsible, you are hopeless. Paradoxically this is the point in the plot when we are most tempted to return to the land from whence we came, hunker down rather than hold on to the assurance of things hoped for, secure the future we can see rather than live by the conviction of things not seen. The pressure is enormous to conform to a way of life that society lauds as normal. This is the turn in the road where we rejoin the crowd and cross over the Jordon with our armies, mistaking the cities we subsequently will build for the city God has promised to prepare for us. “The land seduced Israel,” notes professor of Old Testament Walter Brueggemann, “until the Israelites wanted more and more of land and security and goods. They organized great cities, great armies, and great tax systems; they ate well, exceedingly well at the expense of the others. In the end, Israel forgot. They forgot that this good life and this good land were gifts, the outcome of God’s promise. Greed overcame gratitude, selfishness displaced compassion. Covenant was reduced to control and exploitation. They forgot and they imagined that their might and the power of their hand had gotten them this wealth.” Need I mention that Israel is not an isolated case in the history of nations that believe themselves to be the manifest destiny promised God’s people in Scripture? Need I rehearse the recent history of this nation when, with the complicity that is the silence of a church co-opted by the state, greed overcame gratitude, selfishness displaced compassion and the promises of God were reduced to control and exploitation? I speak now to those of us in the middle of the parentheses, those in the land working as hard as humanly possible to avoid both wilderness and exile. Suddenly we who deemed ourselves justified in stiffing the needs of the hungry and homeless, the prisoner and widow, the aging and the little children because our portfolio had shrunk by a third, suddenly we believe we have everything to lose! Subtly but surely it must be said that the world has us by the bottom line--which we believe to be our refuge and our help. By the way, you will know the world has you by the bottom line when you believe the church should create a budget, commit our resources, consider our stewardship not as a community of faith but a community in fear for our financial well-being. You will know the world has you by the bottom line when you speak as though the generosity of previous generations has been given for us to hoard in hard times rather than to help the next generation continue the pilgrimage. You will know the world has you personally by the bottom line when you excuse yourself from financial responsibility for next year’s ministry and mission, excuse yourself from fulfilling your pledge this year, excuse yourself from growing toward the tithe that is the tangible token of your trust in God because, well, even though you have a job and your stocks are beginning to come back you had better hedge your bets with the devil you know instead of the God who knows your frame and remembers that you are dust. Those of us in this community of faith with jobs and money in the bank can continue to live by the plot that promises us a return to and a return on what has been construed by the purveyors of the plot to be the good life. We can decide to stop in the tracks of our pilgrimage, circle the wagons against the American tragedy of homelessness and hunger, of foreclosure and catastrophic illness, of unemployment and hopelessness lest the snare of the fowler or the deadly pestilence comes near our tent. We can ride out this downturn with prudence until better times return when we may responsibly, according to the world, risk ourselves again on a ministry that will hand faith on to all of these little ones and dare mission with the homeless and hungry whose numbers have become legion. If this is the plot we choose, we will spend our days in the landed space between the parentheses, having no need of the refuge and help that God is. Or we may set out as pilgrims scripted in a radically different plot. It is the story that led saints before us to conquer kingdoms, administer justice, obtain promises, stop the mouths of lions, quench raging fires, escape the edge of the sword, win strength our of weakness. In this plot, ours will be a life lived on the edge of an exilic parenthesis where we remember that we are strangers and exiles: rehearsing on the Lord’s Day the story and singing the praises of the God who is our destination; gathering at the font to renew the covenant in the waters of baptism as children of the living God; feasting at table on the living presence of Him who strengthens us and accompanies us. In the world where we are sent out aliens, we will erect outposts of the promised kingdom, create space enough to be human in for the least of these, seek the common good, wander in deserts and mountains, in caves and holes in the ground following him who had no place to lay his head. The enduring discipline of those who have continued to trust God alone when danger gathered round or when the world threatened to be too much with them was the discipline of tithing. Whether livestock or produce, first born sons or shekels, God’s people reminded themselves that everything was a gift from God and reinforced their commitment to trust in God alone by returning to God ten percent off the top. As always I am glad to exegete the texts on tithing after taxes because God knows if this congregation ever tithed after taxes we could lead the city of brotherly love to become just that by our witness. The mantra of stewardship committees ever since I have been with you continues this year unchanged: grow by 1% of your household income each year toward a tithe. If we had really set out on that pilgrimage fourteen years ago, we might even have begun to look like the redeemed of the Lord by now. A few among us in this flock have and do! I therefore implore you, my fellow pilgrims and fearful saints, to set out anew on the pilgrimage and with the people whose refuge and help is God. Imagine this place of gathering not as a home we have established forever in God’s name that must be preserved but as a tent of meeting where the Lord God tabernacles with us. Then trusting in God’s gracious promises and obeying God’s call, let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. Thanks be to God. |