The
Savior We Follow, The Life We Lead:
Who Are You?
Sermon preached by Rev. Patricia Farris
September 10, 2006 (Homecoming Sunday)
Scripture:
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Mark 7:24-30
Good
morning. Let me extend my personal welcome as we gather back together
on this Homecoming Sunday. And I want to thank the members of the
Guidance and Outreach Council, the volunteers who helped out yesterday
and also our staff, particularly our office and maintenance staff
who worked extra special hard to make this day so wonderful.
Homecoming.
How the word itself tugs on our heartstrings and stirs deep within
us a kind of deep nostalgia for those special people and places that
mean “home” to us. And part of that sense of home for
many of us is this place, this congregation and this beautiful sanctuary
and all those saints who are no longer physically present among us—but
sometimes when I look out on a Sunday morning I see their faces, in
the pews, in the choir loft…and I remember that in God’s
great love they are now at home in a heavenly place and still always
present with us as that great cloud of witnesses to comfort and guide
and challenge.
And
if you are here today for the first time, or if you are still somewhat
new to the life of this great family of faith, let me say “welcome
home” to you, too, today. Because the great thing about church
is like the great thing about a great meal—there’s always
room for one more. There’s always enough to eat. The more, the
merrier. Welcome home.
Or
maybe I should say, like Mr. Rogers used to do, in his inviting and
reassuring sort of way, “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
Because, actually, while we are one in this home, we are at the same
time many, in this family we call church. That is, we’re what
scholars are now calling a congregation of “polycultures.”
That’s a fancy way of saying that within our unity is a rich
array of difference. We are young and old and in-between. We come
from different parts of the world and different parts of the country.
Increasingly, we come from different church backgrounds or none at
all. We come from standard nuclear families and we come from family
configurations that are all our own. We come from different parts
of the political spectrum and we cheer different teams and different
sports—or none. We like different kinds of music and watch different
things on TV and some of us still read books. We get our (continued...)
"Who
Are You?" by Rev. Patricia Farris, September 10, 2006
information
in different ways—from television, newspaper, FM or AM radio
and blogs. And we communicate with one another in an ever-widening
array of gadgets from land-line telephones to text-messaging. Polycultures.
Many cultures. All right here. Welcome home! And welcome to the neighborhood.
Those
of you who watch TV and have cable may have seen the great new ad
campaign of The United Methodist Church in the last couple weeks,
launched for exactly this season of back-to-school and homecoming
when we know that peoples’ thoughts come back ‘round to
church after all the distractions of summertime. The overall theme
of the campaign is “I Believe” and the ads are designed
to give people a sense of what our church is—who we are and
what we believe. They’re designed to reach out to people who
might not know if they’d be welcome in a church. They’re
designed for people with deep spiritual longings and needs who may
not know that church could be a home for them.
I
saw a couple of the new ads on CNN. They’re very well done.
The visuals and the voices present the faces and sounds of all kinds
of Methodists of very race and age and ethnic background. Each saying…”I
believe….” And what are they saying? Different bits of
what we, all together, believe…“I believe no one who asks
for help should be turned away. I believe it’s good to question.
I believe none of us is qualified to judge the lives of others. I
believe the church isn’t a building. I believe when you truly
embrace diversity, you embrace God.” And finally, the punchline:
“I can’t believe there’s a church that believes
these things! The people of the United Methodist Church. Open hearts.
Open minds. Open doors.” Wow. Welcome home, everyone. Welcome
to the neighborhood.
Everything
about our faith, about the Bible, teaches us that in God’s house,
there is indeed a place for everyone. The story we hear about Jesus
this morning from Mark’s Gospel shows us this very thing. It’s
a story that would have been rather shocking to its original hearers.
Because you know, God’s people always like to think that they’re
special, that they’re the IN group and everybody else is…well,
you know, NOT. The “us” and the “them.” Maybe
it’s human nature and that’s WHY we need the Bible to
remind us that it’s not God’s idea for this world.
This
is a great and poignant story, especially hearing it now. Jesus goes
to the region of Tyre, and if you’ve followed the recent news
through whatever media, you know that Tyre was seriously destroyed
in the recent war between Israel and the Hezbollah, a war in which
more children were killed than combatants.
Today’s
Gospel story is set in this very region where the ancient questions
are still being sorted out, about who’s in and who’s out
and who is entitled to be at home where. Jesus goes there to rest
in a home where he is seeking some privacy, some down time, we might
say. But a mother, desperate about the health of her little daughter,
cannot stay outside. A Gentile, a woman—two strikes against
her—this Gentile, woman, mother is bold enough to go right into
that Jewish home, evidently, and bow down at the feet of this great
healer. “Please, I’ll take anything, even the crumbs.
