The place we call home

• Isaiah 43:16-21
• Philippians 3:4b-14
• John 12:1-8
• Psalm 126

On Thursday I went to the home of a neighbor here in Petaluma, where I’d been invited for lunch.  A smiling woman met me at the door and showed me into her beautiful home which was painted in warm primary colors and decorated with Mexican folk art.  There were two other people already there, and two soon more soon arrived.  They were a couple of young community organizers from Santa Rosa, and a fellow I’d met before from the Unitarian Universalists, a folks from St. Vincent’s Catholic parish, and me, and we ate squash soup and bread and salad, and talked about the critical shortage of affordable housing in Petaluma, and what our faith communities might come together to do. 

You don’t have to look outside of this room to find persons of low- or moderate-income who are at the mercy of rising rents and vacancy rates that are vanishingly low.  Several of our members have already had to move, some of them out of Petaluma, because a home was sold out from under them and the new owner jacked up the rent, or because they wanted to buy a house and found that they could not afford to do so in their home town.  And I get regular calls in the parish office from people asking for help, who’d been just scraping by until a lay-off, or an illness, or a car crash, brought them to the brink of homelessness. 

So this is a problem that concerns me professionally and pastorally, but also personally.  It wounds my conscience.  So much insecurity about something as basic as having a home can’t be what God intends for her people, and something needs to be done.  And yet I didn’t go to that meeting on Thursday feeling certain that I know what that “something” is.   Which I found to be a great relief.  So often in my daily work I feel like I’m the one who’s expected to know what we’re all supposed to do.  But at this meeting I could sit back and listen to the conversation and learn about who these people were, and what they’re passionate about, and what they see happening in Petaluma, and what they’d like to see.

Which was kind of the same thing we were talking about doing in the meeting, only on a wider scale.  As I understand it, what was being proposed was to select a couple of precincts in town where there are a high density of renters, and voter turnout is low.  And the participating churches would divide up those neighborhoods and send out volunteers in pairs, each with at least one Spanish and English bilingual member, to go door to door.  And affordable housing might be a good place to start a conversation, one that might come around in time to the upcoming election and whether folks were eligible and planning to vote.  But the focus wouldn’t be to convince them to adopt an opinion, or to promote a candidate or political party.  It would be to ask questions and to listen, to what is on the minds of our neighbors.  It would be to build relationships of common interest and concern.

But when we got to the end of our meeting on Thursday, and it came time to plan the next one, I had to say that I couldn’t commit to being there.  With everything else I’m already engaged, the Russian River Deanery, and the College for Congregational Development, the Living Legacy Storytelling Events, the Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative and the Interfaith Springtime Fellowship gathering that’s coming up on Trinity Sunday, I just don’t have the “bandwidth”, as they say, to be out in front of an effort like this, so if St. John’s is going to get involved it will depend on other folks in the congregation.  If you’re interested, speak to me later.

Of course it’s likely you don’t have the extra time and energy either.  We still have our hands full developing our capacities in basic areas of congregational life, like liturgy and music, and inviting and welcoming newcomers, and stewardship of our buildings and grounds, and teaching our tradition to the children.  But I like the idea of doing this voter engagement.  I’m intrigued by the possibility of receiving training from experienced community organizers, and joining in the effort with other congregations in a discrete project with a set timeline and a modest goal.  I like to think that within with this supportive context some of us could take a step toward acquiring new skills and confidence in the art of engaging strangers in conversation, and listening for common ground, of building relationships across the barriers of culture and language, and religion and class. 

And it’s fun to imagine that one day I’ll the time for this kind of thing.  It’s not that what we’re already doing isn’t worthwhile.  As I left that meeting on Thursday, our host told me that she’d attended labyrinth walks at our church and said how much she loves what we’re doing at St. John’s.  But as I drove away I reflected on how good it had been to have a brief break from doing the work of the church, to be able to break out briefly of my ceaseless thinking and working and praying only about what I can do to strengthen this congregation, and care for its members, to spend an hour as one citizen among other citizens talking about the welfare of the place where we all live—it was refreshing, and it made me wish for more.

