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Foundry United Rev. |
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“When God Is
Homeless” Sunday, August 19,
2007 |
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John 14: 18-24
Rev. |
We are
looking at a passage this morning from the Gospel of John…from the part of
the Gospel that scholars call “The Last Discourses.” It is
Jesus’ last teachings and his last conversation with his disciples before his
death. The other Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, tell us about the last
supper briefly. In John, the Last Discourses go on chapter after chapter. And,
for me at least, Jesus seems vague and esoteric and oblique, especially
compared to the Jesus we see in Matthew, Mark and Luke who is so direct and
concrete. So I’ve
found that I need to read the Last Discourses very carefully and deliberately
to try to understand what is going on in this conversation between Jesus and
his disciples. In the
14th Chapter, where our lesson is located this morning, Jesus is
talking about his relationship with God, whom he calls “the Father.” His
disciples are having a hard understanding what he is saying. You can almost
see them looking at each other out of the corner of their eyes trying to
figure out if they are the only one not getting this. So
finally Phillip takes the risk of asking a question. His question is: “Lord,
show us the Father and we will be satisfied.” Give us
something concrete here, Jesus. Show us God. Jesus
responds to this by scolding Phillip. “Have I been with you all this time,
Phillip, and you still don’t know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the
Father.” (John 14: 8-9) Jesus
goes on talking. You get a sense that the disciples are still having a hard
time understanding him. So Judas, not Iscariot, but another disciple named
Judas, takes the chance to ask a question. The
question is: “How can it be Lord, that you will reveal yourself to us but not
to the world?” In
other words, how is it that we believe that you are from God and are a
messenger from God and the Child of God but that other people don’t see it?
Why don’t you do something to make your identity plainer to those who don’t
believe in you and your teachings? And it
is Jesus’ answer to this question that I’d like us to pay attention to this
morning. Jesus
says: “Those who love me will keep my word and my Father will love them, and
we will come to them and make our home with them.” It
would hardly seem at first glance to be an answer to Judas’ question. You’ve
got to sit with it to figure out what Jesus is saying. He is
saying something about the way God is in the world. Judas
is asking, like Phillip had before him, Why don’t you make it plainer? Why
doesn’t God just write it in big letters in the sky? Why doesn’t God just
push it in people’s faces? Why doesn’t God just compel people to believe? Jesus’
answer is, in effect, that God doesn’t compel us to do anything. That’s not
the way God works in the world. God invites, God teaches, God woos, but God
doesn’t want to force God’s self on anyone. God
wants to be welcomed. God doesn’t want to conquer the world. God wants to be
wanted. God wants the world to be not a conquest, but a home. So he
says: “Those who love me will keep my word and my Parent God will love them,
and we will make our home with them.” We want
to be at home in the world. We want hospitality, not accommodation. We want
welcome, not surrender. Our
theme this summer is home: “ Fred
Buechner, in his book, A Longing for
Home, points out that a home is more than a house or an apartment or a
place. A home is where we have a sense of belonging. A home
is hospitable. I think
that what Jesus is suggesting in response to Judas’ question in John is that
God’s chosen way of being in the world is be received with hospitality. God
and Christ come to make their home with those who will receive them with
hospitality. God is not intrusive, but only invitational. This
tells us something about God but it also tells us something about the meaning
of home. Home is where we are welcomed. One of
the reasons we are focusing on the theme of home this summer is because of
our ministries with and to the homeless. One of
the most devastating aspects of homelessness, I think, is not just the
obvious hardship of having no place to be but the sense that you don’t belong
anywhere. That you are always intruding. I have
been a city pastor for most of my 39 years in ministry. My ministry has
roughly paralleled the emergence of homelessness as we know it today. One of
the dynamics that has been fascinating to watch is to see homeless men and
women systematically squeezed out. I was
the pastor of a church in the late 70s and early 80s that housed an emergency
shelter on our first floor. At one point homelessness so exploded that we had
to turn people away. I wrote an article entitled “Thank God for the Train
Stations,” and the point of the article was that, when we turned them away,
at least people could avoid freezing by sleeping on the benches in the train
station. Then
the day came, a few years later, when the train stations began evicting
homeless people unless they had a ticket. Then, in response to that, signs
began appearing on restaurants and shops that their rest rooms where for
customer use only. Just
about every place homeless people tried to be began to send the message: “You
don’t belong here.” The
same is true here in I think
one of the gifts of Foundry’s Walk-In Mission is that it is a hospitable
place. People are treated as those who belong here. (In order for that to
happen, there need to be some expectations of the way people will treat one
another, so that hospitality does not mean anyone can act mean or disruptive
to other.) But people are treated with dignity and respect and welcomed and
wanted. I used
the provocative title for this sermon this morning “When God is Homeless.” What
I meant to say is that when we do not welcome God into our world, God does
not force God’s way in. God stays homeless. I like
the image from Revelation 3: 20 in which the resurrected Christ says to the
church – “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice
and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” God is
homeless in our world until we make a home for God. The
first book I ever read by Henry Nouwen remains my favorite. It is a book
entitled “Reaching Out – The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life.” One of
the movements Nouwen talks about is the movement from hostility to
hospitality. I think all spirituality is hospitality – what Nouwen calls
“making space for strangers.” God
wants to live with us if we will make space for God. God wants to make us
God’s home if we will give God room. One of
my early mentors, Bill Matthews, who has been gone more 15 years now, had a
core message. His core message was that the way we treat God is the way we treat
others and the way we treat others is the way we treat God. We can
not be an inhospitality city to our homeless brothers and sisters and be
spiritually hospitable to God. I noticed in reading the sermon Jana preached
a couple of weeks ago that she connected our ministry with day-laborers to
the theme of home. I know the immigration issue is complicated, but at the
heart of it is the question of hospitality. Inhospitality
is a spiritual process. Homelessness is the physical manifestation of a
spiritual problem. And the spiritual and the physical do not work in
isolation. When we
make room in our lives and our world for God to be at home here, then we will
make room for our brothers and sisters to be at home here, and when we make
room for our homeless brothers and sisters to be at home here, we will be
making room in our loves and world for God. Foundry
is taking the lead along with other Washington Interfaith Network churches to
work with Mayor Fenty to create supportive housing with supportive service
for the most chronically homeless people of our city. We will succeed at this
only as we ourselves also create supporting housing in our lives and our
congregations for God. www.foundryumc.org |
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