I’m begging you, on behalf of my daughter.” And for her
faith, her daughter is healed. (continued...)
"Who
Are You?" by Rev. Patricia Farris, September 10, 2006
Jesus
has just re-defined “home” big time. His actions say
that Jews and non-Jews are equally welcome here. He’s saying
that there’s no such thing as some chosen people and others
who are ….NOT. This is God’s home, he’s saying,
and there is a place for everyone. As John’s Gospel
has him say it: In my Father’s house are many mansions, many
rooms…and there is a place here for everyone.
Over
and over again, the Word of God brings the “us” and
the “them” together. And every time, the “us”
say to the “them”: “Who are you?” And the
answer that comes from God is always “this is your brother,
your sister….love them as yourself.”
You
know, about forty years or so ago in our country, God rose up a
prophet among us. And that prophet was Martin Luther King, Jr. He
was a prophet to our nation and, as you know, he was also a pastor
of the church. And it seems to me that both as a nation and as a
church we are still trying to live into many of the things he was
trying to say to us. He ended what was to be his last book, Where
Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? with a chapter called “The
World House.” And in it he tells a story about a novelist
who dies. In his papers are found thoughts and notes for the plot
line of a new book. It goes like this: A widely separated family
inherits a house in which they must live together. To accept the
inheritance, they must all live in the house forever.
King
goes on to imagine that we are that family and have inherited that
"great ‘world house' in which we have to live together—black
and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and
Protestant, Moslem and Hindu—a family unduly separated in
ideas, culture, and interest, who, because we can never again live
without each other, must learn somehow, in this one big world house,
to live with each other. “
A
world house. How much more true now even than forty years ago. All
of our communities have become even more multicultural and interfaith.
By the time you layer that on to the kinds of polycultures I mentioned
earlier—Wow. Welcome to the neighborhood, indeed. It’s
not your father’s neighborhood, we might say to Mr. Rogers
if he were still around.
There’s that iconic, oft-referenced scene in The Wizard of
Oz. Having been swooped up by the tornado and deposited in the land
of Oz, Dorothy says to her faithful dog, Toto: “Toto, I’ve
a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore!” But, you see,
now we’d have to take it one step further because…well…even
Kansas isn’t “Kansas” anymore, either, in the
old way we used to think. For example, as I read in Thomas Friedman’s
important book, The World is Flat, about globalization and technology
and communications and so forth, Boeing engineers right in Wichita,
Kansas, are now collaborating with Russian engineers and scientists,
the guys who used to make MiG fighter planes, and between them working
24-hour shifts using French-made airplane design software to develop
the next generation of passenger planes.
Perhaps it has been the astronauts, those who have seen the earth
from space, who first put our world house in heavenly perspective.
As Frank Borman, Commander of Apollo 8, said: (continued...)
"Who
Are You?" by Rev. Patricia Farris, September 10, 2006
“The
view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me —a small disk,
240,000 miles away. . . .raging nationalistic interests, famines,
wars, pestilence don't show from that distance,” a sentiment
shared by Saudi astronaut, Sultan bin Salman al-Saud, who observed
after his 1985 Discovery flight with the American and French crew:
“The
first day we all pointed to our own countries. The third or fourth
day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day we were
aware of only one Earth." This is God’s view of our
big, beautiful globe, of the totality of our home, our neighborhood,
our world house. The beautiful thing here, friends, the great
gift in all this, is that God has given us the church in which
to experience all of this big, marvelous world in love. In a world
in which we are so often estranged from one another, here we can
say “strangers no more.” In this time in which all
our differences and our conflicts can seem so entrenched and so
overpowering and so hope-less, here God gives us the wherewithal
to speak a word of hope. In this loving home, this beautiful neighborhood
we call “church,” we can grow into relationships with
one another across whatever it is that might otherwise divide
and separate. In this safe home, we can learn to let go of whatever
fear we might have of those different from us in any kind of way.
And
then, we can go out from this home and witness to the world what
it means to love one another, and want the best for one another,
and live together in peace.
May
God grant us the grace, the wisdom and the generosity of heart
to dwell in this great world house with hope and with great joy.
Welcome home.
Amen
Notes:
Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
HarperCollins, 1967.
Thomas Friedman. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first
Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
©Patricia
Farris , 2006. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
All other rights reserved.
|