Because even as we are making a mighty effort to rebuild the internal fabric of this church community, powerful economic, technological, and ideological forces are tearing the wider community around us apart.  Our national politics display, to a frightening degree, the breakdown of civility and mutual respect, or any pretense of concern for the common good; but the same thing is happening on the local scale as well.  The eviction of elderly renters is a symptom of the same progressive, potentially terminal disease.  And it is not only the poor and marginal who are suffering.  As Mother Teresa of Kolkata said, forty years ago, in a famous interview:

“You, in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don't know what it is.  What they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.”

And I think we all know that when we are estranged from each other, when we are trapped in structures of social interaction that pit us against each other and make us vie competitively for our own narrow self-interest or that of our group, we aren’t really free in relation to God.  When Mary of Bethany takes a pound of perfume worth a working man’s pay for a year and anoints Jesus with it, she is acknowledging the supreme value of that living relationship.  Judas complains about the waste and indulgence, but Jesus affirms the gesture that Mary has made.  When he says, “you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me,” he is not saying to be indifferent to the plight of the less fortunate, or fatalistic about their prospects for relief.  He is pointing to the essential work that he has come to do, of breaking down the barriers we put between ourselves and each other, which are really barriers to God.  He is saying that without this work, we are all in poverty, a poverty that is absolute.

The energy of Jesus’ work is reconciling love.  Without it, we are like Judas, whose appeal on behalf of the poor is just another self-serving scheme.   With it, we dare hope that God can open every prison of separation that keeps us bound, even the prison of death.  Mary of Bethany has seen Jesus free her brother Lazarus from that prison, for love of her family, and she repays him her own extravagant gesture of love.  The fragrance of her outpouring fills whole house.

But she is, as Jesus says, anointing him for his burial.  She pours her perfume on his feet, the feet that will carry him away from her and the intimate circle of her family home, away to complete the work he came to do.  They will carry him into the city, to the temple in the midst of the Passover crowds.  They will carry him to the place of public execution, and there the soldiers will drive a spike through the feet that Mary caressed with her hair.  Because the reconciling love of God isn’t for Jesus’ particular friends.  It isn’t for the rich, and it isn’t for the poor, for sinners or for the righteous.  It’s for us all.  

Sometimes it takes a story

• Joshua 5:9-12
• 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
• Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
• Psalm 32

If someone were to ask you to explain yourself, to spell out what it is that makes you tick, or why you do the things you do, chances are you couldn’t do it.  You might fumble around for a while, trying to put into words the inner workings of your heart and mind, or to come up with nouns and adjectives that seem to describe your values and motivations.  But sooner or later what you’d probably do is tell a story.  Part of my job is to meet a lot of people, and to get to know them, and give them a chance to get to know me.  And while everyone is different, and the conversations we have as we are getting acquainted are all different, as people ask me questions about myself, to better understand where I’m coming from, I find that there are certain stories I tell over and over again. 

There’s the story of how I became a Zen monk and organic farmer, and my story of going from Zen monk to Episcopal Priest, and there’s the story of the rebirth of St. John’s, Petaluma, from the ashes of schism and how I came here to be the Rector.  I never tell these stories exactly the same way twice, and I never mind telling them again, because they are alive—they are stories that live in me, and I live in them.  And sometimes that’s what it takes to really come alive to the deeper truth about who we are, and the higher purpose for which we strive—sometimes it takes a story. 

So when some Pharisees and scribes were grumbling about Jesus, about the way he welcomed sinners and ate and drank with them, Jesus could have tried to explain to them in abstract terms about his own experience of the unconditional and gratuitous love of God.  He could have told them how he had come to give the last word about any idea or system of religion that seeks to put barriers around that love and control people’s access to it on the basis of human judgements about morality and justice.  He could have told them that he had come to identify himself completely with the people whom such conventional ideas and systems of religion had ruled out of bounds with respect to God, and to invite those people to feast with him at the inaugural dinner of a new creation, a world remade, where the only power is the grace of God, and love is the only law, where no one is excluded or estranged. 

I suppose that Jesus could have tried to explain himself in these terms, but no one would have had the foggiest idea what he was talking about.  You and I can talk this way because we have the advantage of being able to reflect on the whole arc of the gospel, and see the entire tapestry of Jesus’ words and actions that weave together to make it up.  Not only that, but the identity and mission of Jesus have had two thousand years to infiltrate and colonize our ideas about holiness and God.  Not that this process is complete, not by a long shot.  That is why we keep going back to the Gospel stories, day by day, week by week.  It’s why we keep placing ourselves imaginatively in the moments where people were seeing and hearing it all for the first time.  Because we know that the truth that Jesus was trying to get across in those moments, by saying and doing the things that he did, has yet to take full possession of us.

People sometimes complain that the teachings of Jesus and of Christianity in general are short on practical advice for the spiritual path.  There may be some lofty ethical principles to guide our behavior, in places like the Sermon on the Mount, but there is very little in the way of instruction on how to train oneself, and to surmount the psychological barriers to spiritual progress.  And I think that something like this is what got the goat of the scribes and Pharisees.  They were masters of the path, with a well-worked out system for what you had to do to get closer to God, and people respected them for it.  So it drove them crazy that Jesus didn’t show the slightest interest in being like them.  They could see that he was a person of extraordinary spiritual gifts, who could have been such an asset to their efforts to encourage and instruct the good and the faithful in the synagogues and in the temple.  He could have had the best and the brightest in the land as his disciples, and rallied up a real religious revival.  But instead he went around like a bum, squandering his talents on losers, on crazy people and prostitutes, on tax-collectors, lepers and Samaritans.

And when they grumble about it, he doesn’t have the decency to explain himself, but tells them another of his stupid stories.  It’s actually the third of three stories, the first two of which the lectionary left out, but they are all about losing something and finding it again, and a party to celebrate the finding.  So maybe Jesus really is explaining himself, and is simply on a mission of mercy to the outcasts and losers, to help them become upstanding citizens again.  Maybe his feasting with them is a celebration of their returning to the fold, and thanksgiving that one of the righteous men of Israel bothered to come looking for them.  This is a common enough interpretation.  It’s the sort of thing that has led generations of Christians to take up works of mercy to the marginal and poor, as if that were the preferred method to get right with God. 

    

Such charity often imagines that the lost will dutifully express their gratitude for being found, and show themselves deserving by cleaning up their act.  And at first it seems as if the story about the son who was lost and is found, meets these expectations.  After all, the younger son in the story is shame-faced, and is prepared be a hired hand on his old family farm.  But there’s a lingering question in our minds about repentant he really is, or whether he’s simply figured out that this what he needs to do to get his three square meals a day.  Because while most of us have been in the position of the younger son now and again, we can more readily identify with his older brother.  It's not that we’re mean, or unforgiving.  We wouldn’t demand that our brother be sent away to starve.  We just ask for a little respect for fair play, a little accountability, a little incentive for good behavior, and consequences for bad.

But it is the father in the story who sees the bigger picture, who understands what is really at stake, which is not a goat or a fatted calf, or which son is the favorite, or who stands to inherit the family farm—what is at stake is life and death.   “This son of mine was dead,” he says, “and is alive again!” And so the party begins.  Pondering this, we might say that Jesus went to the tax collectors and sinners, not because they were the people who needed the most help, but because they, unlike the upstanding scribes and Pharisees, were able to understand the deeper purpose of his mission.  Which was not to show screwed-up people how they could get back in favor with God, but to put to everyone the question—can the dead come back to life?

It’s a question only God can answer, but in the company of Jesus, the tax collectors and sinners find it possible to imagine that the answer to that question might be “yes.”  And that is the possibility that animates not just the story of the lost son, but the whole story of Jesus.  Because the gospel is about more than helping losers become winners again, or readjusting misfits to polite society.  It’s a story about one who goes looking for all that has been lost, from the foundation of the world.  To do that he must become the lost, the outcast, despised and forsaken.  He must go in search of us even to depths of the earth, to lie, the dead among the dead.  The story of Jesus is the story of one who lives, not for spiritual progress, or moral perfection, but for love for us, and for hope in what could come to him, and to us, in that place of absolute surrender.